SPOKES VOL. LXV NO. 1 July 3, 2018
We were greeted by Dan Thompson and Bob Stickland.
Newly inducted President Mark Odland opened his first meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance and Art Ayers offered a patriotic invocation.
Guests:
Prospective members Tom Noverr and Steve Miles were our guests this morning. These two gentlemen will be considered for membership in the next few weeks. Anyone with concerns should contact President Odland.
Spotlight:
Nick Tuit has just returned from a trip to England, where, in Cornwall, he came across a Rotary club holding its annual change of officers meeting. The club asked Nick to step in and introduce himself and talk about our club. He discovered that their club had a special award, the “Cock-up Award”, given to the member who commits the biggest blunder over the year. He also brought back a St. Ives Rotary Club flag and we presented him one of ours to send to them.
MUSIC
President Odland, worried that the music would not work, had been in earlier to make sure it was ready to go. He believes that we should invest in a $30 CD player that plugs into the room’s sound system but several members were concerned about the cost and will miss singing our opening song twice each week. Bob Boerma, assisted by “Fingers” Gruber and Dottie and her metronome, was our leader today. We sang a couple of barbershop quartet favorites, beginning with the slightly risqué “If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie” and “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella”. We finished with “Roll Rotary” and it’s slightly sexist finishing line.
Announcements:.
- Our District Governor’s annual visit will be August 7th.
- We were saddened to hear that Dorothy Lockwood will be leaving our club as she has accepted a new job at Walt Sicard Car Company and we wish her the best of luck and will miss her and the work she has done for our club.
- Thanks to Tom Renner, our club was featured in two articles in the District Newsletter this month.
- We served over 600 people at our pancake breakfast on Sunday, in spite of the extremely warm weather. Up next is the Blueberry Festival breakfast in August. We had several comments about the generosity of our guests.
Tom Ruesink resumed his duties as Sargent-at-Arms this week and Bob Boerma not only had the lucky ticket but drew the four, winning the pot. He then drew Bob Straits number for the $2 winner.
Fines:
- Don Hixson has two family birthdays this week, grandsons Tim and Vincent.
- Stu Comiskey also had a birthday this week.
- Scott Mark’s son had a birthday also.
- Glenn Pietenpol wanted us to know that Mary, the mother of his children, is celebrating a birthday this week.
- We selected one of our better Ludington Style birthday songs to honor this week’s birthdays.
- Bob Copping realized that several of our new members were unaware of the legend of the Bell Ringer of Notre Dame and seems intent on educating them as cheaply as possible.
- Rhonda Wendzel paid for having her picture in the District Newsletter and the paper.
- Nick Tuit returned from England to a family gathering.
- Paul Hemmeter tried to pay his fine with his unlucky, non-winning raffle ticket.
- Larry Lewis, Jean Stein, Art Ayers, Bob Boerma and probably many others had or are looking forward to having family in town this week..
- Tony Martorano offered a reward for the return of his grandmother’s pearl handled scissors that she brought here directly from Sicily.
- Dan Thompson spent the weekend with his son aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln.
- Scott Smith mentioned that there were fireworks scheduled for this evening for anyone interested in attending – and they will be broadcast live on the Internet and TV.
Our program this morning was a club assembly.
Mark began the club assembly by introducing the results of a survey that 38 members of the club responded to in the last week or two.
Highlights included several areas in which club members indicated 100% satisfaction in our club and its activities.Perhaps most impressive of those 100%s was the question about “Membership experience is worth the time I give to Rotary”.Also impressive was the support that members feel that through Rotary, they are making a difference in our community and that our projects and fund raisers are making a difference in our community.Also at the top of the scale was the opinion that our service projects are well organized.Another important 100% category was the opinion that communications with members is well done.
There two areas that, while OK, could use some work.The first of those was improving the way we involve new members improving members’ involvement in service projects.President Odland indicated that we will work hard on those two areas in the future.
Finally, we talked about music.While there are no plans to ever do away with our singing, we did talk about a better sound system and other improvements.In a future issue of Spokes, we will review the interesting history of music in our club.
We closed our meeting with the Four Way Test.
Next week’s program: Danae Donatella from the Senior PGA introduced by Paul Hemmeter.
Next week’s Greeters: July 3rd: Jeff Melvin and Glenn Pietenpol
Editarian: Dene Hadden