Meeting of the Rotary Club of Burlington Central was chaired by President Bryce Leggatt, on Thursday 15th of October 2015. Three guests were introduced and welcomed to the meeting. There were numerous anniversaries announced.
A heartbreaking and poignant story about a refugee family from Syria was read to us, a letter written by an amazing individual who made his way from Syria to Greece and ultimately to Austria after a very tortuous and painful journey. His family suffered but ultimately he ended up learning German by studying 14 hours a day and receiving his Austrian citizenship. He had been "adopted" by a Rotary club after he was invited by one of his various saviours along the way.
There will be a Peace Breakfast in Hamilton on Tuesday 24th November 2015.
Jim Brindle asked urgently for volunteers to help with the Rotary Music Festival. Anyone considering volunteering for this wonderful annual event in a number of different roles over a two-week period in November is urged to contact Jim Brindle or preferably to go online to the club website and sign on to the volunteers area. It's very straightforward and Jim would like this to be done in the next couple of days as he will be drawing up the schedule.
We were asked to consider a possible exchange student for next year, somebody to go on the Rotary Youth Exchange programme aged 15 1/2 to 18.
The Lakeside and Partnership Golf committee are starting to work already for next year. We're asked to think about roles in the organisation; these are fundraising and recruitment to the club.
The speaker for the day was our own Mike Torsney who presented his reclassification speech. Mike is originally from Dublin. His career in architecture was illustrious and he told us of a number of buildings that he had designed, places that many of us are familiar with.
Mike's crowning achievement in his own mind is his family. His daughter Michelle is head of the Hamilton Separate School Board speech-language pathologists, and we heard of his son Brian who lives locally and has his own advertising company in Burlington. His daughter Paddy was 13 years a member of the Provincial Parliament in Ontario and has been appointed as an observer for the inter-parliamentary committee of the United Nations and is responsible for bringing together 164 countries to look at their common problems. She has an office in New York office near the United Nations building and also an office in Geneva. His youngest son Sean is in LA in the communications business.
He told us that his wife Marie tried out for the 1948 olympics. Fortunately Mike was able to swim faster then she and was able to catch her.
Mike retired at 64 years of age and had always wanted to travel but was able to travel to follow his sport. He has always been a quintessential sportsmen and originally played rugby and water polo at the national level. He's been in 10 world championships in swimming and has medalled in nine of them. He got his first gold medal in Edmonton for the 50 fly. Competition is clearly in his blood. He's been swimming almost all his life and still competing, typically in Florida where he competes in the masters in the 85 to 89 years category. He has swum locally, provincially and nationally for the masters. He was delighted to be at one swim meet with over three generations of swimmers. He made the interesting point that swimming brings together more athletes than all of the Pan American games with 7000 at one meet, meaning that with partners, there were 14,000 people approximately in the host city for this one sport!
He was the director of the national programme for water polo. He went to Budapest during the Russian occupation where he spent some time. His team received the ultimate compliment of being pitted against their national team.
He was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame this year a wonderful, very well-deserved honour. He plans to be in Clearwater in February for another competition.
Mike was asked what drew him to architecture. He told us it was because he was always a doodler. He went to the National College of Art in Dublin but was thoroughly put off by the prospect of starvation, so he went into architecture instead!
Mike was thanked for his presentation by Roy Cooper.
The meeting was adjourned.
