Service clubs key to city growth

It’s more than streets and avenues. A map of Lethbridge offers many insights into our city’s history.

Facility names Nicholas Sheran, Fritz Sick, Alexander Galt or Dave Elton remind us frequently of our city’s roots and growth. Schools, too, provide memory links with important figures in our history — think of General Stewart, Agnes Davidson, Mike Mountain Horse, William Buchanan and more.

But our community has also been built by groups of people who’ve banded together in common cause. So we have the Gyro tennis courts, the Labour Club Arena, the Elks picnic facility, the Lions Centennial Park, Kinsmen Park and more . . . along with such long-running events as the Kiwanis Music and Speech Arts Festival and the Rotary Carol Festival.

It’s public-service groups like these that can add so much to the vitality and ethos of a community.

So it’s only fitting we pay tribute to one of these organizations this year. It was 100 years ago that the first Rotary club formed in Lethbridge, a little more than a decade after the town actually became a city.

Today’s Rotarians may be surprised to learn how many projects and events their forerunners have taken on through that century of service.

Books were collected to launch a Lethbridge library, trees were planted along our scenic North Parkside Drive, children were sent to summer camp, Victory Bond sales were promoted. The list of accomplishments is impressive, to say the least.

Alongside members of other service clubs, church groups, sports organizations, ethnic associations and others, local Rotarians have a lot to celebrate. But of course, their focus is not solely on Lethbridge.

Southern Albertans know about the surplus fire trucks, ambulances, handi-buses and other vehicles that have been solicited, repaired and then convoyed south, year after year, to rural communities in Mexico that can’t afford those basics.

Maybe they don’t know as much about our local clubs’ support for medical services and schools in many more developing nations. Or about the international Rotary network’s largely successful efforts to eliminate the scourge of polio.

Perhaps that’s because Rotarians — like members of our city’s other service clubs — spend far more time working on their projects than on blowing their own horns. But after 100 years dedicated to the well-being of our community and our world, they surely deserve a little time in the spotlight.

“Rotary has been an integral partner with the City of Lethbridge for the past century,” Mayor Chris Spearman pointed out, during a celebratory Rotary flag-raising event outside city hall this week.

“We would be a poorer city without the participation of Rotary.”

On this occasion at least, we think our mayor is guilty of understatement.

Without the hard work and dedication of the men and women in Rotary and our other public service organizations, we suggest, Lethbridge could never have become the community we are proud to call home.

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