Message From the President

Dear Fellow Rotarians:

February and March are really busy times for me, because the legislature is in session and that places extra demands on my time. I know that all of you have busy schedules as well. Amazingly, people in our club still find time to work on Rotary and our many service projects in the community. We have a terrific group of officers and directors in this club. I'd like to highlight just a few who put in lots of effort to keep our club functioning, despite busy schedules and other demands on their time.

Terry Wages, Vice-President, is doing a great job planning our programs and handling speaker introductions. Terry makes countless phone calls and sends a ton of e-mail just to keep our Thursday meetings interesting. And he always has a smile, even when his speaker just cancelled and he has to find another! This is probably the busiest job in the entire club.

Gary Knoll, Treasurer, makes sure our money is accounted for, provides analysis of how our spending re-lates to the budget, and deals with the Ramada Inn on our weekly meals -- not an easy task! We have just ex-perienced another increase in our meal costs so Gary has to make sure we stay within our budget.

Mike Welch has moved the planning for our vocational service program with the area middle school stu-dents into high gear. Mike did a superb job last year organizing a day-long Saturday program for students which exposed them to a variety of occupations and careers. He and his volunteers plan to make this year's program even more spectacular. He will need help from all of us to make this successful this year. The date is March 14th. Won't you make plans to help with this important event?

Anita Wolgast, Club Service, and Joy Moser, Club Administration are constantly checking to see that things run smoothly--whether its having someone at the registration table, or greeters, or someone to give the invocation to coordinating the various service projects for the club. They each have a large group of volun-teers to manage and they do it beautifully.

Al Dvorak and Pat Michaelis have been hard at work finding new members. We are so pleased with the new members that have joined since our club year began in July. Unfortunately, we have lost members as well through death and resignation, so member recruitment requires a constant effort. The entire member-ship committee works very hard at bringing in these new members and seeing that they feel a part of our club. Hats off to Al and Pat and the entire committee.

Greg Hill deserves special thanks for all the time and effort he has put into making Rotopeka such an excel-lent publication. Greg has to pull and prod all of us to get stories, but he always puts out a quality newslet-ter. Do Greg and favor, and help him find copy for our newsletter; if you can‘t, just pat him on the back for his efforts.

Finally, I don‘t have space to mention everyone who is working for Rotary, but someone in our club is doing something every week – often unnoticed. You know who you are, and I hope you take great pride in giving Service Above Self, and making our Rotary family better and better. Thank you for what you do.

Joan Wagnon