On a bitterly cold Chicago evening some 96 February 23rds ago lawyer Paul Percy Harris invited three businessmen to meet in room 711 of the Unity Building. That was the office mining engineer Gustavus Loehr. The four men 
decided to go forward with a new kind of club that Harris had been talking
about for nearly a year. When the meeting ended they still had no name but
they did have a vision. They would also assemble every two weeks and invite
new persons to join them. Until they grew too large, they would take turns
meeting in one another's offices or factories.

That club still exists. Its 289 members come together for lunch every
Tuesday noon in the Athletic Association building. Its name is the Rotary
Club of Chicago. Throughout 1905, 1906 and into 1907 they were not what we today would call a "service club." Its members--all of them male--initially
met every two weeks to do three and only three things:
 

• (1)  become ever closer personal friends, 
• (2) to have lots of fun, 
• (3)  and to do business with one another.

--Who was Paul Percy Harris? 
--What led him to create the Rotary Club of Chicago? 
--What did Rotarians do in their meetings during the club's first
two years? 
--What ideas were in the air?  From what types of organizations did he draw   models for his new-fangled club? 

These questions I will explore with you this afternoon.

Paul Percy Harris died in 1947, aged 79. He was born in 1868 in Racine, Wisconsin. He had a dreamy, restless father who moved a lot and felt that his two sons would grow up better if his grandparents raised Paul and his brother. So Paul, age three, began living his formative years in Wallingford, Vermont, a village of 1,000 souls. He went on to college, took a good law degree in 1891and then spent five planned years roaming the world. In those years he was a cowboy in John Valicek's [Charter President of the Rotary Club of Canyon Lake, Texas, NOTE: 05/30/01] beloved Colorado, tended cattle on a tramp steamer, was a reporter in San Francisco, taught in Los Angeles and did odd jobs in the USA and other countries.

He then selected raw, bustling, teeming Chicago to open his law office.
Harris explored many churches and synagogues. He joined club after
club--including a hiking group where he met his future wife Jean. He
deliberately changed his place of abode every six months. His law practice
flourished. But he did not feel personally comfortable in cutthroat Chicago. His profession did not bring him close personal friends. Country clubs were rather austere, rule-bound and forbade young professionals and business members to talk shop or do business on club premises.

In 1904, after an absence of several years, Paul Harris revisited Wallingford. He realized that he had never been happier than when growing up in that tiny hamlet. He began to analyze just what it was about small town America in the latter part of the 1800s which had so satisfied not only himself but all of his neighbors as well.

Paul remembered an ideal face-to-face community in which everybody knew
everybody else. Because they saw one another so often, they naturally and
easily became and remained friends. The adults all did business with one
another and the fact that there was only one barber, one butcher, one
lawyer and only a sprinkling of men in other trades meant that their
daily face-to-face business dealing was essentially non-competitive. Harris, on the other hand, also liked living and working in Chicago. Would it be possible, he wondered, in some way to bring Wallingford to the Windy City? To reassemble the best of small town America in a big, impersonal, socially cold metropolis?

He began to probe this idea with Sylvester Schiele, the best and most loyal friend he would ever know, the man who is buried only a few feet from him, while his widow rests in her native Scotland. Harris and Schiele then brought
two others together in February 1905 in order to transport Wallingford to
Chicago, though only Harris would have thought of it that way.

I focus today on the first two years of Chicago Rotary because in 1907
Harris persuaded initially reluctant members to add a fourth club goal:
service to the wider local community beyond the membership. That new fourth goal is what made Chicago Rotary what we would now regard as a true service club. But Rotary did not begin as an external service club in which members made themselves into a team primarily to do good to other people.

In its first two years Chicago Rotary was strictly for doing business with
members, having fun with members and becoming deeper friends of members.

What was Rotary like 1905, 1906 and into 1907? What did it do? What made so special to Paul Harris?

--Rotarians remained all male.

--They either owned their own stores, factories or businesses or headed
professional offices as did Paul Harris.

--They met every two weeks--not weekly, as Rotarians now do.

--After a couple of months their numbers grew too great to meet regularly
in members' offices. They were 30 by late 1905. So they began rotating evening meals among various Chicago hotels.

--Chicago Rotary was a secular, not a religious organization. Indeed, one
of its prized characteristics was to demonstrate that men of competing
religions could be personal friends if they tried.

--Rotary had no secrets. It was neither lodge or fraternity.

--At every meeting Rotarians did business with other members. Indeed they
appointed an officer whose sole job was to record each month the number of business deals, member by member, with one another. Such records have been preserved and you will find Paul Harris there with the best of them. One of the First Four Rotarians, Hiram Shorey,  said that he thought it a swell idea that he would co-create a club with lots of friends "boosting for me," and all of them having their suits made in my tailor shop.

--Chicago Rotarians soon began to sing together. Loudly. Lustily.

--At one of their very early meetings members created a slate of possible
names for their club. Among the candidates: FFF (Food, Friends, Fun--though
one wag said it really meant Free From Females), Windy City Round Table,
The Booster Club, The Blue Boys and on and on. At their next meeting two
weeks later they selected Paul Harris's personal favorite: The Rotary Club.
For one thing it expressed their earliest custom of "rotating" meeting
places.

--Chicago Rotarians drew up a constitution and by-laws. They fined members 50 cents for every meeting not attended.

--Their first club emblem was a wagon wheel tossing up dust.

A word of comment. In 1907 the Rotary Club of Chicago became an
organization also for external service. Other clubs imitated Chicago
Rotary. Within years an umbrella organization was formed linking Rotary
Clubs on several continents. Famous writers took notice of Rotary and others in the growing service club family. These were writers of national and
global renown such as 

--George Bernard Shaw("Where is Rotary going? It's going to lunch!"), 

--G. K. Chesterton ("We now live in this Rotarian Age."), 

--H. L. Mencken ("Rotarians are always sobbing for service")

--and Sinclair Lewis (whose secretly hard drinking preacher hero in the novel ELMER GANTRY was invited into Rotary only after personally leading an axe-swinging raid on a saloon patronized by German immigrants). 

Not all of their notice was favorable, to put it mildly. A repeated criticism was that Rotarians, Lions and others were hypocrites. It was impossible, the argument went, to combine altruistic external service to strangers while also doing self-seeking business with one another. But that is the subject, if you invite me, for another talk.

Such criticism stung Paul Percy Harris. Over and over he wrote in defense of his original vision of Rotary as a club for internal service only, with a tight linkage between fellowship, fun and doing business with members.

Harris argued that the essence of earliest Rotary was friendship and fun
and that members did business with one another as but one of many ways they expressed their friendship and concern for one another. Harris said that
Chicago Rotary was far more dedicated to the welfare of members than any
other contemporary organization he knew of--and he knew them all.

Harris also went to great lengths in his writings to evoke a unique spirit
of fun and merrymaking in earliest Rotary. You went to meetings knowing
that you would "check at the door" all stuffiness and inhibitions. In
Rotary it was all right, it was expected, that members would let their hair
down, kick up their heels, engage in horseplay, call one another by first
names or nicknames and in general have a grand time. Specifically, "we were
boys together."  No other professional and business men's club was so
fun-oriented.

I will save for another occasion a lengthy presentation of where Harris got
his organizational ideas. But here is a sketch.

--The basic vision of recreating a Vermont village in Chicago was unique to
him. He said that it also resonated with the memories of other onetime country boys living lonely lives in the big city.

--Paul Percy Harris belonged to social clubs, liked the personal pleasure
they brought members and their families but rejected their stuffiness,
snobbishness and pharisaical devotion to rules.

--Also very big in the Mid West after 1890 were "booster" clubs. In
booster clubs members met for meals and to do business with other members.

--These clubs were also "classified." Somewhat analogous to the spirit of
Wallingford, Vermont, booster clubs found that friendship among businessmen was best preserved by keeping head-on competitors out of the club. The first Rotarians understood full well that Chicago Rotary was a new kind of booster club.

--Young Benjamin Franklin, as he later wrote in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY, had created America's first classified club in the middle of the 18th Century, just after his first visit to London. He then brought together 12 young men of
12 different professions to meet weekly, read papers and undertake service
projects. They did all this in secret. Years later when persons asked
Harris if he had got his idea of  membership classification from Franklin's
"Junto" club, Harris admitted that this was the first he had ever heard of
the Junto. In any event Harris rejected secrecy for Rotary and obviously
learned the classification principle from the booster clubs in Detroit and
elsewhere.

--Finally, Harris was familiar with Freemasonry and what scholars call
"masonic-like" organizations. Clearly, Harris would not have used their
element of secrecy. But perhaps he borrowed one key element from such
masonic-like lodges, protective associations or fraternal organizations as
The Knights of Pythias or the Ancient Order of Hibernians. That core
element of both lodges, fraternal organizations and Rotary was intense
personal concern for the good and welfare of members. Paul Harris intended unusually close fellowship and concern for fellow members to be a signature component of earliest Rotary. Did he borrow that notion from Freemasonry or college fraternities? He never said that he did, and perhaps the mere memory of life in Wallingford was the source of this Rotary element.

What I hope stays with us all from this historical review is that friendship and fun among members have always been at the  core of Rotary. Canyon Lake Rotary, in a sense, stands today where the Rotary Club of Chicago was in 1905. Our future is before us. Some of us will become whizzes at fund raising. Some may work with Smithson Valley High School in vocational service or youth exchanges. Others will come eagerly to meetings primarily to hear and learn from the talks presented in weekly programs. Others will live for the conferences of Rotary International District 5840. But some will also remember and give highest honor to Rotary's earliest commitment: fun and fellowship.

We have been most fortunate over the past few weeks to have among us a matchless model of Rotary friendship and fun as one of our mentors from the Rotary Club of New Braunfels. I refer, of course, to my friend and yours,
Delroy York. If, God forbid, we ever get so absorbed in other aspects of
Rotary that we forget to enjoy Rotary, to have fun, to care for one another
and to deepen our friendship with other members, then all we have to do is
invite Delroy to come on back to Canyon Lake and show us what Paul Harris
deep, deep down meant Rotary to be. And let's not forget that, like Delroy today, Rotary started singing very early on: loudly and lustily!

As Canyon Lake Rotary mulls over its various possible lines of march into
2001, 2002 and beyond, may we never forget that Paul Harris would invite
our Rotary club to be first, foremost and forever a place for friendship, fun and enjoyment--with as many of us as possible behaving a lot like Delroy York.

Thank you.

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE