Longmont Rotary marks 100 years of service City Mayor proclaims the centennial of the Rotary club which has earned goodwill through community projects, programmes and assisting many nonprofits in their social activities.
The Rotary Club of Longmont (Colorado, RID 5450) is celebrating a century of presence in and service to the community.
A group of local men met on June 13, 1919, to organise the club, a night on which they adopted a constitution and bylaws.
The Longmont club’s formal charter is dated four days later — June 17, 1919.
At Tuesday night’s city council meeting, Mayor Brian Bagley proclaimed this coming Monday to be “Rotary Club of Longmont 100th Anniversary Day” and encouraged residents “to thank Rotary members for their service to our community over the past 100 years.”
Former Longmont Mayor Leona Stoecker, a past Longmont Rotary president, and Debbie Setlock, the club’s current president, showed up to accept the proclamation on behalf of the chapter — even though, Stoecker joked, “she and I were not there 100 years ago.”
Earlier Tuesday, during the Longmont club’s weekly luncheon meeting at First Lutheran Church, two of the club’s members, Dr Alfred Carr and John Flanders, read the names of the club’s organisers — some of those names recognisable to Longmont residents today.
“We stand today on the shoulders of the founders,” Carr said.
One was Charles L Hover, who built the Hoverhome on what once was farmland northwest of what is now Hover Street and Mountain View Avenue and is now a locally-designated landmark, which since 1999 has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Another was a John Flanders ancestor, Fred W Flanders, who was Longmont’s mayor from 1927 to 1929, ousting an incumbent mayor favoured by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Rotary Club of Longmont now has 130 members, said Setlock, whose term as president ends this month.
Nancy Rezac, who takes over as president in July, said “there’s just a lot of things that Rotary does for the community” with its projects and programmes — a role Bagley noted in his proclamation.
That includes the Longmont’s club’s participation in the international Rotary commitment and Rotary’s partners to fund an effort to eradicate polio worldwide, a “massive endeavour (that) has decreased polio cases by 99 per cent,” Bagley said.
The mayor also cited the Rotary Club of Longmont’s community services through such projects as assisting with Salvation Army bell-ringing, an annual coat drive, city park cleanups, “and many others,” Bagley said.
Setlock said afterward that the club has adopted the Jim Hamm and Roger’s Grove nature areas, the latter a city park named after the late Roger Jones, a former Longmont Rotarian, for those cleanup efforts.
After Bagley read the proclamation on Tuesday, Stoecker used the city council occasion to recite Rotarians’ “Four-Way Test” — an ethical guideline Rotarians repeat at the start of each meeting, and one Stoecker suggested non-Rotarians might consider practising: “Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”
Stoecker after the council meeting, said, “If we all lived by that, just imagine what a different world it would be.”
One hundred years after its founding, Longmont Rotary is now one of three Rotary clubs based in the city. The others are Twin Peaks Rotary and St Vrain Rotary.
Source: Longmont Times-Call
