RANSVESTIA

meeting held a vote and decided to disaffiliate with the parent organization and did so. I carried on the national organization until 1976 when Tri Sigma was organized. Although this gets us a little out of the chronological development of things it seems appropriate to go into the development of Tri Sigma at this point.

Early in 1976 I was contacted by Carol Beecroft who had several years earlier set up her own local organization which she had named "Mamselle." Although it had a well functioning local group she was not in a position to enlarge it onto the national scene because other than advertising she had no way to find new people. So she came to me with the proposition that we should merge Mamselle and FPE. At first I took a negative view because I couldn't see what advantage such a merger could provide to FPE. However, we kept on with talks and eventually it began to be evident that the members of both organizations and both of the leaders would be able to benefit from the merger. Members of Mamselle would become part of a larger organizaation, national in scope, FPE members would benefit by having an additional leader at the top who could handle some of the chapter organization problems that it had not been possible for me to handle ever since Fran had had to discontinue her efforts. Carol, in turn, would have a large organization to expend her talents on instead of just a small local group, and I would have someone else to share the effort with. So we decided to merge the two organizations. Since it was a merger, we couldn't go on with the same name of either organization and thus was born "The Society for the Second Self-SSS or Tri Sigma for short. We went into "business" in June of 1976.

As older members of FPE will remember, we required the purchase and reading of five issues of TVia to qualify for membership. This was not, as many of my detractors maintained, just a rip off way of selling the magazine. It was a carefully planned part of the security effort. Some years before I had placed an ad in a Canadian paper which I thought had been cleverly worded since it was aimed at "Men with a yen for the feminine." It brought in a good many orders for an issue of TVia. But about nine months later I went through the record cards to send reminders to those who had not ordered for some time so that I could eliminate dead cards from the file. I was surprised to note how many cards there were which only showed that one issue had been ordered. I thought I knew the FPs of those days pretty well. There was practically nothing other than TVia available and most FPs were so

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