Kiwanis Club Member

"How would you like to join Kiwanis?" It is amazing to me how one event in my life opened me up to becoming a serious volunteer of charitable works. Let's start at the beginning. Like most young people of my age group (85 in this year 214) a certain amount of serving in the works of my church was expected. We were taught the lesson of the tithe. What has been lost in these modern times is that a tithe consists of both "time" and money, time being the act of a volunteer in charitable work. Money alone does not satisfy the tithe. Shortly after becoming married, a friend in a church group we both were members of asked me one day, "How would you like to join me for lunch at my Kiwanis Club?" Frankly, I really didn't know much about what Kiwanis was, or did. However, my friend was a respected individual in the Baton Rouge business community. I had just become a new hire in the field of mortgage banking with an old established business and my boss, the owner, had already encourage me to become active in the community. So, I accepted my friend's invitation to join him at his Kiwanis luncheon. The Kiwanis luncheon I attended was with the original Baton Rouge Kiwanis Club, known as the Downtown Kiwanis Club. At that time it met in the Capital House Hotel ballroom and was about 235 members in size. As a young man of 29, most of the Kiwanians I shook hands with that day were familiar "movers and shakers" of Baton Rouge. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. Not too long after that first luncheon, my friend asked me if I would like to join the Downtown Kiwanis Club. "Oh, sure," but I would have to ask my boss if the dues were a reimbursable expense because as a newly married man, money spent was carefully watched over. Not only did my boss agree but he complimented me on being accepted as a member of the prestigious "Downtown" Kiwanis Club. My boss was a Rotary member. I learned quickly that "Rotary Club members owned the town, Kiwanis Club members made the town work better, while Lion Club members enjoyed it all." I became a Kiwanis member in 1959. Kiwanis has a saying that "Volunteerism is the price we pay for the space we occupy." I paid the price well, and in 1969 I became my club's president. However, that is not the real story. The real story is that the training I received by being a Kiwanis Club member led me to serve continually as a volunteer for the rest of my life. Not a statement of vanity, but one of justified pride. In some almost insane way, Kiwanis taught me that if something is broken in the society around me, "I can fix it!" Of course, I can't always fix it, but "can't" is not the operative word when trying.