Rotary Club of Owego, NY
ROTATELLER
Gary Williams, Editor
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Rotary Club of Owego, NY |
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Gary Williams, Editor |
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Carolyn announced that Michael Wold has expressed interest in membership. Due to his work at the airport, Thursday mornings will work better for him.
Judy announced that a number of members went to visit Betty after last week’s meeting and Judy took bed jackets to her. They had a nice visit and Betty already sent a thank-you note.
Paul announced that the Treadway, in appreciation for our volunteering, had given the Club $75 a week for four weeks.
It will be held on May 6 – 7. They are looking for gifts of gift bags, particularly items from anyone’s business.
There will be a meeting this Thurday at 7:30 AM.
Next week’s meeting will be on the day before the official 100 year anniversary. There will be a special program. Please consider bringing a guest.
The Rotary Leadership Institute will be on April 2. Please contact Carolyn Wright if you are interested.
The Youth Services Committee is looking for volunteers to provide snacks for the students in the district who will be here on March 13.
Richard announced that the orientation will be held as soon as the materials come in from RI. It will be held parallel to our luncheon to make it easier for participants to attend.
Wilma fined people with information about breeds of dogs (in honor of their new family member). The most common are: labrador retriever; golden retriever; German Shephard; beagle; and Yorkshire Terrier. The most obscure is the English Foxhound.
Congratulations to TOM MC CORMACK for his picture on the front page of the Pennysaver last week.
Orv organized the six new members to speak about themselves. It was one of the most interesting half hours that I have spent at a Rotary meeting. Orv mentioned that the life expectancy in the US was 47 in 1905, that 14% of homes had a bathtub, 90% of doctors had not attended college, that women washed their hair once a month with Borax or egg yolks, and that 6% of our population had graduated from high school.
Bob Kingston: Bob’s parents graduated from UE. When he was one year old, they moved one hour north of Utica on the border of the Adirondacks. After he graduatd from high school, he came back here where part of his family still lived. At that age, he did not appreciate the beauty of the north country and the economic opportunities were limited. After a number of jobs, he attended Mortuary Science School in Syracuse every weekend for three years. After working for Coleman and Daniels for six years, Sean Feahy invited him into Estey and Monroe. He is married and they have a 10 year old daughter and a 4 year old son.
Ed Arrington: Ed grew up on a farm outside Collins, Mississippi. When he was 10, the family moved to Erie, PA, where he made a name for himself in wrestling. He worked his way through Ganning College in Erie. GE paid for his way through college and when he graduated with a BS in chemistry, he got an offer from IBM which he couldn’t refuse. He worked in Owego as a chemical engineer primarily with polyurethane adn protective coatings. He received his MBA from the University of Scranton. He and Dorothy have four children and their daughter Kim has two children. He joined Rotary when he was invited by his close friend, Doyle. He was impressed with the welcome he received and with the attitude the the Club does not just talk, but it does. Before he was a member, he stopped one day to help scrape the railings. His heritage is that talking about oneself is bragging. He wants his actions to speak for him. Ed has four patents with IBM. (It is interesting how the excerpt that will be at the end, ties in with some of our members profiles.)
Fred Ajaeb: Fred was born in Utica. Both of his parents were born in Lebanon. His father came over in 1950 and went back to find a wife and returned with her in 1955. Fred also worked for GE (which started from Thomas Edison). He appreciates the benefits of working for a major corporation in a small town with an easy commute. He and Martha have three children ages 17, 15, and 12. He became interested in Rotary when his daughter attended RYLA and Carl invited him to a meeting. He sees Rotary as an organization making a positive contribution to the community. Arabic was his first language and he is still fluent in Arabic. His parents spoke Arabic, French, and English, but they spoke Arabic in the home.
Gwen Smith: Gwen was born in Crowley, LA and was raised near Lake Charles. She is the oldest of 5. Her parents were divorced when she was 4. Her father was Marine pilot and then worked for the CIA. She left her mother to live with her father after high school graduation to be able to attend college. Her mother was mentally ill all of her life. Gwen managed a 40 room hotel in Myrtle Beach, SC for 10 years and then worked in food services for 10 years for Western Stear. When she started with them, they had 12 restaurants. When she left, they has 200 and she opened most of them. When she was 21, she met Ken is a refrigerated meat room. After visiting each other every weekend for a year with a seven hour commute each way, they decided to get married. Ken has two children and Gwen’s daughter, who is 34 is mentally ill. She has three chidren which Gwen and Ken are raising since 1990. Ken sells beaf and pork by the 40,000 lb. truck-load. She loves this community and appreciates Gary’s invitation to join Rotary. She sees that we are willing to come out of our comfort zones. Gwen is a people person and she wants to both contribute and to learn.
Susan English: Susan grew up in Montrose, PA working on a dairy farm alongside her father. She has known her husband her entire life and their mothers went to Kindergarten together. She always knew that she wanted to be a lawyer and was interested in criminal justice. She started in Temple, but felt that the city made her be too tough and decided to transfer to Binghamton. She then got her law degree from Syracuse while she was also working for Coughlan and Gerhart. Their daughter was born in 1990 and their son in 1995. They have a busy and good life. Her husband has now worked at Frito Lay for over 20 years. She is thankful for her family and has a greater appreciation due to the tough times they had to work through. She thanks John Spencer for inviting her to Rotary. A little known part of her history is that she was the Susquehanna Dairy Princess in 1979-1980.
The following excerpts are from the latest book (An Empire of Wealth) by one of my favorite authors (John Steele Gordon). ---No, I still have not read a Nelson DeMille book. Knowing how reading tastes differ, my sales pitch reminds me of Michael Douglas telling his daughter in American President that her history text book is a page-turner in his perspective. This book is a history of the U. S. from an economic perspective.
Hamilton’s political enemy – and eventual murderer – Aaron Burr was able to create a bank by sneaking a clause into a charter for a company, called the Manhattan Company, to provide clean water to NYC. The innocuous-looking clause allowed the company to invest surplus capital in any lawful enterprise. Within six months of the company’s creation, and long before it had laid a single section of water pipe, the company opened a bank, the Bank of the Manhattan Company. Still in existence, it is today J. P. Morgan Chase, the second largest bank in the United States.
Like so many nineteenth-century inventions (and far more twentieth-century ones), the railroad was not a single invention created by a lone genius. Instead it was a system whose components were invented separately and then pieced together by people in the new profession of civil engineering (so-called because until the middle of the eighteenth century, "engineer" had been solely a military specialty).
And despite the vast growth of industry in the later nineteenth century, in 1900, the largest single category of employment tracked by the U. S. Census would still be domestic service.
Something very close to mass hysteria was the result. In 1849 about ninety thousand Americans set off for California, and as many followed in 1850. That is not far short of 1 percent of the population. And most of them, not surprisingly, were men. When CA became a state, less that three years after the gold strike, its population was 92 % male.
By the turn of the century the railroads tightly knitted together an economy that was now fully national in scope, and nearly every town of any size was served by a railroad. The major cities were usually served by several. This new railroad net presented a new problem, however, one that had been wholly unanticipated. The reckoning of time had always been a local matter, set by local noon, which, at the latitude of New York, is about one minute later for each eleven miles one traveled westward. This when it was noon in New York, it was 11:55 AM in Philadelphia, 11:47 in Washington, and 11:35 in Pittsburgh. The state of Illinois used twenty-seven different time zones; Wisconsin, thirty-eight.
Early in that year the British government signed an agreement with J. P. Morgan and Company, making the bank the American purchasing agent for the British government. Its first deal was for $12 million worth of horses, which were desperately need to move artillery and supplies at the front. (The extremely high prices paid for horses in the war years was a prime reason that tractors so quickly replaced them on American farms at this time.) The bank soon signed a similar agreement with the French government.
No one had any idea at the beginning of the war how much the Allies would purchase in the United States for the war effort, but the British secretary of war, Lord Kitchener, thought it might be no more than $50 million. In fact, it would amount to more than $3 billion, more than four times total federal government revenues
General Electric was formed in 1892 by J. P. Morgan from the Edison General Electic Company.
In 2003, IBM alone would take out more than thirty-four thousand patents.
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R. I. President: Glenn Estess, Sr. District 7170 Governor: Peter Brellochs |
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President: Judy Kip President-elect: Orv Wright Vice-President: Al Bingley Secretary: Orv/Carolyn Wright Treasurer: Jan Nolis Past President: Carl Betcher |
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Sgt. At Arms: Paul Stear Pianist: Wilma Betcher |
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Board of Directors: 2003-2005: Kay Murray, John Spencer, Ed Kuhlman 2004-2006: Laura Costello, Matt Adler, Priscilla Hoag |
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Exchange Students: Andrés Tejada - inbound from Bolivia José Rojas Bojalil - inbound from Mexico Leslie-Morgan Frederick - outbound to Japan Chloë Lind - outbound to Mexico Joleen Butterfield - outbound to Brazil Staci Schaffer - outbound to Bolivia |