Rotary Club of Santa Monica

"2001/2002 - A Rotary Odyssey"

Rota-Monica

YOUTH LOOKS AT OUR 4-WAY TEST

            When Herbert Taylor was appointed trustee in bankruptcy of a small cookware company in Chicago, it owed $400,000 but was still doing business.  It had good people and good products.  Taylor wondered if he could work it out of its hole. 

            “This company can prosper if it earns a reputation for integrity, dependability and helpfulness,” he thought.  “Can I give the employees a simple code of ethics that will keep them on the right track?”  Taylor searched, but found only long lists of rules, hard to memorize.

             After much thrashing around, he prayed for guidance in “creating a simple yardstick by which all the company’s plans and actions can be measured.”  Soon, four lines came into his head.  He wrote them on a small card.

             That was how Rotary’s Four-Way Test came to be written in July of 1932, a bad year for most businesses.  The cookware company did pay off its debts, and thrived for decades thereafter.  Rotarians heard about its simple code.  Other companies picked it up.  Eventually it became Rotary’s unchanging standard of business and civic morality.  Viewpoints and behavior have changed in recent years.  Do local youngsters think Rotary’s code should apply to them today?

             We’ll get a good idea this Friday, because our program will consist of the winners in our club’s annual essay contest for local middle school students who’ve felt like entering.  About 160 youngsters did so, from Lincoln, John Adams, Crossroads and Carlthorp schools.  At each school, teachers chose a winner who will read his or her winning essay, and will receive a $100 bond.  Probably their parents will also be our club’s guests for lunch.  Second-place winners from each of the four schools will receive a $50 bond, and the four third-place winners will receive a $20 bond.  Whether or not this makes them professional writers is a question we’ll leave to the lawyers among us.

             Dee Menzies planned the contest and the meeting, assisted by Joyce Khoury.

MORE IDEAS FOR CLUB PROJECTS

             Browse through the new April issue of The Rotarian, and you’ll find reports of more club service projects than you’d ever guess.  For example:

             The club in Rajkot, India, took a look at living conditions in the slums of  the city.  It found that the biggest needs of the 150,000 people there was sanitary water.  The club applied for and obtained a grant from the Rotary Foundation, with which it built a dam.  Rajkot residents now have a safe, reliable water supply.

             One of Haiti’s poorest villages, Anse Rouge, had no medical treatment for ailments common there:  malnutrition, hypertension and malaria.  The Rotary Club of Yakima, Washington, sent a medical team, which treated 150 patients on two-day visits. 

            The Rotary Club of Sullurpet, India, taught 40 adults to read and write.  Broken but life-saving equipment clutters hallways and closets in countless hospitals.  A $400,000 program funded in the Philippines by the Rotary Foundation is salvaging such equipment, and training hospital people to repair and maintain everything from sterilizers to microscopes and diagnostic imaging machines.  This program will last three years.

 THEY PRETEND TO BE ROTARIANS

             “Eight people attended, and I was the only Rotarian,” recalls Herman Heid, a Rotarian who had moved to Beijing, China from Hong Kong and was trying to start a new Rotary Club in Beijing.  He had just spent six months searching for expatriate Rotarians there, and talking with other foreign business people who said they were interested in joining Rotary.

             The small group who actually came to Heid’s meeting determined to go on.  “We decided to continue to meet weekly and pretend to be Rotarians.”  They did.  They have kept meeting regularly ever since June 1996.  And they’ve kept acting like Rotarians.  They’ve gathered clothing and bought air-conditioning equipment for an orphanage; purchased tents to be used as classrooms in northwestern towns; and worked with Rotary’s Gift of Life program to send children to the United States for open-heart surgery.

             “We were constantly under the microscope of the Rotary world,” Heid says.  “We were scrutinized by passing Rotarians and visiting Rotary leaders.  Chinese government officials wanted to find out who we were.”

            Finally in June 2001, after the Chinese government adjusted policies and laws to allow international groups such as Rotary to operate, the Rotary International board of directors formally recognized the Rotary Club of Beijing. 

             You can read all this as part of the detailed struggle to reestablish Rotary in China, a five-page article in the current (April) issue of The Rotarian… It’s a suspenseful story, from 1919 when the first Rotary club in China was established, through the 1950-s when the new government dissolved Rotary clubs, and the fight to start Rotary again in various cities on China from the 1970’s onward.  You’ll find it fascinating reading.

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