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Rotary History:
The Early Years
Today, Rotary is well known throughout the world for its dedication to service and international goodwill. Changing the world through service, however, was hardly uppermost in the mind of Paul P. Harris when he founded the organization in 1905. Harris, a lawyer in Chicago, Illinois, USA, had been raised in a rural village in Vermont. He envisioned a new kind of club for professionals that would kindle the fellowship and friendly spirit he had known in his youth.
On the evening of 23 February 1905, Harris invited three friends to a meeting. Silvester Schiele, a coal dealer, Hiram Shorey, a merchant tailor, and Gustavus Loehr, a mining engineer, gathered with Harris in Loehr's business office in Room 711 of the Unity Building in downtown Chicago. They discussed Harris' idea that business leaders should meet periodically to enjoy camaraderie and to enlarge their circle of business and professional acquaintances. The club met weekly; membership was limited to one representative from each business and profession. Though the men didn't use the term Rotary that night, that gathering is commonly regarded as the first Rotary club meeting.
As they continued to convene, members began rotating their meetings among their places of business, hence the name Rotary. 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.
By the end of 1905, the club's roster showed a membership of 30 with Schiele as president and Ruggles as treasurer. Paul Harris declined office in the new club and didn't become its president until two years later. Club membership grew, making it difficult to gather in offices, so the members shifted their meetings to hotels and restaurants, where many Rotary club meetings are held today.
These early "Rotarians" realized that fellowship and mutual self-interest were not enough to keep a club of busy professionals meeting each week. Reaching out to improve the lives of the less fortunate proved to be an even more powerful motivation. The Rotary commitment to service began in 1907, when the Rotary Club of Chicago donated a horse to a preacher. The man's own horse had died, and because he was too poor to buy another one, he was unable to make the rounds of his churches and parishioners. A few weeks later, the club constructed Chicago's first public lavatory. With these inaugural projects, Rotary became the world's first service-club organization.
Rotary's popularity began to spread throughout the USA. The second Rotary club was chartered in 1908 in San Francisco, California, with a third club formed in Oakland, California. Others soon followed in Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles, California; and New York, New York. When the National Association of Rotary Clubs held its first convention in 1910, Harris was elected president.
At the following year's convention, speakers used the phrases "Service, Not Self" and "He Profits Most Who Serves Best," which became the organization's mottoes. "Service, Not Self," was later changed to "Service Above Self" and has since been adopted as Rotary's primary motto.
Rotary Today and Tomorrow
In 1985, Rotary made a historic commitment to immunize all of the world's children against polio. Working in partnership with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and national governments, Rotary is the largest private-sector contributor in the global polio eradication campaign. Through its PolioPlus program, Rotary raised more than US$240 million and will have contributed half a billion dollars to the cause by 2005, the target date for certification of polio eradication and Rotary's centennial year. Rotarians have mobilized hundreds of thousands of PolioPlus volunteers to promote and carry out national immunization days in polio-endemic countries, resulting in the immunization of nearly two billion children worldwide.
Throughout the late 20th century, Rotary International's service program has adapted to the times. Rotary began to address the pressing global issues of environmental degradation with the formation of the Preserve Planet Earth program in 1990. Other programs were formed to address illiteracy, drug abuse, and the needs of both an aging population and the increasing number of children at risk.
Reflecting society in 1905, the organization had been limited to male members and remained so officially until 1989, when the Council on Legislation, Rotary's parliament, voted to eliminate the male-only provision, opening up membership to qualified women across the world (though the U.S. women Rotarians began to appear during the 1986-1987 Rotary year). Today, there are approximately 145,000 women Rotarians worldwide, many of them serving in leadership roles.
Rotary experienced a growth spurt in the early 1990s when it expanded into former Soviet bloc countries following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1989, clubs in Central and Eastern Europe that had been disbanded for more than 50 years were re-established, and the first Russian Rotary club was chartered in 1990.
Nearly 100 years after Paul Harris and his colleagues chartered the club that would become Rotary International, Rotarians continue to take pride in their history. In honor of the club that first gathered in Room 711, Rotarians have preserved the room in an extensive re-creation of the office as it existed in 1905. For several years, the club maintained the room as a shrine for visiting Rotarians. In 1989, when the Unity Building was scheduled to be demolished, Rotary's 711 Club carefully dismantled the office, salvaging the original interior, including doors and radiators. In 1993, the Board of Directors of Rotary International set aside a permanent home for the restored Room 711 on the 16th floor of RI World Headquarters in Evanston, Illinois. |
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