In the spirit of celebrating Milson Rotary’s 50th anniversary, President Glen invited three of our wise men to reflect on some significant events in our club's past. As we were running out of time, Glen wisely deferred the third until 2024.
Our first wise man - Bruce Wackrow (past President 1983-84) recalled a significant project, Milson Rotary.
The project was hatched by the International committee led by Peter Balfour (past member). The aim was to raise $NZ21,000 to build a staff/materials preparation room at the St Joseph Community College on the island of Lifuka in the Ha’Apai group of the Tongan Islands. The project took 11 months from its inception to completion. Seven Club members went over to the islands to do the construction, and the club was awarded a ‘Significant Achievement Award” by Rotary International.
Our second wise man, Allan Lee (past President 1980-81), concentrated on two events that occurred in his presidential year.
The club focus for that year was on youth of the future. To this end, the club applied to the district governor (DG) of 9940 Bill Carter for permission to conduct the district RYLA course. Permission was granted, and a steering committee was appointed, with Jeff Blackmore being appointed the convenor. The RYLA course traditionally had an attendance figure of 20 to 30. Milson Rotary set out to increase these numbers. This was achieved with a lot of effort (mainly by personal contacts from committee members). The count on registration day, which was Friday of, the start of the weekend seminar, was 79 registrants. However, on a Saturday morning, the number decreased by one as a young lady got so homesick on Friday night that we had to send her home by bus back to Wellington. The official count was, therefore, 78. This set a record that, to this day, still stands as the largest by far of any RYLA course.
The logistics of accommodation, transportation, lecture rooms and equipment proved daunting. However, inquiries with Massey University solved these problems. The army also had a tremendous input to the course. As well as providing transportation, they put the attendees through their obstacle course and put on various leadership sessions. Many high-profile local businesses also gave up their time to give talks to the attendees.
Arthur and Brenda Smethhurst were the “live-in camp mother and father”, and Harry Vyver was the physical instructor. It was Harry's job to assemble the attendees each morning and take them for a couple of laps around the Massey University ring road to start the day’s program.
As mentioned earlier, this course set a record for district 9940; while Milson Rotary did run another rider course a few years later, the number fell back to the usual high 20s and mid-thirties.
The second item was the faux pas made during the club visit of the district 9940 governor Bill Carthew. Rotary holds certain traditions; one of these is the official annual visit of the district governor. DG visits involve a meeting with the President and his board, followed by the club meeting. This meeting is usually a partner's night, and the guest speaker is the DG.
The format of meetings in those days was for the official party to sit at a top table with the proceedings being conducted from the front. On this occasion, the DG's visit went according to plan. After the DG had given his speech, I thanked Bill and his wife for their attendance and for giving up their time to visit our club. Unfortunately, the DJ's speech took a bit longer than usual, and the meeting was in overtime. I then proceeded to end the meeting. And here was where I made the faux pas by saying: “Fellows and guests, thank you for coming tonight to hear the DG. I will now close the meeting and not waste any more of your time”.
Well, those last seven words would come back to haunt me for a decade or more. This was because past DG Bill Carthew became involved in our District's PETs program (PresidentElect Training seminar). At each seminar, he would use my closing words to emphasise what a president should not say in closing a meeting.
I lived with that “booboo” for a long time, as I was the district registration coordinator for 19 years, and I was always present at PETs. However, as time passed, this became a little joke between Bill and me, and there were certainly no hard feelings.
Documention and reports from the Ha’Apai project can be found in Clubrunner under the downloads menu.