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Your place in
Rotary
One of the early
Rotary clubs had a shy young member who has since risen high in
his profession and in Rotary. He likes to tell about the horror
he felt when the president of the club assigned him as a speaker
at the weekly meeting. An incident in relation to his work which
he had described at the luncheon table suggested that he might
be able to provide an interesting program.
The young man
protested when he was asked, and on the eve of his assignment
invented a trip out of town to avoid speaking. Some weeks later,
however, another speaker failed to appear and the club president
called for the promised talk.
Almost numb with
fear, he arose to speak. And then his interest in the subject
and the realization that he was among friends took hold of him.
He spoke freely, naturally, enjoyably—even to himself. Today, he
still remembers with gratitude that his Rotary membership
imposed this assignment. Without it, he believes, his
professional advancement would have been inhibited.
This man is
typical of those persons—and there are thousands of them—who
have found in Rotary the ideal setting for developing their
capacity for leadership. In a meeting of past district
governors, one of them said: "All of us around this table know
that we shall never be able to give to Rotary as much as
we have received from it." Every head nodded enthusiastic
assent.
These were men who
had given generously of their time and talent—and without
remuneration—to the cause of Rotary and who, the more they gave,
the more they received.
The new man in
Rotary has much to learn, much to understand before he becomes
fully effective as a Rotarian. But he was chosen in the belief
that he possessed the requisite qualities, and that he would
quickly find his starting place. The club will provide the
proper and favorable setting. There is a well-ordered procedure
to acquaint new members with the broad facets of Rotary so that
they may find their particular niche. Thus, in many clubs an
individual may begin his Rotary career on the "badge board,"
distributing luncheon badges so he may learn the names of his
fellow-Rotarians and begin the process of acquaintance in the
shortest possible time. Rotary is based upon
acquaintance—fellowship—and the opportunities this acquaintance
provides for personal service.
Committee
assignments carry this process forward. The new member works
closely with older Rotarians—the most natural setting in which
to learn Rotary functions—and thus absorbs more about the
purposes and operations of his club. The informal discussions of
a committee session, as one new member put it, "really gave me
the 'feel' of how Rotarians work together to take decisions. It
made me feel I 'belonged,' especially when I was asked for my
opinion and was drawn into the discussion as a full-fledged
member."
This feeling of
"belonging" also makes the new member aware of his
responsibilities to Rotary, and Rotary's responsibilities to
him. The member, by virtue of his membership in such an
organization, is expected to look for opportunities to serve; it
is one of the obligations he accepts. Through daily contacts
with the life of the community, through contacts with Rotarians
at the weekly meetings and elsewhere, through programs and
Rotary literature—such as The Rotarian magazine—the new
member constantly widens the scope of his knowledge. Each
contact is an opportunity for re-examination of older concepts
or for the opening of new horizons.
The club
simultaneously undertakes responsibilities toward the new
member—responsibilities for informing him on the operations of
the club, on Rotary International, and
on various other
matters grading between the strictly local and the broadly
universal. In brief, the club's responsibility is to put the
knowledge to work.
First and
foremost, all members have the responsibility for regular
attendance at weekly meetings. If for any reason a member is
unable to attend his own club, he is expected to attend the
meeting of another club in either the six days preceding, on the
day of the meeting, or the six days succeeding his own club's
meeting day. Failure to attend for four consecutive weeks
automatically terminates membership unless the individual has
been excused by his club's board of directors.
This is not just
an odd requirement of Rotary. It is practical and is based on
years of experience. No club can operate efficiently without the
full participation of its membership in regularly scheduled
gatherings, and this is particularly true of Rotary.
Non-attendance is a triple handicap: the club itself fails to
receive benefit of the member's ideas and experiences; second,
the individual is deprived of the fellowship, the give-and-take,
the companionship, the broader horizons that result from
contact with like-minded men; and, third, the classification
held by the absentee is not represented at the meeting. A club
that aims at being a cross section of the business and
professional community fails of its goal by the number of its
habitual absentees and the number of unfilled classifications. A
member who aims at being a good Rotarian generally succeeds in
direct proportion to his attendance - and participation.
It is not without
significance that the emblem of Rotary is the gear-wheel.
Mechanically speaking, the loss of a single cog of a gear
impairs efficiency by introducing slippage at a given point on
the rim; lose enough cogs, and the wheel will cease to do useful
work. It is as simple as that.
The individual
member has another responsibility: to
serve his club in
all its endeavors, and the club has the complementary
responsibility—to see that he is given opportunity to serve. It
is understood in Rotary that when a member is offered an
assignment by his club, he accepts it willingly and dispatches
it with energy. It is this responsibility in Rotary which may
cause the leading men of the community to do things far removed
from their normal activity so that there will be funds to help
the crippled children of the community or pay for a scholarship
for a deserving student. Men who work at a desk all day may take
pick and shovel and rake on Saturday to level off the playground
or park development undertaken by their club. More often,
however, the service may be individual service—service motivated
through other channels, but accepted enthusiastically because
the man is a Rotarian. An illustration makes this pattern clear.
A Rotary club had a program at its weekly meeting on Scouting—a
full and inspiring description of the Scout movement in that
community and its relationship to Scouting in other parts of the
world. The speaker closed with an appeal for more adult leaders
and sponsors, explaining the significance of competent
leadership.
This Rotarian was
moved by what he heard—as many others were—and this man
determined that he would volunteer his services as an adult
leader. As a Rotarian and as a serving citizen of his community,
he could do no less. Could he do any more? Yes, he could; he
belonged to another organization in the community, and, at its
next meeting, he stood up to advocate that this organization do
what his Rotary club had already done a long time ago— sponsor a
Boy Scout troop. It was done.
Both the
fellowship and the service of Rotary have strong chain reaction
characteristics. In thousands of instances these acts of service
span the oceans and jungles, reaching across national and
geographical boundaries. Take, for example, the story of Alec
MacPhail and Eric Schultz.
Alec MacPhail, a
member of the Rotary Club of Johannesburg, South Africa, first
met Eric Schultz when the latter was a patient in the hospital.
Schultz, a husky young miner, had been in a serious motorcycle
accident and had lost both arms and both legs. Because of slow
progress in learning how to use artificial limbs he was, at the
time his path crossed MacPhail's, in a state of extreme mental
depression. He felt society had no further use for him, that
ahead stretched only the grim future of a helpless, quadruple
amputee.
Schultz impressed
MacPhail. Gradually MacPhail convinced the young man that the
future was not as black as it seemed, that something could be
done for him, that he could do something for himself, and that
society still could use him. Information was procured on the
latest in prosthetic devices, particularly on a system devised
to treat American war veterans. The apparent road block was that
treatment and training facilities were across the broad
Atlantic
and across the
United States, in
California.
MacPhail presented
the matter to his Rotary club. The money was raised to pay
Schultz's traveling expenses to the
United States, and for
specialized training at the University of California in Los Angeles.
As Schultz winged
his way across the world, an Amsterdam Rotarian met him and
entertained him until plane time. In
New York, another Rotarian, who had
reserved both a hotel and a hospital room, canceled both and
took Schultz home with him. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the traveler was met by still
another Rotarian who took him along to a Rotary meeting. A month
after Eric's admission to the
University
of California,
he received new arms; after five months training, he had become
almost completely independent of outside help. He made such progress
in the use of his four artificial limbs that the doctors in
charge suggested he demonstrate his new skills in Washington to the Committee on Veterans'
Affairs of the United States Congress. Shortly after he did so,
a million-dollar appropriation for further research into
artificial limbs was passed; Eric demonstrated mastery of his
new limbs to the extent of offering a cigarette to a friend—and
lighting it for him!
A letter he wrote
home after arriving in the United States expresses a
fundamental truth and helps the Rotarian see his organization in
inspiring perspective. Schultz wrote, "It was only after this
long trip that I began to appreciate what a huge organization
Rotary is and how small it has made the world."
That, in brief, is
the story of a young man who once thought life had cast him
aside. It also is the story of Alec MacPhail and the Rotarians
of Johannesburg and the place they occupy in the
service-above-self world of Rotary. In the broader sense, it is
the story of all Rotary: a need apprehended, a need met through
local and worldwide co-operation.
The world-famous
Dr. Albert Schweitzer who has achieved greatness as clergyman,
author, physician, musician, and humanitarian summed it up once.
Accepting honorary membership from the Rotary Club of Colmar,
France—which was made the occasion for a substantial club
donation to Dr. Schweitzer's work in Africa—he
said: "I feel that I am in a sympathetic group. I feel that I am
among men who sincerely desire to give our civilization more
spiritualite, a deepening of thought and of human ideals,
and a will to save the world from ruin. I am, therefore, one of
you, and I believe in your great and splendid goal."
None of what has
been said should be taken to mean that Rotary is a crusading
army marching off to save the world; nothing of the sort would
be possible under its organization.
Neither is it a collection of back-slappers and gladhanders. It
is composed of many kinds of men - some more fully imbued with
zeal than others. But all members, at one time or another,
manage to progress toward their ideals while having a good deal
of plain, wholesome fun. Some of this is from programming, some
of it is the quiet satisfaction of a job well done. Some of it
is in the fellowship of the weekly meeting or other Rotary
gatherings. Some of it is in the common effort toward a common
goal. Taken together, it spells R-O-T-A-R-Y.
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