Los Altos Rotary Club eNewsletter "Rotator"

Los Altos Rotary Club

Home of the Annual Rotary Fine Art Show

April 10 2014

Writer: Marlene Cowan - Photographer: Jerry Tomanek - Editor:Cynthia Luedtke #41-0410 2013-2014

This is National Volunteer Week, and Los Altos Rotarians are certainly doing their part volunteering in service projects all over the land (both here and abroad!)

Busy volunteer Pres JACK opened by thanking his volunteer greeters ALLART LIGTENBERG, PAT FARRELL, and CINDY BOGARD-O’GORMAN. SALLY MEADOWS quoted Anne Frank, “How wonderful that no one need wait a single moment to improve the world.” PP JOHN SYLVESTER waved his conductor’s arms to lead “America the Beautiful”.

PE KENDRA welcomed our guests: PDG Jim Walker of Cupertino RC; HARRY PRICE and NIEL BONKE introduced “super Sharks fans”; PP DICK HENNING introduced Brandon Hong, our Camp RYLA student from LAHS; LINA BROYDO introduced her husband Sam Broydo.

Announcements

KATHY LERA invited all to take a few lovely Fine Art Show posters to display in LA and other communities.
JULIE ROSE extended an open invitation to attend today’s Silicon Valley Chamber Business EXPO, featuring nine Chambers and sponsored in part by TRACIE MURRAY’s Cedar Crest.
PP JOHN SYLVESTER is already planning the royal boot for Pres JACK and wants your ideas for his Kick Out program.
ROY JONES’ shipment of LARC shirts has arrived and is ready for pick-up.
FRANK ELMER needs four more drivers to sign up for the Art Show.
HARRY PRICE reminded all of the May 9 wine and appetizers party at the home of our PP DICK BLANDING. Just bring a bottle, a snack to share, and your sense of humor.
DONNA VRENA took off the shoe she had forgotten to change in order to remind Art Show sponsors not to forget to turn in their checks to her.
JUDY OTT circulated a get well card for JOHN EVANS who is recuperating from hospitalization with pneumonia.
PP MARLENE COWAN reminds Community Grants Committee of their meeting Monday, April 14 at 5 pm in DAVID CASAS’ Intero office. New members are welcome if they have reviewed the grant requests to be considered. Those interested in becoming future members should contact PEN (that’s President-Elect Nominee) JERRY MOISON.
Pres JACK hopes many will join him at the District Conference at the Dolce Hays Mansion this weekend. Our golf team, headed by STEVE SHEPHERD, was playing in the District Tournament at Cinnabar Hills today, as JACK spoke.
PP DICK HENNING raved about the wonderful Chilean hospitality (and 8.2 earthquake) that his group of Rotarians experienced while visiting the COANIQUEM burned children’s rehabilitation center. These are the burned patients that LARC members have so generously supported in the past through their donations. The next COANIQUEM fundraiser will be a September Dinner Cruise on San Francisco Bay. Stay tuned.

HARN SOPER, Art Show Director, is working hard for our success with FAITP (that would be “Fine Art in the Park”). Please contact FRANK ELMER with all staffing issues, then “Let the wild rumpus begin!”

10-MinuteTalk-Joe Eyre

JOE EYRE managed to squeeze a half century of adventures into his Ten Minute Talk. He was born during the “Ike and Dick” era in Akron, Ohio, the rubber capitol of the world where the morning’s snowfall turned black by evening. After earning his Eagle Scout title, he transferred to Ohio State, but enhanced his education by hitchhiking across the US to San Francisco and Seattle and back to school. He had gotten the mountaineering bug, so transferred to the U Washington and then worked for PG&E in San Francisco, putting him just close enough to Yosemite to climb the formidable face of El Capitan in three days. Photos of his overnight “lodgings” on its narrow ledges made one wonder at his sanity, however. Some time after climbing Mount McKinley in ten days, he met his future wife Teri who seems to have talked sense into him (if the life insurance companies didn’t), so they both went to work at HP, San Francisco and settled on skiing, sailing, and biking as safer passions for parents of two children, now in college. JOE is an active volunteer, a great member of our club, and now heads the Los Altos Community Foundation.

PP WYATT ALLEN was joined by PP CYNTHIA LUEDTKE to honor a group of very generous donors to TRF (The Rotary Foundation):

CLARI NOLET
PP MONA ARMISTEAD
PAUL GONELLA
PAUL NYBERG
HARN SOPER
RON STEFANI
JERRY TOMANEK
DENNIS YOUNG

He gave special commendation to PP STEVE ANDERSON (over $5K donations) and PP ROY LAVE (over $6K donations). Donations to TRF fund many worthy programs including Group Study Exchange (GSE), now in its 50th year of advancing international understanding by sending groups of non-Rotarians led by one Rotarian to a foreign country to experience their vocational counterparts via business visits and host family lodgings abroad for 3-9 weeks. In 1965 PP DICK HENNING was a member of the initial year’s GSE and later led a group exchange to Pakistan.

Pres JACK took his turn at Recognition (aka Finemaster) by calling for volunteers.

AL DIAZ admitted he had not been to LARC for 180 days but congratulated ABBY AHRENS on her selection as a Woman of Influence 2014. ABBY paid a token to wait for making a big announcement at the opening of her new hotel.
Both RANDY GARD and JOHN Bogie BOGARD stepped up to join the President’s Club.
PP STEVE ANDERSON, whose hand was raised, claimed he was “just scratching my head”; he got fined, and that fine grew as Pres JACK reminded us that it was STEVE himself who had explained the “President’s Prerogative” to him.
GREG DABB entertained us with a joke: What do you get when you take the Titanic across the Atlantic? (answer: “halfway”).
ANABEL PELHAM announced that PEGS (Partners for Elder Generations) had assembled and given away 80 emergency preparedness backpacks and roller packs last weekend. Volunteers even delivered 20 packs to seniors who couldn’t make it to the distribution center.
CINDY BOGARD-O’GORMAN reminded us that Red Badgers’ emergency backpacks are available to the more able-bodied among us for $100, so please support this Red Badge project and buy one, two or six!

Star PR LINA BROYDO introduced our speaker Randy Hahn, her friend who was responsible for bringing the Sharks to San Jose and has been calling their games for Comcast Sports for 21 seasons. She cheered him on with “Go Randy, and bring the coveted Stanley Cup to the Bay Area!” At the end of today’s meeting, he drew a name out of the hat to win two tickets he had offered to a game next season. After he surprisingly drew Pres JACK’s name, Randy generously offered a second pair of tickets to another Rotarian who turned out to be lucky ROY LAVE.

Randy Hahn has called over 1,000 National Hockey League games in his 30 years of sports broadcast experience, beginning with announcing the “paw-by-paw” excitement of a dog sled race in the Yukon at age 16. Versatile and experienced, he also called matches of three soccer World Cups. National Hockey League postseason playoffs for the Stanley Cup begin April 16 and continue for two months. The Sharks’ first postseason game against the Los Angeles Kings may clinch a play-off spot for Bay Area ice hockey fans—in a city where it doesn’t snow.

In the NHL, the Sharks now have the second longest streak of making it into the playoffs—10 years--, but can they win the coveted Stanley Cup? Winning the Cup is extremely difficult with 30 teams playing 82 games each. Even the LA Kings haven’t won the Cup since 1967, long before the Sharks even existed. But Hahn assured his audience that this is “the best team we’ve ever had, on paper”. A native of Edmonton, Alberta, Hahn is a natural hockey devotee, and he joked that most Canadians are born “with a hockey stick in their hand, though that makes for a difficult birth”.

Some of the outstanding Sharks players today include Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau, Joe Pavelski of the US Olympic hockey team. The strong “character players” he mentioned were Matt Nieto, just 23 years old and the first California-born player ever drafted into the NHL. James Sheppard shattered his knee cap while training Colorado, was traded to the Sharks, and has spent three years battling to regain strength in that knee. They’re all tremendous athletes and great citizens of our community who volunteer in many charitable events, said Hahn.

Hahn was instrumental in bringing a NHL franchise to the Bay Area, as Vice President of Pro Hockey San Jose. Some 22 years ago, the “Shark Tank”, now designated as SAP Center, was one of the last multi-use arenas constructed with public funds. Along with the Fairmont Hotel and the Convention Center, the excitement of hockey rivalries at SAP Center has helped develop downtown San Jose into a community-building entertainment destination, which Hahn calls “the soul of the city”.

Hahn said calling hockey is probably the most difficult sport to announce because the game is so fluid with substitutions on the fly. A player’s average shift on the ice is only 30-40 seconds, he said, because their oxygen is depleted so rapidly while skating “full out”.

The sport has only gotten faster. In the 1970’s goalies didn’t wear masks, and Doug Wilson, original captain of the Sharks, was “grandfathered in” as one of the last team members to play without a helmet. Slap shot pucks that used to fly at 70 mph now travel at 100 mph, so protective helmets have become essential.

When asked about the origin of the Sharks’ logo, Hahn said it was developed by Matt Levin’s marketing and was the number one sport sales logo in the early years. The teal and black shark logo is still in the top ten for sports merchandise sales. But why call them sharks when San Jose is this far from the ocean? “The name sounds fierce and predatory,” Hahn smiled.

This Thursday's Program:

Lisa Hendrickson - "Village Movement"