Board of Trustees

The current Board of Trustees are listed below. Andrew Solberg is Chairman of The Baker Street Irregulars Trust and Les Klinger is Secretary-Treasurer. Many other volunteers help with Trust activities, including the newsletter and this website.

Andrew Solberg, BSI, ASH first found Sherlock Holmes boring as an eleven year old.  Ten years later, he happened to pick it up, again, and he has been rereading the stories ever since.  He had his first article published in The Baker Street Journal in 1976 and has been a frequent contributor to the BSJ and other publications.  Mr. Solberg conceived and runs a Sherlock Holmes Essay Contest for 7th graders with his home scion, Watson’s Tin Box, which has exposed thousands of students to the Speckled Band.  He led the BSI Oral History Project for several years before he became the Chairman of the Trust.  Mr. Solberg taught health care planning at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.  Since 1985, he has operated a strategic planning consultation practice in Maryland, specializing in assisting health care providers.  E-mail <chair@bsitrust.org>.

Peter Blau was introduced to the world of Sherlockians as a teenager. His father introduced him to Ben Abramson, who told Peter, "I publish a magazine you'll enjoy reading." It was The Baker Street Journal. There was (and is) no better introduction to that strange and interesting world. He went on to become a member of the Priory Scholars of Fordham, and The Baker Street Irregulars ("Black Peter", 1959), and the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes ("Ship's", 1991). He is a collector who agrees with the late John Bennett Shaw (who liked to explain that he collected with the selectivity of a vacuum cleaner), editor and publisher of the monthly newsletter Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press, and the secretary of the BSI.

Bob Coghill has been a member of the Bootmakers of Toronto since 1976 and has twice served as its president, or Meyers, in 1982 and again in 2003.  He is also a member of the Sign of the Four Noble Bachelor Students and The Baker Street Irregulars ("John Hopley Neligan", 1983) and serves on the board of directors of the Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection of the Toronto Public Library.  A founding member of The Midland Electric Company, of Midland, Ontario, Bob currently holds a full-time job in the Staff Development Office of the Toronto District School Board.  He is also is a part-time reference librarian for the Special Collections Department (home of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection) of the Toronto Public Library.

Thomas J. Francis, BSI ("The Imperial Opera of Warsaw", 1995) is a retired financial executive who has been a devotee of Sherlock Holmes for as long as he can remember. He is a member of many Sherlockian scion societies including The Speckled Band of Boston, The Friends of Irene Adler and The Cornish Horrors. He has been a collector of Sherlockiana and of Conan Doyle's non-Sherlockian work for over forty-five years.

Bob Katz was born in New York City, becoming devoted to Sherlock Holmes while in his early teens.  His BA is from Haverford College (alma mater of all three Morley brothers) and his MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.  While training in Pathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he became active in scion societies.  He then moved to Baltimore, joining the Johns Hopkins medical faculty and eventually becoming Gasogene of The Six Napoleons.  He entered private practice in Morristown, NJ in 1987 and recently retired after 35 years in Pathology.  He received the BSI Investiture of "Dr. Ainstree" in 1983, the Two-Shilling Award in 1995, the ASH investiture of "Dr. Jackson", founded The Epilogues of Sherlock Holmes, and is also Headmastiff of The Sons of the Copper Beeches.  Bob has been a speaker at a wide variety of Sherlockian events and has been published in The Baker Street Journal, Baker Street Miscellanea, The Serpentine Muse, and The Watsonian.  Most recently, he co-edited, with Andrew Solberg, two volumes in the BSI Manuscript Series: The Wrong Passage and Irregular Stain.

The study of the lives of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, M.D., has been Mr. Klinger's consuming passion since 1994.  He has published numerous articles on Sherlockiana and a number of books, among them The Life and Times of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, John H. Watson, M.D., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Other Notable Personages.  He also co-authored the revised edition of The Date Being—A Compendium of Sherlockian Chronologies and most recently Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle & The Bookman.  In 1998 Gasogene Books began publishing Klinger's Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, a ten-volume set, the first of which was The Adventures of SH.  In 2004 and 2005, W. W. Norton published Klinger's three-volume work The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.  Klinger has twice received a "Special Sherlock Award" from Sherlock Holmes Detective Magazine for the best Sherlockian work of 1998 and 2002 and won the Edgar for best Critical/Biographical work for the first two volumes of the Norton set.

Les is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars ("The Abbey Grange", 1999) and holds the Two-Shilling Award.  He served as Series Editor of the BSI Manuscript Series and is presently the Series Editor for the BSI History Series.  In his remaining hours, Les is married to Sharon Flaum Klinger, has five children and four grandchildren, and practices tax, estate-planning, and business law full-time.

Marsha Pollak has been an avid mystery reader since her childhood when she devoured the complete sets of Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew adventures. As a librarian, her career took her to Buffalo N.Y. where she was present for the founding of her first Scion, An Irish Secret Society at Buffalo, and became a member of The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (Mrs. Neville St. Clair).  Holmes has stayed in her life as she moved and made more friends in societies in Florida, Texas and, for the last 27 years, California.  She became a member of The Baker Street Irregulars in 1996 (A Small But Select Library) and now leads the Oral History Project.  She is also the Chairman of The Sub-Librarians Scion of the Baker Street Irregulars in the American Library Association, the oldest profession-oriented group interested in Sherlock Holmes.

Dan Posnansky has been a student of The Canon since he could read and he became a "connoisseur" of fine books not long after that.  He is remarkably generous with his time and knowledge of The Canon, books and U.S. publishing history, with collectors and libraries.

Dan is a longtime member of The Speckled Band of Boston, where he has served as Cheetah.  Dan is also a most active member of The Baker Street Irregulars ("Colonel Hayter", 1977) and a founder of The Friends of Irene Adler. When not refining his knowledge about books and Sherlock, Dan rusticates in the woods of the great Northeast.

Constantine Rossakis has been a devout Sherlockian since the sixth grade, when he wrote a report on "The Greek Interpreter."  His passion for matters bibliophilic as well as Sherlock Holmes continued to evolve since then, and he began to build his Sherlockian library almost twenty years ago, emphasizing first editions, first appearances, and manuscript material.  He is the author of numerous medical and Sherlockian articles, lectured at the inaugural meeting of Mycroft's League in Philadelphia, and is a member of The Grolier Club.  Costa received his investiture into The Baker Street Irregulars in 2004 as "St. Bartholomew's Hospital", and was the recipient of The Morley-Montgomery Memorial Award for The Baker Street Journal outstanding article in 2004.  He will be editor of The BSI Manuscript Series for 2008.  Costa remains in private practice as an interventional and consultative Cardiologist in Bergen County, New Jersey, to offset the cost of his expanding family and collection.

Steven Rothman discovered that at heart he was a Sherlockian when he read with great amusement Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.  Thus vaccinated by canonical scholarship at the tender age of 12, he was destined to become an Irregular.  He soon discovered that his other love in literature, Christopher Morley, was entwined with the BSI.  In 1990 he edited The Standard Doyle Company: Christopher Morley on Sherlock Holmes (Fordham University Press).  Rothman's long association with the BSI ("The Valley of Fear", 1986) includes editorship of The Baker Street Journal since 2000.

The 1950's TV program starring Ronald Howard as Holmes sparked Bill Vande Water's fascination with Sherlock Holmes. He continued to live the peaceful and innocent life of an independent Sherlockian for the next two decades, acquiring a few of the classic reference works and several editions of the Canon. Then a colleague in the CBS News Archives brought him the kinescope of the 1957 Odyssey program on the BSI. Investigating this program led to his connection with the Irregulars; the founding of A Case of Identifiers (A Nonexistent Scion); his work on "graphic accoutrement" for Jon L. Lellenberg's BSI History Series; and his investiture as "An Enlarged Photograph" in 1994.

Bill's contributions to "The Game" have a sonnet, a pastiche and a spurious document for the Serpentine Muse. His Sherlockian thoughts, have also appeared in Murder Ink, Ellery Queen's Tragedy of Errors, I Love a Mystery Newsletter, Mystery Scene, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Baker Street Journal. In addition to membership in numerous scion societies he is "deceptively" a member of the Society of American Magicians and the Mystery Writers of America.

In 1950, Mike Whelan purchased The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Garden City edition with his caddy tips.  Neither he nor his mother who had sparked his interest in Sherlock Holmes, had an inkling of where that particular purchase would lead him.  That passion, thus ignited, has continued unabated for over 50 years.  Sherlockian zeal, wrapped as close as an Inverness cape, has accompanied him from coast to coast and around the world.  Whelan is the current "Wiggins", or chairman, of The Baker Street Irregulars.  He is a retired business executive, married to Mary Ann Bradley, "The Woman (1993) of The BSI," with three sons and six grandchildren.  He is also currently the Board president of The Friends of the Lilly Library and a member of the Indianapolis Literary Club, as well as a proud member of several Sherlockian societies.