Longest-Running Critique Group?

This month, my mystery-thriller-suspense critique group celebrates its anniversary. When we began meeting every two weeks to critique and discuss markets, we were strangers who had taken the same class. None of us had published anything in a commercial market.

Members have fallen by the wayside, losing interest, moving away, revolting against the group's agreed goal and taking several members, and in one case dying (the nerve!), but we have persisted for eighteen years. We are all published now, most of us several times.

Is anybody here at AW part of a local independent group which meets face to face (not a chapter of a larger organization) which has been around longer?

Maryn, hoping you'll raise a glass to Thirteenth Precinct

(Splurt!) Me, social graces? I'm pretty shy.

We're friends now, but not terribly close. There's one I might call if I had a personal problem, but she would not be my first call.

Among the few bumps in the road was a subset of the main group which had become quite friendly, led by a very outgoing woman. They had trouble staying 'on task' with critique or brainstorm, reverting to socializing without realizing it. Our meetings started running longer and longer, and they got snippier and snippier each time anyone asked them to please socialize on their own, not during meetings.

Maryn, thanking you all for the toasts