* As reported by F.O. “Rep” Repplier in 1956 and John B. Schoolland in 1969.
This club has always been proud of our membership, with leaders in professional, business, and community activity. The club’s weekly programs have been of a caliber that many large city clubs may envy and that not many of them equal.
The Boulder club has achieved a sterling reputation, built for us by our visitors, of whom we have more than most clubs. We are known for the quality of our fellowship, the easy relaxed banter, the quips without animus, the humor without horseplay. Member-speakers who deliver a talk to this club know better than to take themselves too seriously. This no doubt is one reason why many of our best programs are those of our own members.
Our commitment to the community is shown by the fact that in our first 50 years, seven Rotarians served as Mayor of Boulder, for a total of 26 years. 22 served as presidents of the Chamber of Commerce. Members served on the City Council, the school board, the county and city planning boards, and citizen committees for schools in the city, on the Chamber of Commerce and Community Chest boards. They worked on drives for the Community Hospital, the University Memorial Center, the Red Cross, the polio foundation, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA.
Historians in the 1990s commented, “Rarely does a meeting proceed without the joy of unbounded laughter, since the club is blessed (or on occasion, burdened)” with humorists. One of those mentioned was our own George Russell.
As for the friendliness of our club, in earlier years weekly meetings opened with singing America. On one occasion, the speaker was an ambassadorial scholar from Perth, Australia. After the first verse of America the assembled Rotarians continued, without a pause, with God Save the Queen. The visitor had tears in his eyes: “But they actually knew the words,” was all he could say. He was a long way from home, but not far from friends.
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