.....And A Well Deserved PHF For a Lifetime of Service Above Self!
We make a lot of fuss and hoopla when we get new members and for good reason....we are thrilled to have them, we want them to know that, and we very much want them to feel welcome and to become involved because that is why people join Rotary: they want to be involved. August is Membership and New Club Development Month, and with that comes an emphasis on new members......but there is more to membership than finding new members....getting new members means much less if they don't stay in Rotary. All too often in our quest to bring new folks into the family of Rotary, we forget to appreciate those who have lived this committment for many, many years. We forget to acknowledge the lifetime of service that some of our members have given, holding onto their Rotarian spirit through the massive facelifts and growth of Rotary as it evolved to meet the demands of a world that was yanked into the technological age. As of this newsletter we currently have eleven members who joined Rotary within the last year, several of whom have joined within the last couple months and five of whom are staffing a position in the club either as a board member or a committee member this Rotary year!!! We are all happy they joined us and are delighted to see them engaging in the fellowship this great organization offers. We are better and stronger with them in our corner.
As awesome as that is, it gets even better. We also have ten members who have been in Rotary for at least twenty years. All ten of them are VERY active members seen at nearly every event and project and most meetings; seven of them are holding official committee or board postions within the club this year! Of those ten, five of them have been in for at least thirty years, and one special man has been a Rotarian for forty-eight years! How many of us have stuck with anything in our life for forty-eight years???? That is a lifetime of Service Above Self and the reason we pay tribute to Don Sturgeon (pictured above) with a Paul Harris Fellow.
New members are awesome; we love them and want to share our wonderful Rotary experiences with all of them. But as we celebrate membership month, never forget the reason we have all these wonderful Rotary experiences to share is because of our long time members who have spent decades of their life making Rotary International and the Rotary Club of Old Town the amazing powerhouses of fellowship and community & world service that they are today.