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It is worth taking a quick look back at the Casas Adobes Rotary Club's 30-year history.
Rotary began in Chicago in 1905. In 1921 the Downtown Club was established in the small town of Tucson. Territorial boundaries were quite important in those days but as Tucson grew, the Downtown Club shared its territory with new Rotary clubs, retaining the right to accept members from throughout the metropolitan area.
After World War II business and population growth along Miracle Mile called for another club. The Saguaro Rotary Club was chartered in 1963, and in turn sponsored what was to become the Casas Adobes Club in 1976.
In May 1976. Dean Hooks, a petroleum dealer, became the leader of the new Northside Breakfast Club, and Steve Kirkpatrick, an insurance man, assumed the role of secretary. District Governor, Horace W. "Sonny" Knowles, and his area coordinator, Porter Williams, met with Hooks to discuss the new club in August 1976 and Hooks among overtones of animosity. The new club's members requested a provisional charter. The first officers were Dean Hooks, president, Sherwin Lurie, vice president; Steven Kirkpatrick, secretary, and Jack Rumsey, treasurer.
By fall, 25 members were meeting regularly at 7:00 a.m., at the Cliff Manor Inn. An early meeting featured a debate between Mo Udall, incumbent Congressman, with Laird Guttersen and Michael Emerling, competitors for Mo's seat in Congress. Each man spoke for 15 minutes and the questions which followed were heated. Gutterson, a club member and former POW who had endured more than five years of brutal captivity in Viet Nam, failed to unseat Udall.
Early members grappled with a number of internal matters: attendance rules, dues, and qualifications of new members, designing an affordable club badge, as well as policies regarding smoking during the meeting and whether an opening prayer would offend anyone. It was agreed that four meetings a year would be open to spouses--a practice that has followed through as the 5th Wednesday meeting.
The new yet-to-be-chartered club was nothing if not ambitious. It took on the project of a $50,000 bloodmobile vehicle, hoping for a joint venture with other clubs. When the hoped-for alliance didn't come to pass, the club considered going it alone. The financial obligation proved insurmountable and the project was dropped.
Nels Havens introduced innovative fines for being late, leaving early, getting married, buying a new car, etc. These were adopted along with what in those days was popular - the matching fine. If the fine was a dollar, many other members would hold up a dollar and whatever was collected from the club had to be matched by the person fined.
A charter was issued on November 11, 1976, and presented at a Charter Dinner at the Skyline Country Club on December 2. The dinner included steak and lobster, and cost $24 per couple. Don Ownbey, a past district governor, was master of ceremonies. A letter of welcome from Rotary International's President, Robert A Manchester II, was read and Casas Adobes became the world's 17,018th Rotary club. Governor Knowles and Dean Hooks were featured speakers.
A member nominee, Mike Harris, was present at the Charter Meeting. Mike was inducted on December 29th as a charter member.
The first family Christmas party saw Jay Wilson as Santa. Jay has continued that tradition ever since.
The club was hardly organized when it discovered a fact of club life - membership turnover. The Vice President moved to North Carolina; Jack Rumsey, treasurer, Peter Evans and Carlton Mellick also dropped out. Of the many men who joined the club in the first decade, only six are still active in the club: Mike Harris (1976), Ron Longenbaugh (1978), Mark Grady and Fred Sowerby (1980), Len Karlberg, and Doug Woodard (1985).
Membership potential increased in the late 1980s with approval of female membership. The first woman member of our club was Susanne Bozzo Thomas. Carolyn Christian was the sixth woman elected to membership, and the first woman member to receive a Paul Harris Fellowship.
Membership in the Casas Adobes Club has risen slowly from 35 (1979) to about 50 today. 2000 saw the most members (76). During the period 1991-99, approximately 125 persons who were club members have moved, died, or dropped out.
In 1983, John Westover gave a program about the Rotary Foundation and Paul Harris Fellowship. Using the matching fine technique which was popular in those days, Westover held up a hundred dollar bill and challenged club members to make a commitment. Keith McKenzie and J.E. King each donated a thousand dollars to the Foundation and became Paul Harris Fellows, with five others signing on as sustaining members. A system of quarterly billing (1984) greatly increased the number of sustaining members and in 1987 sustaining membership became a club tradition. Today the club counts over 75 members, former members, and transferring members among its Paul Harris Fellows.
The Club moved to the Westward Look in 1985 because of inadequate space for expansion.
Dues and fines were not producing enough money to achieve the club's aims. Additional funds were gained from pancake breakfasts and bake sales held at the Casa Blanca Shopping Center jointly with the Saguaro Club.
The first Monte Carlo Night at the Oro Valley Country Club (19??) was not a great financial success, but in succeeding years the net proceeds rose above $11,000, largely from Doug Woodard's silent and live auctions of donated and purchased items such as airline tickets or vacation packages.
The most ambitious Monte Carlo night auctioned off two round trip tickets to Beijing, China, and a week's stay in a deluxe hotel. The hotel suite was donated by the hotel manager, a former member of the Club. It was anticipated that the tickets would be available at a greatly reduced rate. Spirited bidding for the grand prize was won by a young woman from California who gave the club her personal check. Then the club received a real blow-the tickets must be purchased at full price. The club was saved, however, when the young woman's check bounced.
In 1998 the club sponsored a "Hold-Up at Westward Look," a western theme program under a big tent with a western-style meal and a western band. The successful silent and live auctions (with Doug Woodard the auctioneer) were continued. Net proceeds in 1999 were in excess of $20.000.
A new fundraiser, "Ticket to Paradise," was tried in 2000. A super raffle with expensive prizes was combined with an outdoor event at the Hacienda del Sol. Net proceeds almost equaled the much more work intensive "Hold-Up".
An additional fundraiser, the Casas Adobes Golf Tournament, began in 2001 and continues as an annual event.
In 2003 the "Hold-Up at Westward Look" returned with a record breaking performance netting about $33,000.
The increasing income put the club's non-profit status in jeopardy, so the club established a separate, not for profit, foundation to receive and distribute money. There is some correlation between the club and the foundation boards, but it is the foundation which dispenses funds for the club's educational and charitable projects.
The Casas Adobes Club is first and foremost a service club. Our members have served many directly, swinging hammers, axes and paint brushes for the YMCA, summer camps, Christmas in April renovation projects, remodeling an office for a charity, working at graffiti abatement, cleaning up the Rillito River and visiting institutional shut-ins. Additionally it has spent its hard-earned money on hundreds of projects large and small, the largest being RI's Polio Plus ($34,500 plus another $4,500 pleadged for the final polio eradication push). Other larger grants of $5,000 went toward the San Xavier Mission restoration and Casa de los Ninos. Significant donations are regularly made to Amphi High School Summer Basketball, the Northwest YMCA, the Marshall Home for Men, folkloric dance troupes, the Holiday Center, a Pima College Scholarship Fund, FINCA, and many more.
Our 8th Grade Program is the club's current flagship project. Each fall our members visit area 8th Grades to challenge the students to leadership and scholarship. The students are told that the following Spring, the best among them will be selected for recognition by their teachers. The selected students, their students, teachers, and parents to a breakfast at which the students are recognized. Students receive certificates and their schools receive plaques. The best of these students are eligible at high school graduation in four years for Rotary scholarship grants. In May 2002 nine grants totaling $9,000 were awarded in scholarships. The program represents a real financial commitment to scholarship and citizenship by the Casas Adobes Rotary Club.
Other grants have helped youths protected by the Juvenile Court, supported the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and provided gifts for the impoverished at Christmas programs on the San Xavier Reservation.
International activities include exchanges with Rotary Clubs in Durango, Torreon, Nacozari and Hermosillo. We have hosted groups from many Mexican communities. In 1984 our club sponsored a week-long visit by Torreon's chief of public services during which the Tucson city government showed him how our community runs. Our club participated in the 50th anniversary of the chartering of the Rotary Club of Torreon. Individual gifts such as a brace for a girl and a motorized wheel chair for a woman have been made to handicapped individuals in Nogales, Sonora. The club has answered many pleas for international help, providing books for schools in India and driving truckloads of clothing to El Paso and Douglas for transshipment to the needy in Mexico.
2001 saw the formal establishment of a sister club relationship with the Rotary Club of Hermosillo-Pitic in Sonora, Mexico.
Casas Adobes has hosted and entertained Group Study Exchange members from worldwide. We also have hosted Rotary Exchange Students from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Peru and South Africa.
It is impossible to recount all of the club's activities during these past 30 years. There is no question, however, that the Rotary spirit, "Service Above Self', has been the standard of the Casas Adobes Rotary Club.
John Westover, former Club Historian
Note - Several of the club's early members have contributed their recollections to this short essay.
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