Page 14 - Demo

Cincinnati Fourteen off of your bookshelves and on to your coffee tables,” he announced in his first issue. The larger format gave us room for more photographs and more ambitious articles and helped make the magazine a far more effective tool for tying our Society together.
His experience as a leader of the North Carolina Society has enriched and informed his work in the General Society. He served successively as assistant marshal, marshal, second vice president, first vice president, and from 2012 to 2015, as president of the North Carolina Society. President General Forrest Pragoff first suggested he accept nomination as a General Officer in 2008, but Pless insisted he was focused on his role in North Carolina. In 2009 Forrest sat him down and insisted he could do both. Pless relented. Thanks to a generation of effective leaders, the North Carolina Society is among the most active, energized state societies. Its meetings move around the state, from Wilmington to Asheville, and are consistently well attended, as is its annual meeting at Anderson House. Its most recent meeting at Anderson House attracted 190 members and guests, the largest crowd ever for a constituent society event at our headquarters.
The North Carolina Society combines a welcoming spirit, commitment to our mission, and a strong sense of fun. Pless has worked to bring that spirit to the General Society.
As secretary general from 2013 to 2016, Pless focused on welcoming new members to the Society. “Because the Society is over 230 years,” he explains, “members think of it is as unchanging. But in fact we welcome around 125 new members every year. Nearly a third of our current members were admitted in the last decade. The way we welcome new members goes a long way toward determining whether they will be active members or not.”
Among his innovations as secretary general is the new member box—an elegant blue bookcase box
embossed with the Society’s Eagle insignia that each never member receives filled with Society materials, including the current Roster, the most recent issues of Cincinnati Fourteen and other publications like A Member’s Guide to Anderson House. The box is predicated on an old truism: you really only get one chance to make a good first impression. He’s signed every welcome letter that has gone out with the box for the last six years.
While secretary general, Pless led the Society’s first modern engagement with Revolutionary War battlefield preservation and interpretation—the successful effort to preserve a critical part of the Princeton battlefield. Working with the then Civil War Trust (now the American Battlefield Trust) and local stakeholders, Pless and Executive Director Jack Warren helped win the public relations campaign that convinced the property owner to sell the property to the Trust. Thanks to Pless’s leadership, hundreds of Society members signed letters addressed to the owner urging that organization to do the right thing and sell the property so it can be preserved for the benefit of the nation.
As vice president general from 2016 to 2019, Pless concentrated his energies on the future of the American Revolution Institute. He served on the Board of Overseers, which helps shape the future of the Institute. And with his fellow overseers, he personally funded much of the increased operating costs of the Institute, providing seed money to increase our capacity in education and media relations, areas critical to our long-term success.
He was also a remarkably effective fraternal leader as vice president general, although one who worked quietly behind the scenes. “I couldn’t have had a better partner these last three years,” says his predecessor Jonathan Woods. Pless is good at making connections. He and Mary have made dozens of friends throughout the Society,
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