Rotary Club looks back at 100 years of Service Above Self

What is the significance of February 14th? The obvious answer is that it’s Valentine’s Day. But for Rotarians of Mount Olive that day will be special for an entirely different reason this year: It will be the club’s 100th anniversary. And the celebration has already taken place. On Thursday, Jan. 11, current and former members attended a gathering that featured historian Ken Dilda looking back at the club’s first hundred years.

“Congratulations Rotary Club of Mount Olive on your Centennial celebration,” Dilda began his tribute. “You’ve reached a milestone achieved by only a few. Many have come, only a few remain, and you remain after 100 years.”

Dilda pointed out that Rotary is Mount Olive’s oldest continuous civic club, having been organized by a group of men on Dec. 13, 1923, in Dr. C. C. Henderson’s medical office on Northeast Center Street, a building that now houses Goshen Medical Center. “They elected I. Faison Witherington, long-time official of the Pickle Company, as their first president,” Dilda recounted. “They set the dues at five dollars, and they agreed to meet in the office until they could find a permanent meeting home.”

They found that “home” in a meeting hall on the second story of what is now Miller’s Crossing II apartment complex. “Downstairs, there was a silent movie theater, and upstairs was a meeting hall. In the meeting hall, it served also as a skating rink and a dance hall.” Dilda paused just a moment before observing, “This was a happening building in the early 1900s.”

It was in this meeting hall that the club’s charter was issued on Feb. 14, 1924. Dilda reported that there were 18 charter members and that the club’s first project was to sponsor the Boy Scouts.

He shared a lighthearted story illustrating how Rotary meetings have changed over the years. “One of the things these early members did was sing. They sang at the beginning, they sang at the end, and if you read the minutes, the songs received more detail and attention than committee reports. That ought to tell you something about priorities.

“I don’t know how well Rotarians sang, but they enjoyed making a noise over the years,” Dilda attested.

When the club celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1949, it boasted 43 members, a substantial increase from its original 18. “And considering that the period from 1924 to 1949 included the Great Depression and World War II, that’s an impressive increase in membership by Rotary,” Dilda said. “It’s the largest increase the club has ever had.”

In 1974, when Rotary celebrated its 50th anniversary, there were 50 members. At that point, Dilda said, “W.K. ‘Hooty’ Lewis, had 25 years of perfect attendance, the longest in the club’s first 50 years. That extended to 36 years before Hooty decided that he would just attend on occasion rather than every meeting.”

“In 1979, Rotary celebrated its 75th anniversary with 31 members,” Dilda recounted. “There’d been a drop-off [in membership] but that’s typical if you look at other clubs in town during this period…”

As Rotary marks its Centennial celebration, the membership is 35, he reported, pointing out several current members with noteworthy longstanding service: Doug Connor with 56 years; Joe Caveness with 49 years, and Bart Baldwin with 44 years.

Over the years, several women have been important to the club’s history, and Dilda noted three in particular. He credited Gaynell Brock and the Southern Bell Restaurant with providing club members with “hundreds, if not thousands” of meals over a span of 38 years, from 1975 until Brock’s retirement in 2013.

He pointed out that Dorothy Dail, the club’s decades-long pianist, was also its first female member. Dail, he said, joked that for years she had attended Rotary and gotten her meals for free, but once she became a member she had to start paying.

And he noted that Patti O’Donoghue was the club’s first female president. (During Rotary’s first hundred years there has been just one other female president, Barbara Bryan.)

Dilda, a member of the Mount Olive Historical Society and director of the David John Aaron Teaching and History Museum, talked about Rotary’s importance to these two organizations. He remembered the club providing a generous donation to the Historical Society in 2005 to be used for the museum. “As a result, the club earned a plaque, the first named room in the museum, and an exhibit,” he said. Several items from the exhibit were displayed alongside him during his presentation. Of particular interest to the Rotarians — and also popular with visitors to the museum, Dilda noted — were a series of “absence cards,” postcards mailed to Rotary members when they missed consecutive meetings.

After a Rotarian’s first absence, he received a card saying, “When you’re absent, we miss you.” A second absence elicited this sentiment: “Caution!! We missed you again.” By the third absence, the message was more dire: “Danger — Beware!!” And, on the occasion of the fourth consecutive absence, the member received a card letting him know he was “Dead — Dead.”

“Rotarians were serious about attendance,” Dilda said with a smile.

Another item of particular interest was the club’s original minutes book. The minutes represent “not only important history, but interesting reading,” Dilda noted. “It’s fascinating what secretaries give attention to as they record history. Again, the songs get a lot of attention. Visitors get a lot of attention. Rarely do they mention any details of a report given.”

Dilda invited Rotarians to stop by the museum to see even more Rotary artifacts; he also invited them to donate additional items. “Upstairs in the museum, we have nine boxes of Rotary records from 1923 to 2005,” he said. “We would be honored to add to that collection from 2005 to the present.”

No history of Rotary would be complete without a mention of the club’s motto — Service Above Self — Dilda said. And with this, he pointed out that Rotary’s positive influence extends far beyond Mount Olive, as with the club’s large donation, in 2005, to Rotary International to help with efforts to eradicate polio.

A current example of Rotary’s commitment to Service Above Self is the club’s determination to do 100 acts of service in conjunction with its Centennial. A blackboard in their meeting room is updated with each project completed and the number of Rotarians who participated in that particular project.

And on the day of the club’s Centennial celebration, members completed yet one more act of service. On behalf of the club, Barbara Bryan presented Dilda with a check for $2,500 to go to the history museum “to use where you feel like it’s most needed.”

Dilda declared that the money would be used in the museum’s ongoing work of documenting the Kraft Collection, a collection of approximately 800,000 photos and negatives from the studio of Mount Olive photographer Charles Kraft.

While Dilda was front and center for the presentation of Rotary’s history, he thanked several people who helped make the presentation possible: Barbara Kornegay for putting together the PowerPoint, the Tribune’s Steve Herring for taking most of the photos that were used, Barbara Bryan for helping with the arrangements, and Andy Wiggins for his technical assistance.