Phil Greenough Forty years ago, the Board of Directors of the Watertown Boys Club made the decision to welcome girls into the club, making Watertown among the nation’s first communities to offer membership to females. In 1980, clubs across the country were open only to boys, and the national organization of Boys Clubs was still 10 years from renaming itself Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The Watertown Boys Club, founded eight years earlier in 1972, had a female director who wasn’t about to wait to bring girls into the club. Bernadette Corbett, who died earlier this year, was one of the club’s founders and the first woman board president. She was the force behind including female members. At the Boys Club headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, where the first club was founded in 1860 by three women, she made the case with national leadership to include girls.