Rotary Club of Santa Monica

"2001/2002 - A Rotary Odyssey"

Rota-Monica

ISSUE NO. 12      SEPTEMBER 28, 2001

HIGH-POWERED GARDENER

Our speaker this Friday, Peter Atkins, has been pumping extra visibility into a seldom-noticed institution – our county arboretum.  Some of us may not be sure exactly what an arboretum is. 

Guidebooks say an arboretum is a botanical garden that cultivates trees for their scientific interest and educational value.  Maybe we haven’t noticed, but such places have existed for a long time.  The Arnold Arboretum, part of Harvard University, dates from 1872.  Kew Gardens in London (officially the “royal botanic gardens”) are even older. 

Our own county arboretum doesn’t reveal, in official publicity it sent, how old it is.  Its life is probably complicated by the fact that it is jointly run by two organizations – the county arboretum foundation and the county department of parks and recreation.  Anyhow it spreads across 127 acres in Arcadia, and it has recently announced that it is launching “its first five-year long-range plan.” 

The man behind its plan is Peter Atkins.  Before coming here (presumably just lately) he made a name for himself as botanical curator of Pepsico’s vigorously-promoted Sculpture Gardens.  He attracted flocks of visitors by publicizing it as “a museum without walls.”  He also added numerous rare trees from Japan and elsewhere. 

At our local arboretum, Mr. Atkins has organized events that attract many visitors and even new members.  These new features include a garden of perennial plants, a herb garden, and growths turned into sculptures.  He stages an annual fund-raiser, the Baldwin Bonanza Festival of Plants, that displays work by the best-known landscape architects in Southern California. 

Trees are all around us but we don’t know much about them.  Mr. Atkins should surprise us with his lore of trees, gardens and growing plants.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

LOOK WHO’S JOINED LATELY

Here’s the September 14 list of new members of Rotary Club of Santa Monica:

Dr. Robert A. Adams, Vice-President Santa Monica College; Charlie Christensen, General Manager Macerich Company; John Deasy, Superintendent of Schools; Aloise L. Helwig, President – L.A. Orthopaedic Hospital Foundation; Tod Lipka, Executive Director Step Up On Second; Andrew Parker, Executive Director Upward Bound House; Michael Rosenthal, Publisher Santa Monica Mirror.

RECENT HOSTS AND GUESTS

Bill Bullock brought Norma Gonzales; Susan Dawson brought Evan Dawson, Patricia Farris brought Kristina Andresen, Paul Gaulke brought Monsignor Liam Kidney, Dan Eliot brought Kathy Dodson, Bob Klein brought Betty Wolf.

KEEP THE CELL PHONES COMING

At this writing (September 17) about eight cell phones have come to the club in response to the appeal in the September 7 Rota-Monica.  To stimulate your memory, these phones are for the Los Angeles Police Department, which will send them to Motorola for reprogramming, and then will distribute them to battered or at-risk women. 

We’ll still be collecting the phones through our October 12 meeting.  The Venice-Marina Club has decided this is a good idea, and is also collecting phones.  So is Santa Monica Red Cross, 1450 Eleventh Street.  If you have an old or unused cell phone, bring it in.  You’ll be helping someone in dire need.

WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR FOUNDATION MONEY

Many of our members give sizable donations to become a Paul Harris Fellow or Sustaining Member.  Also, at least once a year, we pay a fine imposed by our club president in recognition of something we did (or just for being a member, if we didn’t do anything that drew attention of the club administration).  But most of us have only a hazy idea of what is done with those moneys.  (We know they don’t go for club operations, because our club dues pay for those.) 

Our fines, which usually total around $48,000 a year, go into our Santa Monica Rotary Club Foundation.  The foundation’s board of directors, composed of eight ex-presidents of the club, meets twice yearly to distribute the interest drawn by the foundation’s treasure (never the principal, which stays intact) in chunks of several thousand dollars each.  These chunks go to local organizations that have sent us a request for a specific purpose.  From time to time the foundation helps all 25 major non-profit welfare organizations in town. 

In recent years we’ve contributed more than ten thousand dollars to the ongoing campaign to rebuild Barnum Hall, the ancient auditorium at Santa Monica High School.  The job, in progress for the past several years, was scheduled to be completed this fall, but the necessary work turn out to be more extensive than anyone expected.  Even so, the rebuilt theatre should be open any month now, at a total cost of about six million dollar.  Money for the work keeps flowing in from alumni, parents, civic organizations, businesses and foundations. 

And what about the Paul Harris money?  It goes to the Rotary Foundation of our international organization.  As of last June, some 763,607 Rotarians had paid at least a thousand dollars each to become Paul Harris Fellows.  The contributions during 1999-2000 totaled $73.7 million. 

This foundation’s most recent gifts included $600,000 to pay for low-cost shelters for people left homeless by a huge earthquake in Gujarat, India.  It also made grants in the tens of thousands of dollars for projects in nineteen African countries.

WE HELPED CLEAN BEACHES

Because of the terrorist tragedies on Tuesday, September 11, organizers of International Coastal Cleanup Day briefly toyed with the idea of postponing the huge operation scheduled for the beaches on Saturday, the 15th.  But they were shouted down by a chorus of volunteers. 

An untallied number of Santa Monica Rotary and Rotoract members were among the 6,829 volunteers who scoured beaches, creeks and estuaries in the county.  They carried out 44,240 pounds of garbage and 3,964 pounds of recyclable.  Elsewhere along California’s coastline, an estimated 40,000 people removed about 600,000 pounds of trash from beaches.

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