Brendan Gill had joked back in his 1973 New Members address that being 32 years old for the club's Centennial in 1947, watching men whom had known founders of the club, he deduced that he would be the only Centurion with a statistical chance of still being alive for the 175th anniversary. And so he mentally set about “preparing some tiresome remarks.” Dutifully fulfilling his destiny, the master raconteur was named Honorary Chairman of the Sesquicentennial Committee and the Century lifted its traditional ban on annual meeting speakers for him to share his anything-but-tiresome account, five decades in the making and less than a year before his death.