Newsletter 8-18-15

**Rotary Notes for Meeting held on August 18, 2015**

The meeting was opened by President Pro Tem Jim Brown with the Pledge of Allegiance; Bob Cocks led us in a great rendition of America the Beautiful; Karen led us in the Blessing.

Visitors: Our many guests today included the speakers:

- Skip Doyle and Bill Domings,

-Steve Stern who owns First Light, a home care company

-Eileen Porras who is a commercial banker with Salem 5. Eileen has just moved to Boston from New Jersey, and she is busy looking for a Rotary Club to join up here.

-Bill Paulson’s daughter, Sarah

-Chuck Buyers daughters Michelle and Julie.

George Hoffmeister led us in the Welcome song. Welcome back George!

Announcements:

-The reality fair has two dates upcoming. October 5, 2015 and May 23, 2016.

-Lois tried to trick us with Bill Clinton as our mystery president.

50/50 winning ticket was held by our guest, Eileen Porras but she didn’t pick the ten of spades. The pot is up to $264.00

School Backpacks for Students from the Congo and Angola: Darrell has approached the Board asking for $1167 to be used to pay for backpacks and new school supplies for children from Angola and the Congo, who are living in Portland Maine. Jim Brown pointed out that this came down to $32.00 per member, and it might be easier just to donate to the club $32 for a backpack complete with school supplies. So, bring a check with you Tuesday for $32, made out to Needham Rotary!! Below are the children involved:

Happy Dollars for our guests, visioning, remembrance for General Leader, Africa being Polio free, vacations, a night at Fenway and the ever popular HTBH.

Doug’s humor:

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”

He replied: “Yeah, once I was driving along and came upon a person who was being harassed by a group of thugs. So I pulled over, got out a bat, and went up to the leader of the thugs. He was a big, muscular man with a ring pierced through his lip. Well, I tore out the ring and told him he and his gang had better stop bothering this guy or they would have to deal with me!”

Speaker: Bill Domings from the Northboro club, and District Governor Nominee Skip Doyle talked about visioning for Rotary Clubs and ours in particular which will be scheduled for a Tuesday night in mid October. This will be in lieu of a Tuesday lunch meeting. Their presentation described how we will discuss and get consensus around plans, goals, and a vision of where we want to be in three years, at the October meeting. There will be a survey coming to each of us via email soon. Fill it out and return it.

They stressed the importance of member involvement, and how that the big test is how our club goes about implementing each of the changes that this meeting will shows that our club wants.

We are looking forward to Bill and Skip’s return in mid-October!

This link will take to you to a sample of thePowerPoint Presentation which Bill and Skip delivered: