Should you do this?

As with anything, practice is a key ingredient for success (in the case of chess, so are other things like chess study). Chess clubs are good resources to get some chess games in (practice) and additionally chess clubs serve as good opportunities to meet and play stronger chess players that would otherwise be more unlikely you would ever meet. Furthermore, it is simply the atmosphere. Sometimes, people just want to talk to people of like-minded interests and chess is no exception. Who else would care to have a conversation about the Nimzo-Indian Opening, or attacking motifs of the King's Indian Defense, or famous chess games? For most people, the answer in their day-to-day life is no one and even if they have someone, they are likely not at a similar chess ability/understanding. Therefore, chess clubs serve to meet all of these points and some more. Chess clubs are perhaps less common now than they were before the internet and other ways of efficiently meeting new people, but back then that was all there was. 

I have had the best camaraderie in my life when I played chess in high school. We played 5-minute chess with old fashioned chess clocks, randomly assigning players unique numbers from one to 5. We called it a quienella. #1 played white against #2. The winner always played White. Challengers went in numerical order and circled around back to the #1 player. Our object was to beat each of the other four players in a row! We each contributed a quarter to the pot and the winner walked away with $1 pot! If a player won three games in a row, we were allowed to kibitz to try to help the challenger beat him. We called it "the defense of the quarters," Never had so much fun in my life!