Spokes May 23, 2017

Posted by Dene Hadden
SPOKES VOL. LXIII NO. 45                                                                                May 23, 2017
 
 
66% of our members read Spokes last week.
 
We were greeted by Art Bolt and Tony Martorano this week.
 
We opened the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance and another of Art Ayers’ inspiring invocations.
 
Guests:
Our guests this morning included Kerri Hagee and Nancy Albright, or speakers, and Bill Hunter from the City of South Haven
 
Music:
Bob Boerma had the helm this week but his crew wasn’t very cooperative.  We did the first take of “Heart of My Heart” both acapella and Ludington style.  We tried again and this time we made the 1926 hit sound a little better, albeit with Dottie’s help.  We followed that up with the 1920 hit “Margie”, named after singer song writer Eddie Cantor’s five year old daughter.  We finished with one of our favorites, “Sing! Everyone Sing!”
 
Spotlight:
No Spotlight this week.
 
Announcements:
  • It is time to nominate folks for our Community Service Award and Rotarian of the Year.  Nomination forms can be found on our website.
  • Don’t forget the Club Runner App for your phones, it’s a great resource!
  • Our Induction dinner will be June 27th and Steve Larsen will organize a golf tournament.
  • Don’t forget the hospital’s annual golf outing on June 9th.
  • We are in charge of staging the 4th of July parade this summer so volunteers are needed on the evening of the 3rd and the morning of the 4th to make sure this event runs smoothly.
  • We are trying to get squared away on the pancake breakfast situation this summer so a sign up list is being passed around to see what the worker situation looks like.
  • If you did not attend the LMC/SHPS Foundation fundraiser in April and have not made your donation to that fundraiser ($100) please get it to Rhonda as soon as possible so we can finalize that event.
  • We were saddened to report that Olga Lewis, wife of long time Rotarian Dale Lewis, passed away last Friday.
50/50
Richard Swanson had the lucky ticket and drew the Queen, but that didn’t get him any money.  Mark Odland, on the other hand, walked off with $2, his second winning week in a row.
 
Fines:
  • Dorothy Lockwood celebrated her anniversary this week
  • Rhonda Wendzel’s granddaughter had a birthday this week
  • Jerry Gruber also celebrated a wedding anniversary this week.  He finally has been married longer than he dated.
  • Dan Liehr seemed kind of excited that his wife retired last week.
  • Bob somebody (Not sure if it was Bob Copping or Bob Brickman) had an interesting story about money and time and God.
  • Tom Fleming was pleased to drive to Rotary on a paved street this morning.
  • It was reported that John VerBeek is riding his three wheeled bike up and down his street with confidence.
  • Tony Martorano will be leaving on a trip it Italy next week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his wedding to Pat.  We celebrated with a pretty good version of “Happy Anniversary”
  • Steve Larsen celebrated the confirmation of his son and noted that he also graduated from Latvian School and can now speak a language understood by very few people in the world today!
 
Our Program today included Kerri Hagee and Nancy Albright from the South Haven Center or the Arts.
 
Kerri began by outlining the Art Center’s programs for this summer.
First she thanked us for our donation to the Creativity Counts program which involves school children from South Haven and SHHS Alumni teaching art centered classes.
 
The Great Lakes Pastel Society will have an exhibit at the Art Center from this Friday to July 8th.
 
Starting July 15th, the Center will host “The Art of Magic”, an exhibition and lecture series about art and magic.
 
She also mentioned that the first of what they hope is many downtown sculptures has been installed and calls for other art pieces have been put out, with the plan to feature local artists.
 
Nancy presented a slide show about the Art Center building.It was constructed in 1905, funded by a donation of $12,500 from Andrew Carnegie to the City of South Haven.The building was designed by Albert Randolph Ross, a well-respected architect who designed civic buildings all over the country.
Nancy provided examples of Ross’s work from various cities, point out the similarities to our building.
 
She was able to show us a rendering of our building done by Ross and pictures of the Art Center during and after construction.
 
She said that there is a time capsule buried in the building, placed there in 1905 with many items of interest from South Haven during that time.She was able to research and find a list of most of the items in the time capsule.
 
She hopes to find out how a town of our size in the early 1900’s was able to secure a donation from Andrew Carnegie.
 
We concluded the program by presenting Kerri and Nancy with a check for our donation to the creativity Counts program.
 
President Ayers thanked Kerri and Nancy for their interesting program and presented each of them with one of our speaker’s pens.
 
Next week’s program: The State of the City with Mayor Bob Burr
 
Next week’s Greeters:  Dick Averill and Bob Straits.
 
Editarian:  Dene Hadden