Rotarians Welcome the World

JOLIET — The parking lot of Inwood Recreation Center was buzzing with excitement Saturday evening.

A small group of people, members of the Joliet Rotary Club, milled around the lot, waiting eagerly for several buses to arrive. The buses would bring a crowd of foreign visitors, in town this week for the Rotary International annual convention in Chicago.

As the buses pulled into the parking lot, the locals held signs printed with their names overhead. Visitors disembarked and squinted into the sun to find their contacts.

From June 15 to Wednesday, Rotary International is celebrating its 100th anniversary in Chicago, the city where the club originated.

As part of that celebration, Chicago is hosting nearly 50,000 visitors. Some of those visitors, including 180 to the Joliet club and about 40 to the Channahon-Minooka club, spent a few hours in the areas surrounding Chicago on Saturday night.

Joliet Rotary members have been on the other side as well, guests of Rotary hosts in foreign countries. Joliet Rotary member James V. Smith said he has been to nine Rotary meetings in Europe while on vacation. Meeting other Rotarians helps you feel less like a tourist while traveling, he said.

"Nine times out of 10, you find out the same problems we have over here, they have. People are people," Smith said.

This was the first visit to Chicago for Charles and Rosemary Guesdon of Caboolture, Australia. They spent Saturday night with about 40 Rotary guests at a dinner party — an authentic American cookout — hosted by Ed and Gloria Dollinger.

"I thought it would be a little industrial, but it was beautiful," Rosemary said of Chicago. "So much green space. It was delightful."

"We're a small country in terms of population. So the scale of things, large numbers of people, is different," Charles said.

Both said they learn a lot about America from the Australian news. If anything, they said, this side of the world does not know as much about their side of the world.

Chicago was well-built and clean to Andres Robles Pena and Gloria Antonia Osollo de Robles, a married couple visiting from Mexico City.

"Chicago is a higher level than other countries," Pena said. "The way of living, good transportation. Using the train to go outside of the city is very handy."

After arriving in Joliet, the couple soon headed over to the home of Herman and Shelly Haase for a dinner party. Joliet Rotary President Greg Peyla and other club members, including Treasurer Dan Vera, hosted 14 people from as far away as Australia. Paul Morimoto and Pete Nichols hosted a party at Morimoto's home as well, with visitors from as close as Holland, Mich., and as far away as Japan.

"All these people speak different languages, but you are all there sharing this common bond in Rotary. That's what brings us together," said Ruby Iwamasa, a resident of Midland, Mich., attending the convention with her husband, Bob. Iwamasa attended Morimoto's dinner party.

"It's wonderful to see all these cultures coming together," she said.

Rotary was not always this large of an organization.

According to the Rotary International Web site, Paul P. Harris founded Rotary on Feb. 23, 1905. The attorney, who wished to recapture in a professional club the same friendly spirit he had felt in the small towns of his youth, decided to gather his business acquaintances together.

In those early years, Rotary members simply met to enjoy camaraderie and enlarge their circle of business and professional acquaintances.

The first four members — Harris; Silvester Schiele, a coal dealer; Hiram Shorey, a merchant tailor; and Gustavus Loehr, a mining engineer — gathered in Loehr's business office in Room 711 of the Unity Building in downtown Chicago. After enlisting a fifth member, printer Harry Ruggles, the group was formally organized as the Rotary Club of Chicago.

The original club emblem, a wagon wheel design, was the precursor of the familiar cogwheel emblem now used by Rotarians worldwide. The name "Rotary" derived from the early practice of rotating meetings among members' offices.

The Joliet Rotary was the 78th club to form. The Joliet Rotary Web site says the Rotary Club of Joliet began in 1910 as the Study Club, with the purpose of studying business building, efficiency and character development.

Today the Joliet Rotary has more than 150 active members. Rotary International has grown to a group of about 1.2 million members who belong to more than 31,000 Rotary clubs.

Ask Rotary members why they joined the club, and often they will first say they wanted the opportunity to help other people. Many of the Rotarians in town Saturday said they were drawn to the generosity of the group as well as the camaraderie.

In addition to enlarging the members' circles of business contacts and professional acquaintances, Rotary International has come to be a service club with lofty goals, such as the complete eradication of polio as part of its PolioPlus program.

"They like to give, and I like that philosophy," Morimoto said. "Whenever I meet Rotarians from other areas, they're all cut from the same cloth. There's no selfishness.