Your Centennial Celebration sub-committee has extended the registration deadline for our Tuesday, February 26 event through February 14. You may still register through the office, at our meeting tomorrow, or online. Click here for details and link to online registration.
With much input from the full Centennial committee, this event will focus on fellowship – there is no long program, we ourselves are the main attraction. We will put the Capitol Theater to use in fun ways and have a lovely evening kicking off our special Centennial year.
One of the tasks I volunteered to work on is a slide show of images from our history. This led Terry Anderson and Rich Leffler (both Centennial committee members) to meet me at the office one Friday afternoon to go through our archives together. Rich has been working on them for the documentary project, and it was great assistance to have him guide us. It took enormous restraint to not stop to read everything and have Rich tell a story to put materials in context. I now regret not convening later in the afternoon with a bottle of Scotch and a sleeping bag because it was truly a special experience to get to review the archives, and it was far too brief and expeditious a tour.
As a result, when you join us at the event, playing on the big screen will be snapshots of great moments from our first 100 years: some formal portraits, some action shots, past anniversary celebrations, current members in years past, and current members in the present. Here is one of my favorites:
The hand-written label on the back of it reads “Baseball team loses game in 1925, watches Kiwanis’ team victory banquet at new Madison Club.”
Also in the show will be sets of historic and contemporary photos taken from the Capitol dome. By sheer chance, Terry Anderson hosted a vocational fellowship group at the Capitol last summer, and Rick Kiley snapped photos all the way around the Capitol. Terry observed these photos happen to match historic photos in a project the full Centennial committee is working on with Gregg Tipple. They are paired in the presentation so you can see “then and now.”
We will celebrate not only our past but our present and future on the 26th. I hope to see you there.
Juli Aulik
Rotary Centennial Celebration Event co-chair
Rotary Club of Madison, Wisconsin 