Rotary Club of Santa Monica

"2001/2002 - A Rotary Odyssey"

Rota-Monica

 

ISSUE NO. 4                         JULY 27, 2001              OUR 80th YEAR

www.RotaryClubofSantaMonica.org

 

HOW DOES SHE FIND OUT?

 

Do you ever wonder how those newspapers at the supermarket racks dig up their sensational stories? How did it happen that The National Enquirer so thoroughly dominated the O. J. Simpson case that even the New York Times quoted it as a source? More recently, how did the Enquirer get the facts about Jesse Jackson’s love child before all the daily newspapers? 

If you’d like to know, come to our Rotary meeting this Friday. Our speaker will be Patricia Shipp, the Enquirer’s star reporter in Los Angeles. 

Patricia was born in Chicago and began her career in the Air Force. Then she talked her way into a position on the payroll of Oprah Winfrey, the talk show queen. Six and a half years ago she moved to Los Angeles and popped up on the Enquirer staff. 

Her first big story for the paper took her to Oklahoma City after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building. In Los Angeles she broke several big stories ahead of everyone else, including the Jackson scandal, which won her a promotion to Senior Reporter. 

The Enquirer has a young Harvard-educated editor-in-chief, Steve Coz, but the paper itself is much older than you might think. In 1952 Generoso Pope bought the old New York Enquirer, and began running gruesome photographs which brought him a big circulation and also a flock of imitators, including one in Canada that later became the Enquirer’s powerful rival, the Globe. 

The tabloids were soon flourishing. Not until the late 1960s, when these papers relocated from America’s rapidly disappearing newsstands to its thriving supermarkets, did they begin to court a mostly female audience and cram their pages with movie star gossip, celebrity scandals and “gotcha” photographs. 

Certainly our national thirst for celebrity tales is accounted for by age-old human nature. La Rochefoucauld wrote long ago: “We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.”


OUR NEXT FOUR MEETINGS

 

bullet

August 3            - Andrea R. Rothe of the Getty Museum

bullet

August 10           - Roger Owens, famed peanut salesman of the Dodgers

bullet

August 17           - Dr. Bruce Goldberg, hypnotist

bullet

August 24           - Bunni Dybnis of LivHome on elder care

 

WHO WAS PAUL HARRIS?

 

The founder of Rotary, Paul P. Harris, was born in 1868. He was raised by his paternal grandparents in Vermont. Their home, he wrote in his autobiography, was “well regulated, with nothing either overdone or underdone.” 

He studied at the University of Vermont and Princeton University before he graduated with a law degree from the University of Iowa in 1891. He then took five years to see the U.S. and Europe. He worked as a newspaper reporter, teacher, fruit picker, cowboy, desk clerk, traveling salesman, and deckhand on a cattle boat. 

In 1896 he settled in Chicago and began to practice law. In 1905 he met with three friends to form the first Rotary club, which drew its name from the fact that weekly meetings rotated to each member’s office. In its first years Harris worked tirelessly to extend Rotary in this country and abroad. 

When the new national Rotary organization held its first convention in 1910, he was elected president. He served two terms, then was elected president emeritus in 1912. 

Paul met his future wife, Jean Thomson, in 1910 while on a hike with the Prairie Club of Chicago, which he had helped to found. Two years later, he had a house built overlooking the woods where they first met. Later, He and Jean traveled widely, promoting Rotary. He died in 1947. Jean eventually returned to her native Scotland, where she died in 1963.

 

HEAR YE! HEAR YE!

 

President Hal has issued his first Proclamation! At last week’s meeting Hal declared July 27th to be “Aloha Day”. So, gentlemen, wear your loudest – oops, sorry – your best “island” shirts. And ladies, muumuus are always in style. Holding true to the Riviera’s dress code – no shorts or jeans, and you must wear shoes. 

 


ROTARY’S BIG PUSH THIS YEAR: MEMBERSHIP GAINS

 

“We must stem the tide of membership loss,” says Kenneth Boyd in The Rotarian for July. “We must turn it around and find those quality people who are ready to give of themselves and serve mankind.” He is Rotary International’s chairman of the 2001-2002 membership executive steering committee. 

Boyd was reinforcing the words of RI’s president-elect, Richard D. King, who said in the same issue of the magazine: “The RI board of directors has undertaken a worldwide campaign called Rotary’s Global Quest to increase membership. It is the most ambitious membership campaign ever undertaken by our organization.” 

We’ll see more about this campaign next month, because on the Rotary calendar August is “membership and extension month. But there’s plenty about it in the July issue. In fact, pages 12, 13, 30 and 31 are devoted entirely to the new Global Quest. In addition you’ll notice mentions of it on the front cover and on pages 1, 3, 5, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39 and 43. 

Our membership total as reported every month since last October is 1,176,169. This is the official figure from RI’s semiannual reports. Unofficially, no doubt, the membership has been shrinking a bit in the months since October. (The magazine’s June issue mentioned “the membership decline of the last three years.”) 

Our goal, set forth several times in the July magazine, is 1.5 million members by the year 2005 – Rotary’s centennial. No intermediate goals have been published. This is good psychology, since membership drives tend to pick up momentum after a year or two. Every club is specifically asked to induct at least one qualified new member per month in 2001-02, with a minimum net gain of at least five new members in the club by next July. 

Competition adds spice to drives, of course. Our club and every club will be part of a competition. Fifty districts and 100 clubs will be named as Global Quest winners. To keep the competition more evenly matched, clubs will be divided into those with fewer than 50 members as of July 1, 2001, and those with more than 50. In each of Rotary’s 68 zones worldwide, two clubs will be honored as winners. The remaining 32 club winners will be identified by their net growth, regardless of size. 

Each district is encouraged to run a membership competition and name a District Global Quest winner. The club presidents from the world’s top ten clubs will be invited, along with their spouses, to attend the 2002 RI convention in Barcelona at Rotary’s expense, including airfare, room, meals, and registration. 

Basically the purpose of the drive is to bring in younger members. Most clubs are short of under-forty Rotarians. For ideas on how to get them interested in joining, see pages 12-13 of the July Rotarian.

Back One Page