FIRSTS AND FOOLISHNESS
The club continued to meet at the Hearthside Restaurant, (now the Queen’s Head). It was a time of firsts: the club’s first major project was the building of a Picnic Shelter in Coronation Park., and Clifford Deathe started building his 38 year record of perfect attendance; David Dunn, raconteur par excellence, with his English sense of humour, marked everyone’s birthday with a ditty or a poem, often with the help of Bob Blades’ poetical skills, it was one of the ways he devised to raise money for the Foundation.
The photo below is of Bob Blades.
Rotary District 709 included clubs in the Buffalo Niagara region of New York State and an equal number on our side of the border. As it was a tradition, to build cross border friendship, each club was twinned with a club across the border. RCOT was twinned with Amherst South and yearly we’d host them at one of our meetings and we’d hire a bus to visit them. On one return journey, after a good time and a few libations, it was decided that one of our members, Cam Taylor – Minister of Knox Church – needed more education. With this incentive, when the bus arrived back in Canada it took a detour in Niagara Falls to an establishment that specializing in displaying the wonders of the female anatomy. No detailed report on the effectiveness of this educational experience was forthcoming from Cam.
Well we were young. Further evidence of that was manifest in the reputation we had in the District as the club that threw buns at each new president starting in office, and at the District Governor when he made his annual visit. This custom, instituted and managed by Basil Markow’s creative mind, also produced a trophy for Fine Master of the Year. It was a white toilet seat suitably engraved and presented each year. The winners always managed to store it in a deep dark place. Gay McDermott, our first female president, who won the award, managed to ‘lose’ it. As president, Gay also ended our ‘bun throwing’ as silly and undignified. Here’s Bill Kerr’s comments on our bun tossing, “Women do not understand that it’s a “guy thing” to bring people down a notch lest they become ‘too big for their britches’ as they used to say. You may be president or district governor but remember you are still one of us.”
The picture below is of our first female President Gay McDermott.
When Rotary’s International Conference was held in Toronto Basil picked up some visiting Rotarians to bring them to Oakville. He told them to look in the hotel lobby for someone wearing a sign that said Meatloaf. |
Money was raised by running Bingo in the eye watering smoke filled Bingo Hall; the saving grace of the evening was to gather afterwards for beer and pizza. There was also an annual Art Auction held in the Glen Abby Golf Club conference room. It was successful for a few years; that is until all the members had their walls filled with pictures! We also had successful Sports Celebrity Dinners for dads and their sons until the locker-room humour, fueled by a few drinks, tended to get out of hand,
By the way, Basil Markow, perhaps in an attempt to keep the cost of lunch low, initiated the “Great Meat Loaf Contest” and for twenty two meetings in a row we were served a different meatloaf for lunch. While the Hearthside did not run out of new recipes we ran out of patience.