June 14, 2023
Dear Diary:
It’s about time for me to start writing this year’s “That Was the Year That Was” speech since our annual event at which the Rotary president and board pass the gavel to the new Rotary president and board is almost upon us. It’s going to be a big change. Victoria Farrar-Myers, our current president, is an academic and a college professor originally from the Northeast. She will hand the gavel to Barry Bondurant, an Arlingtonian and Texan through and through who, like his father, Fred, and many of his siblings attended college at Texas A&M University. It’s going to be hard for me not to tell Aggie jokes this year, Dear Diary, but I will not succumb to temptation, even though I know in my heart that my college and law degrees from The University of Texas entitle me —perhaps require me—to do so. But I won’t; I won’t; I won’t. Well, perhaps I will but, only occasionally. Like, maybe, once a month. Or once a week. Or once a day. Or even once a minute.
Like maybe this one: what is black and crispy and hangs from a chandelier? An Aggie electrician.
No, no, I really love Barry. He’s a wonderful guy and he has done a fine job as president-elect. Really, there’s no reason to upset him. And yet, I feel another one coming on. What was it? Oh, yeah: There was the one about the Aggie who got fired from the M&M factory because he kept throwing out all the Ws.
No, no, that’s enough. I’m going to have to restrain myself. I need to think about my speech. This is a really important one because we have just finished the club’s centennial year (BTW, that’s 100 years for all you Aggies.) and I should say something to cap off what this significant milestone of our Rotary club’s service means to its members, to the community and to the world. As I consider the Rotary year just passed, it occurs to me that our outgoing club president, Victoria, introduced a lot of things. Some of them were little things but they made a big difference.
For instance, each month Victoria projected on the screen the thermometers that showed the goals the club established at the beginning of the year and kept track of where we were as a club with regard to these goals. Luckily they were not the old-style ones where you had to try to find the line of mercury. If so, we never would have figured out where we were. The result was that the club members took ownership of those goals and consciously contributed to the club’s reaching them. This was very effective and the result was that the club members bought into those goals. They became our goals, not just the goals Victoria and her board had established.
And so we reached most of those goals by the middle of the Rotary year. And as I write this we exceeded – sometimes greatly exceeded – almost all of them. For instance, we wanted to bring our club to 152 members this year. After no less than 25 inductions, including seven this month, we have 160 active members, a net increase of 13 from this time last year. Randy Hendricks and his membership committee deserve a lot of credit for this accomplishment. And this increased membership permitted us to perform an astonishing amount of community service this year, which Victoria urged us to report at each weekly meeting or online at the club’s website. She even put a QR Code on the screen at each meeting that takes the viewer to our club website and encouraged us to use our smartphones to report our community service hours there. I am grateful that my smartphone didn’t rub it in how much smarter it is than me and helps me with these things or I would have gotten no credit for my service. At this writing, the members of our Rotary club have performed more than 4,700 hours of community service during this Rotary year. And using Victoria’s QR code, it’s so easy to report community service hours that even an Aggie could do it.
This is the first time I can remember since I joined the club in 1986 that our membership is nearly as large as it was back then. (And I mean numbers, not size.) You know, when I joined the club my badge number was 163. It is now 11. For that to happen a whole lot of people had to step aside. Some of them moved away. Some changed professions. Others departed the club for a variety of reasons, most often due to illness or a job-related relocation. But most of them only left the club when they died. So now I am only ten Rotarians away from being the person who has been a member of this club for the longest time. It’s an honor, I guess. But it’s not an honor I’m looking forward to because I know what happens when you get to the front of the line. I am a little comforted by the fact that I am not the oldest member, so maybe I’ll beat the odds.
Anyway, we successfully met and exceeded our goals this Rotary year. We wanted 100 Rotarians to participate in club service activities this year. 272 did. We wanted five members to sponsor a new Rotarian this year. 16 did. We had hoped that our club members would contribute $15,000 to the Rotary Foundation Annual Fund this year. We collectively contributed $23,025. And we wanted our club members to contribute a total of $3,000 to Polio Plus this year. We contributed $5,257.
But our club did far more than give money this Rotary year. We completed five community service projects. We sponsored an Interact club at Arlington High School. We chose and sponsored five students to attend our Rotary District’s annual Rotary Youth Leadership Award or RYLA camp. As we do every year, we gave Rotary awards to two students at every public school in the Arlington ISD. We wanted ten club members to participate in leadership development activities this Rotary year; 29 did. And that doesn’t even count the many members of our club who have attended leadership events and whose experience is so valued that they have been asked to teach their fellow Rotarians. That would include Scott Hendricks, who can complete Rotary grant applications in his sleep, and our Past District Governors Don Mebus and Peter Scott, who somehow managed all the Rotary clubs in our District 5790, although how they did it is beyond me. It’s a lot like riding a unicycle and juggling at the same time. In addition, as I write this, Rotary International has made Peter responsible for various activities in several Rotary districts. I hope that Peter has been practicing his juggling.
Speaking of our Rotary district, I was astonished to learn that at the recent Rotary District Conference our District Governor, Dan Steele, made our club one of just twenty clubs in the district to which he gave vibrant club awards. It’s an honor not just for Victoria, who led us to this goal, but also for the board and for the entire club, who actually showed up, got to work and did what we needed to do to meet our common goals.
This is no small feat but somehow Victoria did it. I said at another of my speeches that when Derrick Kinney was president he did not bully us; he did not nag us; he did not harangue us. He just told us where he wanted to go and went there. And as if he were the Rotary Pied Piper we all somehow followed. It was a lot like that with Victoria and I’m still not really sure how she pulled it off. Managing a Rotary club is like herding cats. Come to think of it, given that Texas A&M bases entire college degree programs on herding animals, this might be just the thing for Barry.
No, really, I think the thing about Victoria is that she has the ability to envision the goals she wants for the club and, more broadly, for the community, to describe that vision in a way that allows others to share it, and to motivate others to progress toward those goals. It’s a rare thing and an extraordinary leadership quality. I’m not sure it’s something that can be taught; I think it’s a rare gift. Well, maybe it can be taught. After all, Derrick was one of Charna’s students at UTA. Anyway, Tommy Vandergriff had it. He was a true visionary and the people of Arlington would have elected him to another 13 terms as mayor if that was what he had wanted. Come to think of it, they elected and re-elected Victoria to a full three terms on our city council before term limits prevented her from running again. That says something about her leadership. And it says one other thing for sure: I’m awfully glad that Arlington had no term limits when Tommy Vandergriff was mayor.
Hmmmm…I feel another Aggie joke coming on as I write this: How can you tell that an Aggie has been using your computer? There’s white-out all over the screen.
In the past, we’ve had trouble attracting media coverage of our club’s activities. If something happens outside the city limits of Fort Worth or Dallas it often seems that local news outlets don’t care. Knowing this, we had hoped that we might be able to get our local media to publish or broadcast at least two stories regarding our club activities this year. Amazingly, there were eight such stories this Rotary year. We are justifiably proud of our achievements and are glad that they were made known to the DFW community.
We also had a lot of fun this year. We started our year with our annual installation of our new president and board. We attended Theatre Arlington’s production of “On Golden Pond” which was preceded by a nice happy hour spent socializing with our fellow Rotarians and their significant others. I’m not sure which I enjoyed more, but I thought Theatre Arlington’s production was better than the movie. We also held a new membership welcoming reception at the Levitt Pavilion. Another event was a happy hour at the Revolver Brewery basketball game at College Park Center and a couple of other happy hours during the Rotary year just passed. I think I’m detecting a pattern here. Apparently, Rotarians enjoy getting – well – happy. Our Co-Directors of Fun, Sarah Knotts and Stacy Bridger, deserve a lot of credit for making these events real occasions.
When Rotarians look back at this year they will likely remember two very special things. One is the dedication of the new Rotary Dream Park for which we purchased and donated a Jen Lewen sculpture called “Boundless.” It consists of a Rotary wheel parallel to the ground and another mounted atop the first, extending upward. This creative artist explained that the sculpture was interactive. It contains 18 infinity mirrors—nine on each side-- and many lights that illuminate in different colors and configurations when the sculpture is touched, stood on, kicked or otherwise um… stimulated. (“Let’s keep it clean, folks.”) The other is our celebration of our Centennial with a gala event at UTA’s Bluebonnet Ballroom. These were certainly wonderful and we enjoyed them very much.
However, many people don’t know about the less obvious improvements President Victoria and her board made to our club this year and how they will improve our club’s operations for years to come. For one thing, Victoria organized a committee to study the club’s finances. The chair of this committee is Kim Crawford, who is not merely a CPA but was recently appointed by Governor Abbott to sit on the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy. I have to stop here and ask how many Rotary clubs have this kind of talent just sitting around and waiting to be utilized? Kim and so many other Rotarians are an incredible resource who, thankfully, are willing to give of their time and talents and ask for nothing in return. This is an extraordinary blessing.
This committee was valuable for many reasons. The Covid pandemic presented many financial challenges. One effect was that the weekly rent for our meeting place in the Great Hall increased from $150 to $200. And of course inflation has increased virtually every other expense the Rotary club regularly incurs. The committee recommended a small but necessary dues increase, our first in eight years.
More importantly, the club now has a regularized budgeting process a little like the Texas Constitution’s “pay-as-you go” scheme. It looks at our past expenses, anticipates our future expenses, and adjusts our income and expenditures accordingly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow get Victoria, Kim, and this committee to Washington? I’m really not trying to be partisan or political. Aligning income and expenditures is a basic business practice and is necessary for any organization, even a governmental one. It makes me wonder how the federal government would function if it were supervised by Rotarians. Perhaps one day we will send Victoria, Kim, and a few other Rotarians to Washington and find out.
Oh dear, I feel another Aggie joke coming on, this one from my misspent youth: Did you hear about the Aggie that broke his leg raking leaves? He fell out of the tree.
Sorry, I keep getting distracted. Another thing Victoria did was to regularize the process by which we recruit and admit new Rotarians and, after their admission, supervise their earning their blue badges. Not a glamorous issue but a great improvement.
And Victoria did still more. At the Rotary International Convention held in Houston last year – you know, the one where Charna and I, among other Rotarians, got Covid – I attended a presentation at which the President of the Rotary Club of Fort Worth explained how that club had reached out to the minority business community to attract new members and to attempt to make the club better represent the community of which it is a part. The program began by recognizing minority-owned businesses and presenting the owners of those businesses with awards. This created an opportunity to introduce minority business owners to Rotary and try to get them interested in joining.
What a great idea, I thought at the time. Our club should do something like that. No sooner were we back in Arlington than I learned during one of the Zoom Rotary meetings I observed from my Covid sick bed that we had instituted an identical program. T.S. Elliot once said that “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Perhaps the same is true of Rotary Clubs. Our president-elect elect, Vera McKissic, deserves a lot of credit for getting this new program off the ground and making it possible for us to present one of these awards each month. You know, president-elect elect is kind of awkward. Could we just call Vera our lady in waiting?
June 10, 2023
Dear Diary:
I had an extraordinary experience today. No, I was not abducted by space aliens or visited by a Nigerian prince. Nor was I discovered by a Hollywood agent and offered a $100 million contract to appear in a movie or to sing in a recording studio. (Everyone should be grateful for that last one.) My experience was of a different sort, but it was no less amazing. And it made me consider in practical terms what having a Rotary club in town for the last hundred years has meant for the City of Arlington.
This morning I visited the beginnings of what will soon be the City of Arlington’s Rotary Dream Park. I attended because there was a formal dedication of the park and of the sculpture I mentioned earlier. The mayor of Arlington, Jim Ross, announced that the park is under development and will be finished by Fall 2023. He was quickly corrected by James Orloski, the city’s Director of Parks and Recreation, who noted that it will not be finished until Fall 2024, still a significant achievement. But already, in downtown Arlington, there is a monument--not just to Rotary, which contributed the park and the sculpture in celebration of our club’s hundredth anniversary — but a monument to this amazing city.
It’s hard to explain all the feelings I experienced while I sat there, Dear Diary, and watched the dedication take place. I grew up in Arlington and remember downtown in the sixties as a modest shopping venue. There was a Sears, a Penney’s, a local department store called Watson’s, a small library, a post office and a few other small businesses. Later, in the seventies, there was a large hardware store called Kier’s. I remember it best because the summer before I started college I wrote my first check there. Remember checks? They were how we paid for things before there were debit cards, Pay Pal, Apple Pay, Zelle and all the others and before every business in America had a Point of Sale terminal to process electronic payments. Unfortunately that no longer gives us the excuse for a late payment that “the check’s in the mail.”
Anyway, as I stood there with the large scissors in my hand – I was privileged to be one of those who cut the ceremonial ribbon – I thought about the old downtown. It’s gone—completely gone. All I could find that I remember from my halcyon days in the sixties were the railroad tracks. The old post office is a bank, Kier’s has become Theatre Arlington, the Sears store is now the Arlington Museum of Art and most of the rest of the small businesses that were there have either closed or relocated.
Standing there, understanding that all of this was happening to commemorate our Rotary club’s centennial, I reflected on those who came before us in Rotary and who were also leaders of our city. President Victoria shared an Isaac Newton quote as our quote of the week during this week’s meeting: “If I have seen further it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” And I thought of the giants I knew as Rotarians, the people on whose shoulders we stand. They were amazing, Dear Diary, and they literally built this city from nothing.
Tom Vandergriff, a Rotarian who served the city as mayor for 26 years, said that when he was first elected in 1951, Arlington was the dash in Dallas- Fort Worth. It was a city of approximately 8,000 people. By the time Tommy passed away in 2010 the city had grown to about 400,000. Some of these other giants were Fred Bondurant, Rusty DiSciullo, George Hawkes, Charley Deahl and many more which my badge #11 brain cannot immediately bring to mind. I was lucky to have known so many of them during the 37 years I have been a Rotarian and benefited from their wisdom. I still miss them all and have mourned for them. I hope they can see us and I hope that we are making them proud. I know that I’m proud of what we have done.
This event was kind of a bookend for me, Dear Diary. When I was a child I was enrolled in the city’s summer camp program and played with many other kids in Meadowbrook Park. When I was old enough to participate in little league, I played baseball at Senter Park. The height of my brief athletic career was the day in 1972 that my little league team won the city championship. Even then I knew that these parks came from somewhere. Only later did I learn that Rotarians had raised and contributed money, purchased the land, developed these parks and made a gift of them to the City of Arlington. Had I known this as a child it would have astounded me. And even then I would have known that but for those Rotarians I would have had no place to attend summer camp or to play baseball.
But as I stood there with those big scissors waiting to cut the ceremonial ribbon, it occurred to me that a question I was often asked as a child was: What do you want to be when you grow up? I never knew what to say. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be what every Jewish mother dreams of: a doctor or a lawyer. And I had brief, quixotic moments when I wanted to be an astronaut, a football player or a fighter pilot. But if I had known then what really goes on in the world I think I would have said that I wanted to be a Rotarian.
I might not have known how I wanted to earn a living, but I knew what kind of man I wanted to be. And I knew what kind of people I wanted to associate with. And the truth, Dear Diary, is that I found my tribe. As I stood there among the other Rotarians looking at that magnificent sculpture, the fledgling park of which it will be a part and the reinvigorated downtown it complements, I was astonished to discover that I was standing among so many people that I love.
During a speech to the Wisconsin State Fair, Abraham Lincoln told the story of an Asian despot who directed his wisest philosophers and advisors to leave the capital and not to return until they had devised something that would be carved in stone, forever in view and forever true. According to Lincoln the advisors returned some weeks later with a few simple words carved in stone: This, too, shall pass away. How chastening in the hour of pride, how consoling in the depths of affliction, said Lincoln.
Looking at Arlington’s new downtown and thinking of its older parks where I had played as a child, I realized that these businesses, too, shall pass away. And so will we. But these parks and other Rotary additions to Arlington will remain. And just like the 19 men who conducted our Rotary club’s inaugural dinner at Arlington Agricultural College – now UTA— a hundred years ago this month, and the Rotarians who created Meadowbrook Park and Senter Park, we will leave something behind. Something useful. And so all those giants on whose shoulders we stand will not have lived and died in vain. And neither will we.
Another giant I remembered as I stood there was Philip Stork, an Arlington Rotarian and a local building contractor. I remembered meeting with Philip and other Rotarians at his house to discuss the formation of what became the Arlington Rotary Foundation. Philip was a quiet, modest man who grew concerned—as many of us did—when we learned of the high drop-out rate among the students who attended Webb Elementary School, a local Title 1 school we had only recently adopted.
When we asked the parents of these students about the problem, they offered a simple explanation. They had lots of children. And given the sorts of jobs they held, it was difficult to provide for all of them. So, at the earliest possible time, they said, they needed their children to drop out of school, to go to work and to help support the family. The Rotarians suggested that if they could just wait a few more years, their children could graduate from high school, attend college and, armed with a college degree, could earn a lot more money and make a much larger contribution toward supporting their families.
Sounds good, said the parents, but it will never happen because they could never afford the cost of the books and tuition that college would require. That’s when Philip, Roger Stiles and a few other Rotarians began talking about raising money and forming a foundation to fund college scholarships for Webb students who graduated from high school. We all know what happened next. The Arlington Rotary Foundation was born, we began distributing certificates to Webb sixth graders at their graduation ceremonies and assuring them and their parents that if they would just graduate from high school – any high school -- we would contribute scholarships to cover their books and tuition at Tarrant County College or another university or trade school of their choosing. And since the first of those kids began graduating from high school – and they graduated in much higher numbers than before – we began awarding the promised scholarships, often as many as a hundred a year.
Philip, Roger, and most of the others who attended that meeting at Philip’s house all those years ago are mostly gone now. But they left behind them that scholarship program and a human resource: at this point in time, more than a thousand former Webb students who would never have graduated from high school or attended college but for their efforts—and ours--have done so. All because a few Rotarians sat down together to address a problem they had discovered and took action. I cannot imagine a more worthwhile endeavor or a more meaningful memorial.
Speaking of the Arlington Rotary Foundation, Gloria Pena, its president, gave a report regarding the foundation at our club meeting last week. The foundation has a balance of almost $1,7oo,oo0. This year it spent around $70,000 for 66 scholarships for Webb students who graduated high school and another $4,000 for two scholarships for graduates of Arlington High School. The foundation funded the purchase of 564 books for the Webb school library and spent around $7,000 sending Webb's fifth and sixth graders to Camp Carter. (Talk about lucky sevens!) It used $157,499 to pay for our Centennial project, the sculpture I mentioned earlier. And Gloria reported that the foundation has now awarded and funded a total of $1 million in scholarships. Let me repeat that. ONE MILLION DOLLARS IN SCHOLARSHIPS. Not a bad year for a small endeavor that began with a meeting of six or eight Rotarians in Philip Stork’s living room.
Continuing with my day, dear diary, we attended our Centennial Celebration tonight, fittingly held at UTA’s Hereford University Center, a site near where those 19 men held the inaugural banquet in 1923 to form the Rotary Club of Arlington, Texas. There was wine, very good food, and a speech from Ron Burton, an Oklahoma lawyer and former President of Rotary International who apparently hails from Duncan, Oklahoma, a small town a mere 39 miles from the Texas border. Close, but no cigar. It left me wondering why Rotary International would send someone who practices law in Norman, the home of the University of Oklahoma, to speak to a Rotary Club in Texas only a few months before the annual Texas-OU football game. I mean, doesn’t RI know that the only reason Texas doesn’t fall into the ocean is that Oklahoma sucks? This is an affront that even Longhorns and Aggies can agree on.
Despite this oversight, it was all a lot of fun. But it occurred to me that this event, wonderful as it was, was merely a celebration of the real work of Rotarians: the hundred years of creating parks and scholarship funds and sending kids to camp and college and providing backpacks full of school supplies to kids who need them and contributing money to end polio and other diseases worldwide and all the other charitable, worthwhile endeavors that we have engaged in for the last century.
June 11, 2023
Dear Diary:
I’m still tired from yesterday. There was the dedication of the Rotary Dream Park in the morning and the Centennial Celebration last night. But my day was not over. After that Charna and I drove back to the Rotary Dream Park to watch the new interactive sculpture, “Boundless,” illuminate its many colors and patterns at night. And we were not alone. Other Rotarians as well as revelers from the many bars and restaurants that now dominate downtown Arlington joined us. We jumped and skipped all over the part of the sculpture embedded in the ground and cheered with amazement as the sculpture’s lights winked and changed colors and patterns as we did so. (I’m really glad no one was taking video of this. The blackmail potential would have been significant.) It was lovely to see that our contribution to the city was already bringing different members of our community together.
We and the others who joined us did this into the wee hours. It was a lot of fun. Just as Arlington citizens and others traveled to the old mineral water fountain downtown to partake of what it offered, I hope that in the future Arlington citizens and others will travel to the Rotary Dream Park to interact with the sculpture and to enjoy its extraordinary beauty. And I hope that occasionally someone will stop and remember how this wonderful gift and the park it adorns came to belong to the City of Arlington.
June 14, 2023
Dear Diary:
As I do every year, I met with our outgoing Rotary club president, Victoria Farrar-Myers, today as part of my preparation for my annual “That Was the Year That Was” speech. We talked about the Rotary year just passed and went over the club’s accomplishments. Victoria also made a few observations about what it’s like to serve as President of the Rotary Club of Arlington, Texas. One of them stayed with me. She said:
“Being president of this Rotary club is humbling. The number of people who help and make sure of every little thing; this makes it work. It made me love my Rotary family and embrace it for what it is to me. It’s awe-inspiring. We come from different walks of life and have different trades and businesses, but come together to pursue altruistic goals. It’s a privilege to talk with them, to be an interloper, to find out what Rotary means to them, and to do what’s possible to make sure the club is here and functioning for years to come.”
I share Victoria’s sentiments. And I couldn’t have said it any better.
So as the 2022-23 Rotary year ends and the 2023-24 Rotary year begins, I cannot resist telling one more Aggie joke: How many Aggies does it take to run a Rotary Club? I don’t know but we’re about to find out. Yet, I find myself feeling optimistic, even if the new President is an Aggie. Perhaps he will teach us some things and, like his predecessor, leave his mark on the club. We should at least give him that chance.
And as I conclude yet another “That Was the Year That Was” speech, I find that I am overwhelmed by three sentiments. First, I am filled with gratitude for all of you, my fellow Rotarians; for all that you do and have done for the club, for the community and for the world. Second, I would like to thank my wife, Charna Blumberg, for her help with this speech and many of those that preceded it. Amazingly, the woman who I have chosen to spend my life with has never, in our 42 years together, refused to help me with this or any other project, and she has improved both me and my speeches. (Thank you, sweetheart.) And third, that was the year that was. I hope that all of you enjoy the next one.
