Pre-dinner ‘chair yoga’ on Thursday’s menu

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Screen Shot 2019-04-29 at 10.38.25 AMFeeling a little stressed? Come to this Thursday’s meeting at Quigley’s and let fellow SRC member Becky Raymond, who is a yoga instructor, lead you in a brief “chair yoga” exercise before dinner. Guaranteed to make you feel a lot better.

This particular form of yoga, while less physically strenuous than what we might think of  as “traditional” yoga, is no less relaxing and can be as beneficial.

Following the session, we’ll enjoy  a hearty dinner featuring eggplant Parmesan, antipasto salad, chef’s choice of side dishes, bread, dessert, and beverages.

If your name is not on the following list and you plan to join us — non-members are, as always welcome — please be sure to email dinner coordinator Debbie Brown at mdbrown@nycap.rr.com no later than Tuesday evening so we have sufficient food and seating for all who wish to attend.

Bailey, Pat
Brown, Debbie
Brown, Peter
Dowd, Bill
Drumm, Dick
Foote, Charlie
Forth, Murray
Hannan, Ray
Kellerman, Phil
Leyhane, Jim
Martinez, Roberto
Raymond, Becky
Rodriguiz, Debbie

Annual ‘Day of Service’ offers 3 choices this year

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This year’s District 7190 “Day of Service” will offer Rotarians the opportunity to choose from among three different projects on Saturday, May 18.

• In Glenville, at the Animal Protective Foundation break room, we can paint and install new kitchen cabinets. The room is small, so we only need about three volunteers on this project.

• In Scotia, the Route 50 railroad bridge needs painting or applying graffiti-proof decals, depending on progress of the project. Volunteers will be working on a 15-foot-high platform lift, so be ready for that. We need about six to eight volunteers.

• In Saratoga Springs, the facilities that support the Back Stretch Community need our service. They provide housing for and support to Saratoga Race Course workers and their families during the racing season. We will provide a yard cleanup requiring 30 or more volunteers, plus painting projects on various buildings inside and outside for five to volunteers. There also is chainsaw work if you have your own chainsaw, plus demo work and wall re-construction for about six to 10 volunteers.

As always, you can come when you can and leave when you must, but the work programs start at 9 a.m. and end at 4 p.m. A simple lunch will be served at all locations.

Click here to respond to event chair Bruce McConnelee and let him know which project you’d like to aid.

 

SRC website adds another name to visitors list

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The official WordPress.com indicator of an international visitor to our website.

Over the past few years, the SRC website has received plenty of  non-member visitors.

In addition to those from  throughout the U.S., we have had visitors from such far-flung spots as Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, Ireland, Israel, France, Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, Morocco, Ghana, the Netherlands, Hungary, Japan, the Philippines, and maybe a few others I’ve forgotten along the way.

Today, we can add another Middle Eastern visitor — two, actually — now that we’ve been visited by a pair of people from Jordan. To them we say, “HELLO, JORDAN!” and thanks for looking us up.

FYI, the first Rotary club in Jordan was created in the capital city of Amman, chartered with 25 members on April 13, 1956.

— Bill Dowd, webmaster

 

Today is the 65th anniversary of polio vaccine trials

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One of the 1954 polio vaccine clinics in New York.

• From The History Channel

On this day in 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, VA.

Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo.

On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere.

Polio, known officially as poliomyelitis, is an infectious disease that has existed since ancient times and is caused by a virus. It occurs most commonly in children and can result in paralysis. The disease reached epidemic proportions throughout the first half of the 20th Century. During the 1940s and 1950s, polio was associated with the iron lung, a large metal tank designed to help polio victims suffering from respiratory paralysis breathe.

President Franklin Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39 and was left paralyzed from the waist down and forced to use leg braces and a wheelchair for the

Rotary has been working to eradicate polio for more than 30 years. Since 1979, we have vaccinated more than 2.5 billion children, and the dread disease has been virtually eliminated everywhere on Earth except for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. But we haven’t done it alone. Click here to see a timeline for our partnerships.

rest of his life. In 1938, Roosevelt helped found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes. The organization was responsible for funding much of the research concerning the disease, including the Salk vaccine trials.

The man behind the original vaccine was New York-born physician and epidemiologist Jonas Salk (1914-95). Salk’s work on an anti-influenza vaccine in the 1940s, while at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, led him, in 1952 at the University of Pittsburgh, to develop the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), based on a killed-virus strain of the disease. The 1954 field trials that followed, the largest in U.S. history at the time, were led by Salk’s former University of Michigan colleague Dr. Thomas Francis Jr.

In the late 1950s, Polish-born physician and virologist Albert Sabin (1906-1993) tested an oral polio vaccine (OPV) he had created from a weakened live virus. The vaccine, easier to administer and cheaper to produce than Salk’s, became available for use in America in the early 1960s and eventually replaced Salk’s as the vaccine of choice in most countries.

Today, polio has been eliminated throughout much of the world due to the vaccine; however, there still is no cure for the disease and it persists in a small number of countries in Africa and Asia.

 

Meeting Clipboard: 4/25/19

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SRC ClipboardHeld at Quigley’s Restaurant
573 Columbia Turnpike
East Greenbush, NY 12061

Members Attending (12): Andy Leyhane, Murray Forth, Jim Leyhane, Phil Kellerman, Bill Dowd, Debbie Brown, Peter Brown, Debbie Rodriguez, Peter Berry, Dick Drumm, Roberto Martinez, Maggie Forth.

Guests (1): Jeremy Forth.

Screen Shot 2019-03-28 at 10.32.11 PMMEETING NOTES: President Andy greeted members and guest Jeremy Forth. … The main order of business was presented, at Andy’s request, by Bill Dowd: Nomination of a slate of officers for the 2019-20 Rotary Year. Although special, personalized invitations had been sent to all members to participate — especially those members who rarely participate in club activities, we barely put together a quorum. As Bill explained, all SRC members had been forwarded a list of candidates to be voted on at this meeting to accomplish two things: (1.) to put a Board in place in time for our application for a District Grant by the June 1 deadline, and (2.) to put a presidential succession plan in place before the end of the current fiscal year as required by our Bylaws. Bill also noted that nominating Dick Drumm as President-elect would put him in line to be club president during our 60th anniversary year — an unusual combination of a charter member serving as president for a 60th anniversary, certainly a first. The slate of candidates for 2019-20, approved without dissent by those in attendance and giving us the maximum allowable of 11 members:

President: Phil Kellerman
President-elect: Dick Drumm
Vice President: Terry Brewer
Immediate Past President: Andy Leyhane
Secretary: Pat Bailey
Treasurer: Murray Forth
At-Large Members: Bill Dowd, Jim Leyhane, Roberto Martinez, Debbie Rodriguez, Dean Calamaras

Recycling Icon… Murray Forth said he will circulate next week a volunteer signup sheet to work the Saturday, May 18, “Recycling & Shredding Day,” a major fundraiser for scholarships and youth programs. … … Bill also reported that he and Terry Brewer, the District 7190 membership chair, would be attending an organizational meeting on Monday as part of an effort to revive a Troy club to succeed the one that went out of existence several years ago. If it comes to fruition, SRC will be the sponsoring club. All discussions so far have been via electronic means; this will be the first in-person session. …

Screen Shot 2019-04-05 at 1.02.22 PMIt was reported that Ray Hannan successfully underwent a medical procedure this week, and hopes to resume Rotary activities next week. … The Advertiser published our full news release on our Oley Foundation fundraiser, “An Hour of Live Music with Phil Kellerman & Friends,” scheduled for Thursday, May 9. We will have a members-only pizza-and-wings dinner from 5:45 to 6:15 p.m., concert at 6:30. … Next Thursday’s dinner meeting will begin with Becky Raymond’s brief  “Introduction to Yoga” session, THEN dinner. Please be sure to RSVP when dinner coordinator Debbie Brown sends out her weekly request for invitations.

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PROGRAM: Bill Dowd presented his 5th annual Great North American Whizbang Trivia Test, a friendly competition won by a different person each year. That held true again, with the team of Maggie and Jeremy Forth edging out Debbie Rodriguez in a tiebreaker session.

The winners received a pristine copy of “Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac,” written by the all-time winningest contestant on TV’s long-running “Jeopardy” game show series.

 

Thursday Special: Voting and Competing

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The top prize for Thursday’s trivia test.

We’ll be doing double duty at Thursday’s dinner meeting — voting for a slate of nominees for the 2019-20 SRC Board of Directors, and competing in a friendly battle during the “5th annual Great North American Whizbang Trivia Test.”

To accomplish the former, we need a quorum of at least 12 SRC members to be present. To accomplish the latter, the more Rotarians and friends and family the merrier to take a crack at winning the title and a special prize.

So, as always, we need an advance headcount to be sure we have enough food on the buffet and seats around the tables. Please be sure dinner coordinator Debbie Brown (email: mdbrown@nycap.rr.com) has your RSVP no later than Tuesday evening.

Meanwhile, here is the slate of nominees for 2019-20, with the possibility one more At-Large nomination will be made at Thursday’s meeting as permitted by our Bylaws:

Screen Shot 2019-03-28 at 10.32.11 PMSRC BOARD OF DIRECTORS NOMINEES

President: Phil Kellerman

President-elect: Dick Drumm

Vice President: Terry Brewer

Immediate Past President: Andy Leyhane

Secretary: Pat Bailey

Treasurer: Murray Forth

At-Large Members: Bill Dowd, Jim Leyhane, Roberto Martinez, Dean Calamaras

 

Checking in on Augie, our Bell Top pal

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It’s been a while since we last looked in on Augie, the therapy dog SRC is helping support at the Bell Top Elementary School. It seems he has been very busy.

If you visit Augie’s blog, “Puppy With a Purpose,” you can catch up on what he’s been doing, from training sessions (see video above) to classroom and library visits, to fun times with the kids during a rather messy “color run,” to getting a haircut. In addition, you can find out how to purchase Augie T-shirts (see below) online. Soon, he’ll be celebrating his first birthday (June 8).

Here are just a few scenes of what Augie has been doing:

Library
Spot the canine in the library.
Trio
Kind of messy fun in the color run.
Writing
When you’re finished, can we play?
shirts
Auggie is selling his T-shirts. (Note the name at the top of the list!)

Your ‘elevator speech’ and a follow-up

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Elevator pitch
Do you ever mention Rotary to someone and they ask you what it’s all about?

We’ve all run into that situation from time to time, but some of us may be stumped for a way to succinctly explain it. May we suggest what we call our “elevator speech” — you know, what can be said in a quick trip between floors:

“We’re a volunteer community service organization of more than a million men and women who work to make our community and our world a better place for all.”

As a followup, you can suggest they visit our website at SRCrotary.org and click on “About Our Club.” That page will tell them a lot. (And, of course, there’s nothing preventing you from reading it yourself to brush up what Rotary and SRC are all about.)

We’ve started the countdown to SRC’s 5th annual Great North American Whizbang Trivia Test

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See that hefty tome above? A copy of it will go to the winner of the “5th annual Great North American Whizbang Trivia Test,” scheduled for 6:15 p.m. next Thursday, April 25, at Quigley’s. Start spreading the word!

(We were thinking of having alphabet soup and such brain-friendly foods as blueberries and avocados on the buffet table, but that might be too gimmicky. So, dinner coordinator Debbie Brown will get together with the Quigley’s kitchen staff to come up with an enticing alternative menu. Please remember to RSVP to her by email — mdbrown@nycap.rr.com — no later than next Tuesday, April 23, if you plan to join us. And remember, guests such as Rotaractors, non-SRC Rotarians, and non-Rotarians in general are welcome as well , but please let Debbie know in advance that they’re coming so we can provide sufficient food and seating for everyone.)

This year’s trivia event will see several format changes. Among them will be fewer categories, more tie-breaker possibilities, and a running-score tabulation so you know where you stand throughout the event.

Quizmaster Bill Dowd has created the categories and the questions in them to appeal to trivia players of all levels, from those who never have tried it to those who make a practice of hitting their local watering holes for trivia night competitions.

See you on Thursday. Bring a friend!

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