Our club’s 2nd annual “Bowling for Vets” event drew an extremely disparate group of participants to the East Greenbush Bowling Center on Sunday afternoon.
Rotarians and their families, friends of Rotary, students, toddlers … all showed up for the two all-you-can-bowl sessions that — with the help of numerous lane sponsorships from individuals and local businesses — raised money we will use to support the Blue Star Mothers military family support organization and local adaptive sports programs working with Wounded Warriors.
Here are some images from the event, courtesy of Roberto Martinez:
If you’re unfamiliar with the former Burden Ironworks in Troy, you’ve missed a major part of America’s industrial history. But, you can remedy the oversight.
The Hudson Shores Rotary Club is iniviting Rotarians from throughout District 7190 members to attend a special tour on Tuesday, November 15, of the Burden Ironworks Museum, beginning at 12:45 p.m. The guide is Michael Barrett, executive director of the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway (HMIG) organization.
Please email Ken Rose at rosek@rpi.edu if you plan to attend. Family members and friends are welcome to participate. There is no required fee to attend, but a $10 donation that would go toward support of HMIG is suggested.
Among many items the local iron industry contributed to the growth of the United States: the hull armor for the Union ironclad ship Monitor in the Civil War; the modern Read More »
Debbie and Chuck Rodriguez’s daughter, Becky Schmitt, shared this photo of her son Xavier intently working with the first installation of “Project Lego” items.
Xavier, who is undergoing chemotherapy in the Hartford, CT, area for treatment of leukemia, received the gift from the Southern Rensselaer County Rotary Club last weekend and was very excited by the unexpected gift.
Jim Leyhane, who created the concept of ongoing gifts of different Lego sets for Xavier and his brother during Xavier’s treatment and recuperation, is the man to check with if you would like to help underwrite the effort.
Meeting at Quigley’s Restaurant 593 Columbia Turnpike East Greenbush, NY
November 3, 2016
Members Attending (17): Debbie Rodriguez, Murray Forth, Pat Bailey, Jim Leyhane, Terry Brewer, Peter Brown, Debbie Brown, Phil Kellerman, Ray Hannan, Ron Annis, Dick Drum, David Taylor, Roberto Martinez, Julius Frankel, Stewart Wagner, Dean Calamaras, Doris Calamaras.
Guests: None.
PROGRAM: ‘Uncle Shawn’s Hugs Blanket Project’
This year’s blanket workshop resulted in a dozen new pieces. And the scenes below show you how it came together.
Attendees worked diligently on making no-sew blankets for the “Uncle Shawn’s Hugs” project created by the Blue Star Mothers military family support group.
This was the second year we have undertaken the work, and we completed about a dozen blankets. They will go on the Toys for Tots holiday train sponsored by the U.S. Marine Corps and distributed to children in need.
The “Uncle Shawn’s Hugs” initiative honors Sgt. Shawn Martin of Delmar, a Marine killed in Iraq.
Announcements/Business
WELCOME — President Debbie Rodriguez welcomed members. She then thanked the club for the Lego sets sent to her grandchildren, including Xavier who is undergoing treatment for leukemia. The first set was received in time for his birthday party on Saturday and Debbie said he was very excited. She also reported that he is doing well and the family will know in two weeks if he is in remission, and then next phase of treatment will begin. Jim Leyhane devised the ongoing Legos project. Anyone who wishes to assist can provide him with a onetime $60 cash payment.
NORDIC ALLIANCE — Phil Kellerman proposed a fundraiser for Capital Region Nordic Alliance (CRNA), the two-year-old nonprofit that creates and runs a variety of adaptive Read More »
SRC members Ray Hannan (center) and David Taylor (right) participate in flag folding ceremony.
The dedication of a flagpole installation at the Eastwyck Village residential complex on Wednesday drew a solid contingent of residents, politicians and members and friends of the Southern Rensselaer County Rotary Club.
Rotarians Ray Hannan and David Taylor, residents of Eastwyck, participated in the flag ceremony along with a veterans color guard. Rensselaer County Executive Kathy Jimino and U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko were among the speakers.
SRC & Friends delegation: (from left) Jim Leyhane, Effie and Julius Frankel, Roberto Martinez, Lois and Ray Hannan, David Taylor.U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko and County Executive Kathy Jimino deliver remarks.Part of the crowd in attendance.
Many Rotarians tend to think of Gift of Life as working exclusively to bring children to the U.S. for lifesaving surgery that is difficult or impossible to find in their own countries.
However, there is another side to GOL: medical missions abroad.
Currently, a District 7190 GOL effort is under way in tandem with partners Save A Child’s Heart, ICHF, the pediatric cardiac team from Albany Medical Center, Rotarians from Romania and elsewhere, and the Romanian Pediatric Cardiac Team at Grigore Alexandrescu Hospital in the capital city of Bucharest.
It is the first-ever pediatric cardiac surgery at the center. The patient, Mihai, and his mom quietly celebrate his successful surgery in the photo above. Below, the Capital Region team and GOL officials pose on the steps of Albany Med before the team departed for Romania.
The District 7190 team.
Here are some other on-site images of medical care given by the team, courtesy of team member Deb Edberg Boel, a registered nurse and daughter of SRC honorary member Russ Edberg.
Tom Frieden is a little out of breath. He just climbed the stairs from a meeting to his office on the top floor of the 12-story headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“I did that because we have a beautiful stairway in this building. I can look outside, and I get better email coverage on the stairs than I do in the elevator,” the CDC director says. His trip up the stairs sums up his view on one of the tenets of his work: “The sweet spot of public health is making the healthiest thing to do the default value — in other words, the easiest thing to do.”
Frieden took his post in 2009 after stopping the largest outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in U.S. history in New York City, helping establish TB treatment programs in India that have saved more than 3 million lives, and serving seven-plus years as health commissioner of New York City. There, he worked with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make all restaurants and bars smoke-free, making New York the first major city to do so outside California. His controversial policies had him criticized as a “nanny” in some circles, and lauded as a visionary in others.
‘The thing that worries us from a public health standpoint … is the potential of an influenza pandemic. … We’re still not as prepared as we’d like to be. We don’t have the vaccines we’d like, and the virus is … constantly mutating.’
As head of the U.S. public health system, Frieden has taken on everything from ebola to the flu. But, where his work most closely intersects with Rotary’s is in polio eradication –- CDC joins Rotary, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Health Organization (WHO) as a core partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. CDC deploys scientists to investigate outbreaks of polio, identify the strain of poliovirus involved, and pinpoint its geographic origin.
“Rotary has done such a phenomenal job for so many decades on this, and now we are poised to get over the finish line and end polio once and for all,” Frieden said in an interview with Rotarian senior editor Diana Schoberg about ending polio and the best buys in public health.
THE ROTARIAN: Polio has been eradicated in the U.S. since 1979. Why does CDC stay involved?
FRIEDEN: CDC takes polio eradication very seriously. We focus on supporting the front lines wherever polio continues to spread. I am deeply engaged with all aspects of the response and support for our team. That includes laboratory work, community outreach, organization of the response, extension of the capacity of local doctors and outreach workers, and tracking cases so we can target our responses and get to the last bastions of polio in the world.
TR: The estimated funding gap to eradicate polio is $1.5 billion. Why is it such a large number?
FRIEDEN: It costs a lot because as long as there’s still polio anywhere, every country needs to continue to act as if polio could get reintroduced. Every year polio is not eradicated will cost another $800 million. You need vaccines, surveillance, and social mobilization. All of that takes people and money. Up to 400 million children still need to be immunized every year, and surveillance in up to 70 countries needs to not only continue, but be intensified, to ensure we are finding all possible cases of polio for as long as polio may be spreading.Read More »
Attention Rotarians (and everyone else, for that matter).
First Street in Troy will be transformed with a 1970s-1980s look and be closed to traffic on Tuesday and Wednesday for yet another movie shoot. That area cuts through the downtown campus of Russell Sage College.
In the recent past, Troy has been a shooting locale for scenes in such films as “Scent of a Woman,” “The Time Machine,” “Age of Innocence,” “Ironweed,” “The Bostonians” and so on. This week, it will be for “The Pretenders,” starring James Franco, who has been scene in the area recently.
If you’re among the few who are unfamiliar with Franco’s work, go here for some help.
The accompanying graph shows traffic to our club website during a 2 1/2 week period in October. It follows a fairly common pattern of ebb and flow seen throughout most weeks.
However, note that one huge spike on the right? That’s the day the website was featured as part of the District 7190 “Membership & PR Summit” in Clifton Park. It certainly looks as if those in attendance did some further viewing of the site after they got home.
Our club’s 2nd annual “Bowling for Vets” event drew an extremely disparate group of participants to the East Greenbush Bowling Center on Sunday afternoon.
If you’re unfamiliar with the former Burden Ironworks in Troy, you’ve missed a major part of America’s industrial history. But, you can remedy the oversight.
Meeting at Quigley’s Restaurant
