Rotary Club - Index

Rotary Club - Experience - Index

A Shared Experience 5 June 25, 2008
Some Things Don’t Change
“Attendance at Meetings is the perennial “inside” matter that
needs to be stressed in this and in every other Rotary Club.
Attendance at the regular meetings, when no special
attraction is offered, is the important thing! That’s the
barometer that indicates how strong is the pressure of real
Rotary spirit and vitality! Your secretary, about to retire from
his office, would like to hammer a bit at this matter.
Life in Our Home Town. The city with all its civic
improvements, its public institutions, its cultural advantages, will amount to just as much
as we put into it, and to no more. The city council and the tax collector attend in large
measure to this matter, but yet it is the experience of all of us that it pays big returns
when we put more of our effort into public affairs than is required of us.
In Private Business. Every employer and employee knows that our regular gainful
occupations and projects thrive only insofar as we stick to them and put our best into
them. Our livelihood and individual success are so intimately connected with our day’s
work in our business or profession that we are constrained not to loaf on the work-a-day
job.
In All Unselfish Enterprises. If one works at church, at charity or at any other
altruistic enterprise, he realizes that the same rule holds. Mere memberships and places
on various rolls with accomplish nothing. To be a producer, one must be active in
whatever type of activity is characteristic of the movement with which he identifies
himself.
Most Characteristic of Rotary is the weekly meeting and the action and reaction of
member upon member, meeting after meeting. That Rotarian, then, who is dilatory in his
attendance is, to say the least, not putting his best into the movement and he makes it
impossible for himself and others to get out of it all the good that they should derive.
Let Each One Watch His Attendance Record!”
The forgoing appeared in The Washingtonian on June 22, 1928, as a
sort of valedictory by the Club Secretary, who was about to leave office.
Reprinted from Rotary Revealed, June 21, 2008