Ann Arbor Rotary Harpoon

Harpoon for the Meeting of March 10, 2010

March is Literacy Month on the Rotary Calendar 

Social Committee Evening at Performance Network Theater

Rotarian Magazine Archives Online

Community Allocations Deadline is March 26

Speaker:  Jim Rampton, Red Cross Community Disaster Education Coordinator
Topic:       Local Disaster Preparedness and Response

Always think that disasters happen to the other guy? Jump-start your own preparedness planning as the local disaster preparedness guru presents highlights from the new Red Cross Emergency Preparedness Guide for Businesses. Jim’s presentation will include a quick overview of critical steps for planning to help save lives, money and time in a disaster, and to recover quickly while consistently following state-enforced regulations.

Song Leader: Russ Collins          Accompanist: Maurita Holland

Upcoming Events:

March 10 – Committee Meetings:
   Social Committee: Susan Smith Gray

March 17 - Luncheon: Jim Irwin & Don Lund. Our beloved song leader extraordinaire has written a book that chronicles the life, times, stories and achievements of U-M sports legend Don Lund. A nine-letter winner in baseball, basketball and football, Lund began a professional baseball career with the Dodgers the same year they signed Jackie Robinson, later played for the St. Louis Browns and the Tigers and ran the Tigers’ farm system before returning to Michigan to coach the baseball team. Ed Hood, a member of Don’s 1962 NCAA champs, will introduce Jim and Don, and the stories will roll.

March 26 -  Community Allocation Fund Grant Proposals are due by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, March 26th. Information is posted on our Rotary website.

April 8 -  Little Shop of Horrors at Performance Network Theater: Social Committee Event including refreshments and cash bar in the Lobby following the performance. Tickets are $17 and deadline is March 24. See Millie Danielson or Susan Gray for tickets.

Notes from the Meeting of March 3:

Be sure to check the February District newsletter for updates of Rotary activities around the District. The Korean Consul’s visit to our Club and the many activities of Huron Interact are prominently featured in the newsletter.

Fritz Seyferth said that when Tom Brokaw was in Ann Arbor last fall to do a TV special on “The Boomer Generation,” among those he interviewed was Cheryl Elliott. The show aired on CNN on March 4.

Our Club received two awards at the Foundation Gala. The first was for its contribution to the Polio Plus challenge. The Club contributed a total of $13,000 plus for the year. The other award recognized the Ann Arbor Rotary Club as the #1 Club in Annual Giving for District 6380 with a sum of, $25,077.41.

The Board is taking another look at the recently approved non-discrimination policy; a reexamination will take place March 17. The controversy stems not from membership admission concerns for our Club, but issues regarding relationships between our Club and non-Rotary local and international organizations.

Todd Kephart announced the beginning of our Rotate Your Food project. This year’s goal is 13,000 pounds. There are 70 more collection boxes deployed this year, at 25 additional locations. Today was the first appearance of the box to collect small change from Rotarians, and the $60.00 collected will buy 156 meals. The campaign runs March 15-27.

We met our Junior Rotarians from Greenhills School. Andrea McIntosh is U-M-bound with a future in medicine; James Chamness would like to go into environmental engineering at Cornell; and Nora Kassner is unsure of her intended major at Macalester College, but she wants to explore our inter-connectedness and what makes people tick.

Notes from the Program of March 3:

Joel Berger introduced Stephen Kesler, U-M Geology Professor and fellow Rotarian, on the topic “The Dynamic Great Lakes.” As a geologist, Steven takes the lo-o-o-ng view and to him, our Great Lakes are just a temporary episode in the process of the advance and retreat of glaciers. Earth, he said, is 4.5 billion years old and the Great Lakes are a “very, very recent feature.” Some of the oldest rocks in the world have been exposed near Watersmeet, in the Upper Peninsula. Moving along the timeline, Michigan about 350 million years ago was as tropical as the Bahamas and people couldn’t get here fast enough to enjoy our warm climes. But then a million or so years ago, give or take an eon, a vast ice sheet thousands of feet thick covered Michigan; the Great Lakes were gouged out when the ice sheet retreated. Steve got into such issues as sand mining, beach erosion and the export of Great Lakes water. Is it really ours, he asked, to sell to the thirsty West when maybe it was theirs to begin with (think evaporation, precipitation and prevailing westerly winds over the Lakes). In any event, we need to look at this water resource in a geological context, Steve said. As for the Asian carp, “well, that’s an immigration issue!”

Thought for the Day comes from Robert Ingersoll:  “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences.”

Notes by Don Faber, Harpoon editor    Photographs by Fred Buetler

Other Items of Interest:

Homes for GSE visitors needed: From Tuesday, May 18, through Thursday, May 20, our Club will be responsible for providing housing for the incoming GSE Team from Japan. There will be an older male leader, a young man and three young women. If interested in hosting or you would like more detail, contact Spaulding Clark at esclark2@comcast.net or call 734-604-2802.

Monthly Membership Report to the District: (A correction to the report from last week's Harpoon.) The club started February with 307 active members. During the month, we lost John Holland and converted Dean Millard to Emeritus status so we reported 305 at the end of the month. Average attendance for the four meetings during the month was 44%. The unusually low percentage was due to low attendance on February 10 as the result of a snowstorm.

One Hundred Years (almost) of Rotarian Magazines are Online: Thanks to RI and Google, we can now search issues and read articles back to Volume 1, Number 1 in January 1911. Seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 19 Pulitzer Prize winners – from Mahatma Ghandi to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – have written for the magazine. Of local interest, we can even search for "Ann Arbor" (use the quotes in the search box to get the most specific results) and turn up 208 issues where the name of our city appears. From there, you will also see references to members like Jody Tull, Paul Glendon, Jerry Prescott and the late Dick Emmons. Anne Glendon, interviewed in the current issue, hasn't made it to the archives yet. In anticipation of the celebration of our Club Centennial in 2016, you may want to search for "Lloyd C. Douglas" and find out how popular was this charter member of our club. Here's the link to get started: http://www.rotary.org/en/MediaAndNews/TheRotarian/Pages/ridefault.aspx.

Meeting Statistics: Our luncheon meeting on March 3 was attended by 125 members. We had no visiting Rotarians but did have three Junior Rotarians. We had no guests. A total of 26 members assembled before lunch in meetings of the Membership Development, Rotate your Food and Survey Committees.

Makeup Cards from Roving Rotarians: Mark Ouimet (Dexter on February 25 and Saline on February 25). Note: He is no magician; Dexter is a breakfast club, Saline meets at lunchtime.

Birthdays: March 8 – Ray Rabidoux; Mar 9 – John Hieftje; Mar 10 – Victor Stoeffler; Mar 12 – Howard Deardorff; Mar 13 – Robert Allen, Carolyn Shear; Mar 14 – Andrea Bernardini

Links of Interest:  Websites of interest to Rotarians.

Rotary International: http://www.rotary.org. The RI home page has links to About Rotary, The Rotary Foundation, Club Locator and Member Access.  Our club is in Zone 29. The zone has 17 districts and covers portions of Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ontario. District 6380: Our district's website includes 53 clubs in the counties of Washtenaw, Livingston, Oakland and Macomb in Michigan and Kent in Ontario. The district’s monthly newsletter and other individual articles of district-wide interest are posted there.

Rotary Club of Ann Arbor: http://www.annarborrotary.org. This is our Club’s website with background material and current information including the current Annual Report, Strategic Plan, New Member Nomination Form, Committee Descriptions, Club and Golf Outing brochures, synopses of upcoming programs and an archive of current and past Harpoons. Find our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57896502278&ref=ts.  Also, find meeting podcasts at http://www.annarborrotary.org/news-events/podcasts. 

The .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) version is posted at http://www.annarborrotary.org/news/harpoon-historical  Submit news, committee meetings, and announcements to “a2harpoon@umich.edu”. “Harpoon” is the newsletter of the Rotary Club of Ann Arbor. Contact the club to subscribe by email.

Our club also sponsors the following Rotaract and Interact Clubs:

U-M Rotaract Club: http://www.uofmrotaract.wordpress.com.
Huron High Interact Club: http://www.aaps.k12.mi.us/huron.interact/home.
Pioneer High Interact Club: http://www.pioneerinteract.blogspot.com.

“The Future of Rotary is in Your Hands”