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In some cities, Friday's newspapers are studded with ads offering the single a pub, a pad or party or anyway a place to meet. Many of these offers mean simply that the promoter has hired a hall. But even with admission charges at the customary $2 or $3 each, the singles flock there in desperate numbers and with such dependable persistence that a promoter can count on as much as $2,000 for one night's work. Some operations remain sleazy reruns of the '30s dance joints, where lonely out-of-town girls gather in groups of twos and threes while guys on the prowl case the merchandise. But most have evolved from the primeval sludge of the lonely-hearts club, and owners now consider themselves a smooth amalgam of mogul and psychiatrist.
The Young College Graduates Club, which meets every Friday, usually in the Moderne Ballroom of Manhattan's Belmont Plaza Hotel, requires all applicants to show proof of college attendance—even though this proof may be as questionable as a college ring that fits. House Party, a New York organization that provides "warm, cozy," homelike places for singles to meet, is so austere that it serves no liquor and thoroughly examines the credentials of its primarily professional clientele. "We strive," claims President Ronald Garretson, "to create an atmosphere for people who don't care to sit on a bar stool or get tapped on the shoulder at a dance." The atmosphere seems to be irresistible. Fourteen thousand members pay $10 a year to belong, another 6,000 pay up to $3 apiece to drop in on weekends, and House Party ("If you are looking for a date or a lifetime mate House Party is for you") soon hopes to have franchises in Philadelphia and Chicago. The comparable Never on Friday Club (never a date, that is) of Los Angeles has gone from 7,000 members in 1964 to 64,000.
Computer services, which were once treated as a joke, have turned into a solid business. Typical is the Compute-A-Date division of the American Compute-A-Service Co., Inc., of Chicago, which started only a year ago but already has some 6,000 names. Vice President John Damijanic, 28, says that a girl applicant can expect an average of one dinner from each of her five computer-chosen dates; at an entrance fee of $6, she is ahead almost as soon as she fills out the little card specifying preferences (white, Negro, Oriental, Indian, Arab, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, nonreligious, other, divorced) and gets a match with her own card of self-analysis—which includes such questions as whether she believes sexual activity is healthful. Most popular answer: "In some ways yes, other ways no."
In city after city, run of the ginmill bars have been turned into "dating bars." What converts an ordinary bar into a dating bar is a weekend admission fee (usually $1), a large welcome for single girls, and a good neighborhood. In Manhattan, the neighborhood is along First Avenue in the 50s and 60s, an area well populated by airline stewardesses and young career women, converted brownstones with quaint apartments that attract upwardly mobile young executives. Nearly every night, there are lines of singles, male and female, waiting to get in to Mr. Laffs, Maxwell's Plum and Friday's. In Chicago it is The Store, in San Francisco it is Paoli's. In Dallas, it is the TGIF (Thank God It's Friday).