Lion Rex passed away Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 4:30 PM.
Lion Rex was a Charter Member of our club and was born on September 5, 1918. He would have been 90 years-old in September. Our club members honored him with a Life Membership and kept him as a member when he relocated to New Mexico to be near his son. He was residing in a VA hospital when he passed. Lion Rex was loved by all of our old members and will be missed.
Our resident photojournalist (Lion Jack Durnin) got the following article published in the 3/29/08 edition of Neighbors.Go supplement of the Dallas Morning News:
Lion Keith Murray, Lions District 2X-1 Texas Lions Camp Director, spoke to Plano Early Lions Club members about the Texas Lions Camp (TLC) in Kerrville, Texas. TLC is for Texas children with physical disabilities who are 7-16 years old. Each child can choose to attend one of six one-week camping sessions, or a 3-day Day Camp. Interested children should have some self-help skills in the areas of dressing, eating, toileting and bathing. Daily camp activities include swimming, canoeing, arts and crafts, field sports, fishing, and camping under the stars. Each week’s activities conclude with a special awards ceremony – everyone is a winner!
TLC also provides summer sessions specifically designed for children with type 1 diabetes (8-15 years old). In addition to exciting and challenging recreational activities, a medical team joins the camp staff to teach campers about diabetes. Children are taught to eat properly, monitor their blood sugar, and give their own insulin injections.
For over 50 years the Texas Lions Camp has provided more than 50,000 children with physical disabilities and diabetes opportunities for recreational and learning experiences. The camp is a nonprofit organization, funded by the Lions Clubs of Texas and private donations. Children attend the camp at no cost to themselves or their families.
Further information and camper applications may be obtained by contacting the Plano Early Lions Club by calling Lion Secretary Ken Gleason at 214-769-8264 or at http://www.planoearlylions.org or http://www.lionscamp.com .
Lion Don Johnson’s mother passed away this week. Please take a bit of time in the coming week to include Lion Don’s family in your thoughts and prayers.
Good to see some participation from the other club members. Please have patience with me while I work out some of the details. One of the things some of you have run into already is that I have set the comments for moderation. The first comment that you enter will be ‘moderated’, so that I can make sure that you are really a member of the club, and not a forum-spammer. After that, the system is supposed to let you post comments without me having to approve them. Let me know if that is not the case!
By the way, anybody that wants author/edit privileges, and is willing to make an occasional post, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to set you up.
Lion Mike Marvel (whom I have mentioned before) gave me a call today, and did me the favor of pointing out a couple of typos on the website. Lion Mike is completely blind — and one of the typos that he found wasn’t even in a part of the site that is normally visible. He uses a program called “Jaws” that reads websites (and other documents) to him, and it picked up on the alternate text for the Lions International logo, which I had typo’d.
So a Lion who is completely blind read our website more thoroughly than the normally-sighted members who have skimmed over it. Ok, as I have put on the front page, you guys have until the first meeting in April 2008 to figure out how to comment on this blog, or get tail-twisted for it every meeting until you do figure it out. Enough of begging for participation; it’s gonna cost you not to, starting in April.
The reason Lion Mike called is that he is working on a website for his club, and he plans to put in a link to us. I have offered to host his club’s site for $12/year (which is a good deal cheaper than the hosting company that they were considering), as long as I didn’t have to do any of the website work. I should mention that I will make the same offer to any other Lions club in District 2X-1. I have enough surplus bandwidth that I should be able to handle 10 to 15 club websites. I currently donate hosting to the Plano Early Lions Club, and any fees I get for hosting other Lions Club sites will go to the PELC Administrative account.
Well, we did it. Another successful parade. This one was a bit more work than the Independence Day Parade, but we also had more folks working, and we were a little better organized. Not perfect, but we did a good job, and we have a list of lessons learned to make future parades even better.
The only thing I really regret is that the members of the club never get to actually SEE the parade. We get there at 5:30 in the morning, get things set up, provide help with parking & the route, and we are there until well after the last float gets all the way to the end, but we never see more than a tiny fraction of the parade. Oh, well, we are here to serve, and it is sufficient that our efforts allow others to see it.
As I have time later this month, I will be posting some pictures that were taken by members and friends. If I can figure out how to do the YouTube thing, I may get to post some videos.
This is going to be a BIG year for our Lions Club. We have established ourselves as the experts for running Parades in the city of Plano, and in addition to hosting the Independence Day Parades from now on, we will be joining forces with the Plano Santas to run the annual Plano Christmas Parade. This has enormous potential for our club.
Our own Lion Tom Siebert is an active member of Plano Santas, and, as an aside, I can personally vouch for the fact that Lion Tom is one of the very best Santas I have ever met.
This year’s Christmas parade will be held on December 1st, which means that we will not be having our regular meeting at Southfork on that Saturday. The second meeting in December is traditionally the Christmas party, so we won’t be having a regular meeting at all in December.
One of the members asked me today about whether I could tell who has visited our website. The short answer is “no”, but there are some things that I can tell about the visitors — one being what site they visited just before ours, if they came to our site as a result of clicking on a link. I was a bit surprised when I went to the usage logs today and found that the number of site visits per day (which has grown steadily for the past several months) suddenly just about tripled starting just after the 4th of July. A little investigation led me to the KAAM radio website, where I found a link to www.PlanoEarlyLions.ORG prominently displayed on their site (edit: the link is no longer active). The reference link was about their entry in our parade.
Some advertising you just can’t buy. I get the feeling that our club is crossing an important threshold in the Computer Age. You might want to call up the folks at KAAM and thank them for acknowledging our Lions Club.
One thing that I did not emphasize as strongly as I should have at the meeting this morning — this is not *MY* blog, it is *OUR* blog. I can help folks with how to enter stuff here, but there is no way that I can come up with all of the needed meaningful content by myself. If you want to make comments on the blog, or would like to write regular articles, please let me know, and I will set you up and get you started.
Lion Marvel gave us a very moving presentation yesterday. In addition to a bit of conscious-raising with regards to blind people, he posed the challenge to us to think about the sorts of things a blind person could do at our own companies.
In a similar vein, I saw a video of a fiddle-player on YouTube a few weeks ago. He wasn’t really great, but he played reasonably well to an appreciative audience. He had no left arm; he played with the bow stuck between his legs. The miracle wasn’t that he could play the fiddle so well, but that he could play at all.
Got me to thinking… I have two working eyes (not perfect, but they do work well enough), and two working arms (again not perfect, but ok). I have no excuse for not doing the very best that I can with what I have.