In attendance: Marilyn Bedell, Ron Bedell, Bruce Bergeron, Jim Carroll, Dean Cashman, Bill Chabot, Hank Clarke, Jim Damren, Mila Dela Pena, Steve Grant, Tim Guaraldi, Tyler Hagan, Carol Keefe, Will Koppenheffer, Christian McDonald, Ron Michaud, Ernst Oidtmann, Bruce Pacht, Travis Paige, Phil Rentz, Bill Secord, Lars Torres, Cal Wolfe, and John Yacavone. Guest, Scott Jones.

 

Call to order: 12:02 by President Marilyn.

Four-Way Test led by Ron Michaud.
Songs: Our old Rotary song and “Grandfather‘s Clock.”
Guest: Scott Jones was brought by Steve Grant.

Thought of the day: It is Rotary Day at the United Nations— bringing communities together and commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco on December 11, 1945. Rotary holds the highest consultative status granted by the United Nations to NGOs, enabling it to contribute to UN discussions on humanitarian and development issues.

Bruce Pacht asked for and received a motion to vote to concur with the Charities Board’s vote to spend $6,200 to construct toilets for two schools in Nepal. Voting will conclude at 5 o’clock today.

 

Bruce Pacht gave a classification talk.
 

Bruce was born in Newport, Rhode Island, thirteen days after the Nagasaki bombing. His family moved to various New York towns during his childhood. He graduated from high school in 1963 and went to Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1967.

In September 1967, he left for Palo Alto, California. Eventually, he made his way to Great Bend National Park and then back to Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was part of a protest group that occupied the administration building at Dartmouth College, an action that in 1969 sent a person to jail for 31 days. From 1969 to 1975, Bruce lived with seven other people in a commune first in Hartland, Vermont, and then in Canaan, New Hampshire, where the four couples bought land at the end of Abbott Road (truly the middle of nowhere) along with a broken-down farmhouse built in the 1790s.

 

The commune was called the Wooden Shoe. As Bruce describes it, their commune was a pure commune, in that absolutely everything was shared. That meant that the normal household chores that had to be done rotated among the condo members on a regular basis. Some members of common worked in the outside world, and any money earned by those members was put in a community pot of money. Members could take money from the pot, but they had to leave a receipt for the money’s use. If a member wanted to buy even a Snickers Bar, a receipt for the Snickers Bar had to be placed in the pot. The commune had no electricity. They had extensive gardens and raised a certain number of livestock, including chickens, a pig, and a cow.
One of the lessons learned from communal living was that you had to compromise. You had to learn how to live in a group, and how to be a leader and how to be a follower. The members of the commune had to make a moral commitment to egalitarianism.

Bruce called his five-and-a-half years of communal living the most intense years of his life. He and his wife Carol left the commune in October 1975—the challenge was gone.

 

• Jim Damon moved that the club accept proposed bylaw revisions. Vote was taken, and it was unanimous approval.
• John Yacavone praised the folks in the kitchen for their efforts over the past year and solicited donations from the club as a holiday gift. A total of $230 was presented to the kitchen staff.