Private Petroleum Club does some soul-searching as oil industry membership falls off

The Petroleum Club of Anchorage, a members-only sanctum for the power brokers of the state's dominant industry, has maintained a discreet presence for years on the ground floor of a Midtown office building.

But as oil prices fell and layoffs and spending cuts followed, membership dropped too. Where the number of members typically hovers close to 1,000, board president Joe Mathis said the club was down to about 860 members as of early this year, prompting something of an existential crisis among those who were left.

"Myself and the board started saying, 'What are we going to do to change this?'" said Mathis, an executive at Alaska Native regional corporation NANA. "We said, 'We need to figure out what club members want, and what kind of club do we want to be?'"

After a brief period of anxiety, the nearly 60-year-old club responded with what longtime members believe is its first marketing and recruitment campaign since a major recession in Alaska in the mid-1980s.

"One of the members once told me this was the best-kept secret in Anchorage," said events coordinator Ashley Miller. "But I want everyone to know who we are."

The board is encouraging its constituency to submit two candidates each for membership. Brochures are showing up in the mailboxes of Realtors, attorneys, doctors, insurers and others who do not make a living directly off oil and gas, members the club generally refers to as "associates."

The marketing team is taking what for them is the novel step of setting up booths at an eclectic selection of trade events this year: the Fall Wedding Show, the Alaska Miners Association convention and the Fin Feather Fur Food Festival, sponsored by the American Association of Drilling Engineers.

The club is also offering discounted application fees of $100 through Sept. 30, said general manager Gail Stanfield. Normally, the cost to apply is $410 for a regular membership and $572 for an associate. Monthly dues remain unchanged at $60 and $72, respectively.

Founded two years before statehood in 1957 by a group of oilmen, the club's primary purpose is to provide a venue for networking, keeping an eye on business rivals and cementing deals. Politicians hold fundraisers there and executives glad-hand while treating their families to Easter and Mother's Day brunches.

"All the members were watching the other guy — all spying on each other, all watching what they have — all would get together looking for a good deal … But I was there to spy on the whole bunch," Bob Atwood, the now-deceased editor and publisher of the Anchorage Times, was quoted as saying in an old club newsletter.

Recently remodeled for half a million dollars, the club pays homage to the industry that made modern Alaska. Lining the walls of the lounge and dining rooms are framed black-and-white photographs of oil infrastructure, including the discovery well at Prudhoe Bay. Flat-screens in the bar and main hallway display a digitized chart tracking the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil.

The staff plays contemporary pop or country hits at lunch and switches to blues for the evening lounge-goers. The buffet lunch on a Thursday in August was heavy on comfort food: fried chicken, beef and bean chili, beef and cheese reindeer roulade, red beans and rice, and broccoli. Every Friday there's a prime rib and seafood buffet.

The outreach efforts of the past few months have helped member rolls rebound, but the realization that times are changing has leadership trying to figure out how to keep the club relevant in the future. Are Italian wine dinners, football tailgates, holiday celebrations, antique car shows, golf tournaments, a women-only networking group, movie nights and an impressive collection of alcohol enough to attract millennials?

"The club has got a lot of longtime members and we have to start asking ourselves: Are we bringing in younger people and what would they like to see and do in a private club?" said Mathis, who has been a member for about a quarter-century. "We're not sure if we're getting the right events for millennials out there. But I don't know if we want to do Pokemon."

For members, survival will likely trump any loyalty to history and tradition. The lack of sentimentality among the business-minded set showed at a recent town hall-style meeting on Wednesday where the club's very identity as an oil-centric organization was up for discussion.

Ideas ranged from moving to a new location and adding health and exercise facilities to dropping the Petroleum Club name altogether and building a new brand as a general business club. The board plans to survey members for more ideas in the coming months.

"This was such a severe shock to the oil industry. Should we be thinking about becoming something else?" Mathis said. "Do we still want to be a Petroleum Club?"