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GET YOUR KICKS ISSUE APRIL 25, 2026
VOL. 6 NO. 27
WHAT DID OUR BOARD DECIDE?
NEWS-NOTES-NONSENSE
Look for your next Eastender News on May 9th. Until then...
Route 66 historian Cheryl Eichar Jett was on hand Thursday to talk about the Route 66 Centennial and her new book Aprons Away: Women's Work on Route 66, featuring 80 individual stories about these ladies. She also shared with us some interesting Illinois and MadCo tidbits. The Route 66 alignment in Illinois was originally along IL Highway 4 and was completed before Route 66 was a designated highway. In MadCo, the first of three alignments crossed the McKinley Bridge. Want to know more about the MadCo connection? Link here https://madison-historical.siue.edu/encyclopedia/route-66-in-madison-county/
Our Pork Jambalaya Dinner is scheduled TODAY (April 25th) @ the Keasler Rec Center. We will need donations of soda and water. Proceeds will benefit the EA-WR High School Special Ed program. See flyer below for more details.
Opening duties were covered by WendellR, SherryT and MarkA, who ended with a Rotary hymn.
This coming Thursday (April 30th) will find us at our Belk Park pavilion for the annual cleanup day. We'll dine on pizza and then roll up our sleeves to get to work. Let Prez Mark know ASAP if you plan to eat. Wear your paint clothes!!
Birthday wishes go out to PaulH on the 28th.
GlennB sent you an email recently regarding Business of the Year nominations. If you have a business that you want to nominate let him know ASAP.
KarenJ introduced her hubby Andrew.
As noted in LoriP's email on Thursday, long-time member PatB is now in hospice care. Please keep Pat and his family in your prayers.
Early birders included -KarenJ, MarkA and AllenH.
PattiA sez we need sponsors ($100) and runners for our Color Run on June 13th @ Belk. Registration is now live. Spread the word! Link via the QR code in the flyer below or on our Facebook page.
It was nice to have MarkA back from his winter abode in Tampa. He expressed his appreciation to BradP for streaming/archiving our meetings on Facebook. He watched while lounging in his hammock stretched between two palm trees.
Our golf tournament is on Saturday July 18th @ Belk. The event needs teams and sponsors. JoeS indicated that we have 5 teams on board. A good start, but, we need a lot more. Please encourage all your golf buddies/work associates/family members to consider joining us for this fun event. See the flyer below for the details.
Our club's 100th anniversary is coming up in 2029. How will we recognize and celebrate?
We had a lot of Slide-right-inners-RobertP, DaveA, LindseyH, GeorgeM, ScottL and PaulH.
Last to arrive included PaulH and ScottL.
There were 20 members dining on Teriyaki pork loin, mixed veggies, rolls, sauce on the side Caesar salad and cookies.
SherryT recently shot her first golf birdie. Congrats. What's next? An eagle??
SAA RickH recruited GlennB to be the finemaster. Happy Fine/shameless plugs were offered by MarkA, RobinK and TomS. A weak happy birthday song serenaded PaulH. We answered 4 out of 5 Route 66 trivia Q's correctly. Not helping at BOTH the Jamba Dinner and shelter cleanup? Pay a $. We found out that 1,601,000 birds migrated through MadCo the night before.
The $45 jackpot went unclaimed by SherryT and guest Cheryl. KarenJ won the scratchie.
POST-MEETING VISITS
TODAY!!
TIME TO RUN (AND SPONSOR)
LOOKING FOR TEAMS AND SPONSORS
NO JOKER FOR SHERRY
ALL THINGS TRIVIAL
Team-building workshops involving the construction of “human towers” are all the rage—where?
A. Cancún
B. Catalonia (Spain)
C. Chile
D. Costa Rica
(Find the answer near the end of the newsletter)
Today is National Zucchini Bread Day
Where is the largest city in the U.S. by land area?
Texas
Montana
Alaska
California
Considering Alaska covers 663,000 square miles — more than one-fifth the size of the entire contiguous U.S. — it should come as no surprise that the four largest cities in the country by land area are located in the state. The largest, Sitka, stretches 2,870 square miles, followed by Juneau (2,702 square miles), Wrangell (2,543 square miles), and Anchorage (1,705 square miles)
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Sourced from the Eastender News, Make-Up and Banner newsletters
April 2022
Prez Lindsey welcomed new member MarkSm, Rotary pinned by PaulG.
We heard a presentation about the Raging Rivers Water park.
RobinK, LoriP and RickH took advantage of the Zoom opportunity to participate in 9 of 12 District Assembly breakout sessions.
BillP and JohnP were among those presenting during the National Day of Prayer event.
We sponsored two RYLA students.
LoriP was elected to serve on the Rotary district Foundation Board.
JoeS was not quite sure what day it was.
Prez Lindsey announced that she has a goal of having 100 runners participate in our Color Run scheduled for June 4th.
BradP had fond memories of a Pink Floyd concert he attended at the Checkerdome.
BradP and WendellR were unable to find the joker.
PHOTOS OF THE WEEK
DATELINE:ROTARY
Changing lives, one backpack at a time
A woman with a WaterSafe backpack carries water back to her home alongside a donkey outfitted with additional containers.
By Connie Cheren, Rotary Club of Charlotte International, North Carolina and founder of Partners for Care
When I first traveled to Kenya in 2007, I thought it would be a short trip, an opportunity to volunteer and return home with new memories. Instead, it changed the direction of my life.
I saw children missing school because of preventable illnesses, mothers walking miles to fetch water that wasn’t even safe to drink, and communities doing everything they could to survive with very little. As a nurse and social worker, I couldn’t ignore what I saw.
That trip led to the creation of Partners for Care, an organization built on one clear mission: to change lives, one child at a time. Our vision has always been that every child in Kenya should have the opportunity to live, to have safe water, enough food, access to school, and the chance to grow up healthy and strong.
Discovering a partnership for change
Years later, I learned about WaterSafe by FPS, an innovation that immediately caught my attention. The WaterSafe backpack is a simple yet brilliant idea — a safer and more hygienic way to carry, store, and dispense water. For women and children who often carry heavy jerry cans or buckets for long distances, this backpack changes everything.
At Partners for Care, we’ve had the privilege of working alongside the WaterSafe team to bring these backpacks into Kenyan communities that need them most. We witnessed firsthand how it transforms daily life, from easing physical burdens to improving health outcomes.
Clean water, real results
One of the most powerful lessons we’ve learned came from our work in Parkishon, Marsabit County, where we partnered with local health officials to help children enrolled in a nutrition program. Many of these children were malnourished and receiving a therapeutic food meant to help them recover. Yet despite the supplements, progress was painfully slow.
It wasn’t the food that was failing them; it was the water. Families were still using unsafe water from nearby dams, and repeated illness was keeping children from healing.
That’s when we introduced WaterSafe backpacks, along with hygiene training and soap distribution. Each family received a backpack to help keep water clean from source to storage. What happened next was remarkable.
Within just three months, 10 of the 37 children whose families used the WaterSafe backpacks made a full recovery — so healthy they no longer needed to remain in the feeding program. Children who didn’t have access to clean water continued to struggle.
In total, about 27% of the children using WaterSafe backpacks recovered completely, and nearly all showed faster improvement than before. To continue reading, link herehttps://tinyurl.com/mrz9mnr2
AND I QUOTE
“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."-Isaac Asimov
“No man has a right to expect to succeed in life unless he understands his business.”-P.T. Barnum
"I would always rather be happy than dignified.“-Jane Eyre
"Courage involves pain, and is justly praised; for it is harder to face what is painful than to abstain from what is pleasant."-Aristotle
SMILE
Let's head west and check out the police blotter from Flathead County, Montana-
11:02 a.m. A woman who was helping retrieve some dogs while their master was incarcerated wanted law enforcement to know she was not an “accessory to the crime.”
12:07 p.m. Someone’s vehicle was “destroyed” after a silly string attack.
3:20 p.m. An 8-year-old’s grandparent wanted the cops to “scare the who-diddly” out of his grandson after he tagged a neighbor’s trash can.
6:51 p.m. A white, unmarked creeper van with the door cracked open was driving slowly in circles around the school and the park.
9:04 p.m. A station wagon filled with boys smoking cigarettes was spinning brodies and heckling a pedestrian in the parking lot.
11:01 p.m. Someone snitched on a probationer who was drinking at the bar.
2:19 a.m. A guy in a trench coat came out of a house with a suspicious bag.
8:38 a.m. A recently fired employee and her boss agreed to “not cause a scene” during a final paperwork meeting.
1:50 p.m. After a driver heading the wrong way on a one-way street was confronted, he warned them to mind their own business.
THE NUMBERS
The accumulated cost of the “annoyance economy”—a term for fraught everyday interactions like dealing with spam, robocalls, hidden fees, insurance claims, and subscription cancellations—is $165 billion-New York Times
Shoppers in households earning $150,000 or more spent 2% less at grocery stores in the first quarter compared with a year earlier and 15% more at consignment stores-Consumer Edge
A JD Power study released in 2025 found that 34% of small businesses were adding credit-card surcharges
About 21.6 million households, one-fourth of owner households in the U.S., paid HOA or condo fees in 2024-Census Bureau
One-third of U.S. adults have turned to artificial intelligence for health advice in the past year, and of those, around 41% uploaded personal medical information to the chatbot, according to a recent survey from the health nonprofit KFF
More than 73% of public high-school students will have to take a personal-finance class by 2031, up from 11% in 2023- Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt.
(Trivia answer-B)
OBJECT OF ROTARY
The object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise and, in particular, to encourage and foster:
First:The development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service.
Second: High ethical standards in business and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations, and the dignifying of each Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society.
Third: The application of the idea of service in each Rotarian's personal business, and community life.
Fourth: The advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons united in the ideal of service.
