If you did not make it to our last Rotary Club of Forest Grove meeting, here is what you missed…

No Meeting – Happy Holidays: We wish everyone a very happy and safe holiday season! A reminder that the Rotary Club of Forest Grove will not meet on Wednesday, Dec. 20 and Wednesday, Dec. 27. We hope to see everyone again for our next meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 3, at the Forest Grove United Church of Christ.

Order Your Lunches In Advance: If you wish to receive lunch at meetings, confirmation for lunch orders must be received by secretary Janet Peters by the Saturday before each week’s meeting. A sign-up sheet will be available at weekly meetings or you can RSVP to Janet via email.

Satellite Club Meeting: The December Satellite Club meeting will take place on Thursday, Dec. 21, 6:30 p.m., at The Growler Garage, 1837 Pacific Ave. All Rotarians are invited to attend and enjoy some fellowship.

Hope For The Holidays: Thank you to all of our Rotarians and Rotary family who helped make our annual Hope For The Holidays project another great success! We held our food distribution on Monday, Dec. 20 at Forest Grove High School and served 100 families, including 280 adults and 130 children.

The food for the project is being covered by $2,500 from the club and $2,500 from a District 5100 Matching Grant. Money from wreath sales and other donations will be used to purchase and provide household items, like toilet paper and laundry detergent, that are normally not available at the Food Pantry.

For more details on the project, check out this story published in the Forest Grove News-Times on Tuesday, Dec. 19.

Thank you to all of the Rotarians that worked so hard to bring this project together, especially Janet & Rus Peters and Parri Van Dyke.

Youth Citizens of the Month: At our Dec. 13 meeting, we were proud to honor our December Youth Citizens of the Month from the Forest Grove School District: Penny Webber from Forest Grove High School and Donovan Mireles of Neil Armstrong Middle School. Both Penny and Donovan received a certificate and a $50 gift card to Frye’s Action Athletics. Click Here To Read The Full Story.

Concours d’Elegance Committee: The Concours d’Elegance Committee is starting the planning for our 50th show on July 21, 2024. If interested in getting further involved with the Concours, the steering committee is always looking for volunteers to prepare for the show throughout the year. For more information, contact Tom Raabe at 503-704-1200 or rotarytomr@gmail.com or Geoff Johnston at 503-939-7868 or gamsma@comcast.net.

The next meeting of the Concours Committee will be on Wednesday, Jan. 10 via Zoom at 7 p.m.

A Note About PMail: When club leadership sends out emails through the DacDB Pmail system (these will usually have ROTARY in the subject line), these are mass emails sent for the purpose of informing the whole club of information. While it may look like the email is addressed specifically to you, it is not. Please keep this in mind when choosing to reply to an email.

The PMail system is the same system we use to send the Rototeller out each week. This means that if you are opting-out of receiving club emails, you will not receive the weekly newsletter either.

Past Programs: Did you miss a meeting or want to go back and check out a program again? Most of our programs since May 2020 (over 100 videos to date) are archived on our club’s YouTube page. Visit https://bit.ly/fgrotaryprograms.

Service Opportunities For Club Members
Do You Know Of Service Opportunities?: Are you aware of service opportunities in our area that our members might be interested in? We can advertise those here! This space is not limited to club-sponsored activities but to any service opportunity in the community. To promote the service activity, please send a detailed description of the project, the date and time, contact information and a link to register to Rototeller editor Blake Timm, blakertimm@gmail.com.

FGHS Community Food Pantry: Our club’s support for the Forest Grove High School Food Pantry continues.  Thanks to its partnership with the Oregon Food Bank, food donations are still welcome but are of less need at this time. Of need, however, are toiletries and hygiene products as well as household cleaning materials.

The Food Pantry is open Mondays from 4-5:30 p.m. The pantry is located along Nichols Lane between the football field and the Basinski Center. Click Here for more information on the FGHS Food Pantry and on other resources for those experiencing food insecurity.

For information on the Food Pantry, please contact Brian Burke, bburke@fgsd.k12.or.us. If you wish to make a cash donation to the pantry, Click Here.

Around District 5100
District Governor Renee Brouse’s December Message: Our health is everything, yet 400 million people in the world cannot afford, or do not have access to basic health care.

This month, we celebrate the work Rotarians worldwide are doing to combat diseases through effective treatment and prevention. Disease results in misery, pain, and poverty for millions of people worldwide. That is why treating and preventing disease is so important to us. We lead efforts both large and small. We set up temporary clinics, blood donation centers, and training facilities in under-served communities struggling with outbreaks and health care access. We design and build infrastructure that allows doctors, patients, and governments to work together.

Our members combat diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and polio. Prevention is important, which is why we also focus on health education and bringing people routine hearing, vision, and dental care.

In 1985, Rotary pledged to eradicate polio, and look at the progress that has occurred! Today, Rotary International has partnered with the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and regional governments worldwide to complete this pledge.

Although infectious diseases continue to be a major cause of illness and death across the globe, they are not the major health concerns for most developed countries. Now, many people are seeing their lives shortened by chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Many of these conditions are not caused by infectious agents but are due to certain health behaviors and social conditions. 

Rotary’s continued involvement in Disease Prevention and Treatment will thus need to be directed toward finding solutions to these social and behavioral determinants of health, while continuing to fight against existing and emerging disease threats. We educate and equip communities to stop the spread of life-threatening diseases. Rotary members have hundreds of health projects underway around the world at any given time. 

The Rotary Foundation is changing the world by providing grants for projects and activities around the globe and in your own backyard.

• $65 million in grants was given by Rotary to fight disease.

• 99.9 % reduction in polio cases since our program started in 1985.

Rotary makes amazing things happen, like:

Providing Clean Water: Rotary has collaborated with partners to provide more than 80 percent of Ghana’s people with clean water to fight Guinea worm disease.

Reducing HIV Infection: In Liberia, Rotary members are helping women get tested for HIV early in their pregnancies. They used prenatal care to reduce new HIV infections in children by 95 percent over two years.

Ending Polio: Rotary members have played a key role in bringing the world to the brink of polio eradication. Their efforts have not only ended polio in 122 countries but also created a system for tackling myriad other health priorities, such as Ebola.

Together we can be the change and create HOPE in the world! 

District 5100 Newsletter: Click Here To View The Monthly District 5100 Newsletter

Last Week’s Program: Remembering Paul Minor

Click Here To View The Complete Program

At our December 13 meeting, we took time out to remember our friend and fellow Rotarian, Paul Minor. We lost Paul on December 1 after a long battle with heart and kidney disease. Click Here To Read Full Obituary.

A memorial service for our friend and fellow Rotarian, Paul Minor, will be held on Saturday, Jan. 6, 2 p.m., at the Forest Grove United Church of Christ. The church is expecting a large crowd and people are encouraged to arrive early.

In lieu of flowers, contributions in Paul’s memory made be made to the Kitchen Remodel Fund at the Forest Grove United Church of Christ, PO Box 265, Forest Grove, OR 97116.

Here are some of the remembrances shared during the meeting:

Tom Raabe: “My fondest memories of Paul center around the many dedicated hours he spent on the Concours programs, sometimes pulling all-nighters to get it done. It was a tremendous amount of work under a deadline and he never complained. I will never forget his dedication to this task and he saved the club many thousands of dollars in expenses that could then be used for donations in our community. Thank you, Paul.”

Pamelajean Myers: “As a music teacher I can’t help but I honor Paul for his music. He was an incredible singer, tenor, sang in the Oregon Chorale, sang here at this church, played organ in this church. He surrounded himself his whole life with music. He would be at the Rasmus House every night or at the Fryes and surrounded himself with music at all times. And even in his last days he’s been playing the organ here. And he’s an incredible musician.”

Blake Timm: “It’s only appropriate that somebody’s playing the organ right now because Paul had an immense love for the organ and played a big role in the new organ that was placed in this church two years ago. He wanted to be the first one to play it. I think he was the first one to play it when it was fully installed. And you couldn’t get through a Sunday that he was playing without having some kind of Bach composition. He loved Johann Sebastian Bach, loved playing his fugues on the organ. And around Halloween time, you could bet that you could hear, as hard and as rockus as Paul Minor could play something, he would definitely be on that.

“And I think what I’ll remember him the most for is the opportunities I had to perform the choir here at the church and sitting next to him, listening to his tenor voice, his musicianship, was just an absolute treat. It’s something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.”

Jim Crisp: Paul was born October 27, 1939 and he just celebrated his 84th birthday when he died on December 1. He joined the Rotary Club on May 20, 1970, which was 53 years ago. He was president of the club in 1997-98, and he was the club’s photographer.

“Back in the days before we had the DacDB online, we had what you call a Membership Directory, and Paul was the person that take the pictures for the directory. To explain what it was, it’s a little book that has all the information on each member of the club and every once in a while we would change that book because we needed to add different people and eliminate some of the others. He would set up what we needed and these pictures taken. We used to meet in the basement of Pacific University and he’d set up his backdrop and his chair at the back of the room and we’d have our meeting and then after the meeting people would get in line and have their picture taken.

“Paul also took all the pictures at the Concours. He would take them of every area, and he’d pick out the ones he thought were the best and take the pictures. When it came time to have the cars go across the stage, he would take those, too.

“He also was a designer. He designed our logo. He designed our Christmas cards that we used to send out to the car owners. Mike Hill was our painter. He used to take our car and paint a picture of it, and Paul would take that picture and he would put that on our posters and our t-shirts and the program and anywhere else we needed to put those.

“The biggest job Paul had was the program, which was 60 or 70 pages. He’d had to take the pictures of the cars that were entered and take that picture and put it in the program along with the information on the car. That’d take hours and hours and hours. And you just can’t imagine how difficult that was.

“I don’t know when it was that the kidney failure got to where Paul couldn’t come to Rotary or participate anymore. I think it must have been a couple of years before the pandemic. We talked to Linda and she said that Paul passed away, he had lived a year longer than what the doctors had predicted. In that year he designed his own memorial service. Linda said he was going to have a lot of music in there because he was on the choir and he played the organ. And then Linda got a smile on her face. She had asked Paul what he wanted her to do with his ashes. And he smiled and said, “Put them in the organ in the church.”

Geoff Faris: “Well, I suppose we should have a representative from the dental community because among all the multitude of amazing talents that Paul had, he was a very, very fine dentist. I always admired Paul. He was of that generation that he would be always willing to answer questions. He would be very open with everything. I remember Dr. Nixon, of course, was very similar. My father, just of that generation, that they were just so open and willing to share their experiences with the younger dentists in town. So I just always admired Paul. He was just one of the good ones that you could always count on to help you out and you will truly be missed.”

Court Carrier: “I’ve been involved in Rotary previously, and when I came here and joined about four years ago, I will never forget how warm and welcoming Paul was. He just always had an open hand and was an incredible force for your club. I went to my first Concours and he was everywhere. He was there during all the Concours meetings, he was there during the day of, and he was all over in every area of the entire event. So I was always impressed with Paul. He was always so generous with his time and his welcoming attitude that I truly felt blessed to be here when he was here.”

Club Calendar
Wed., Dec. 20: No Meeting

Thurs., Dec. 21: Board Meeting, 7 a.m.
via Zoom

Thurs., Dec. 21: Satellite Club Meeting, 6:30 p.m.
The Growler Garage, 1837 Pacific Ave.

Wed., Dec. 27: No Meeting

Wed., Jan. 3: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Forest Grove United Church of Christ, 2032 College Way
Program: Fareeha Nayebare

Wed., Jan. 10: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Forest Grove United Church of Christ, 2032 College Way
Program: Natalie Olivier, Cornelius 2045 Community Conversation

Wed., Jan. 10: Concours Committee, 7 p.m.
via Zoom

Thurs., Jan. 11: Executive Board Meeting, 7 p.m.
via Zoom