Our Rotarian of the Day today is Ben Gorrell. Ben is native Tulsan, born January 19, 1947. He graduated from Edison High School here in Tulsa and the University of Kansas, where he earned a B.S. degree in aerospace engineering. He also obtained a masters degree in business administration.
He is a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU), and a Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC). He is Vice-President of Rich & Cartmill, Inc.
He is married to Kathy, and they have been married for 40 years. They have two daughters: Charlotte (1973) and Shelley (1976), four grandsons, and one granddaughter.
Ben enjoys jogging, skiing (water and snow), snowshoeing, hunting, fishing and geography. He joined Southside Rotary on September 4, 1980, and was proposed by Bill Van Horn. He was president during the 1991-1992 Rotary year.
Ben is a member of Kirk of the Hills Presbyterian Church, Southern Oaks Neighborhood Association, and Independent Insurance Agents of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the USA.
Ben, thank you for being the ROD today!
This Week’s Program
Josh Butts
Our speaker today is Josh Butts. Josh served five years in the United States Army, where he spent two years in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and two years in Korea, where he was a member of the 8th Army and All-Army Track and Cross Country teams. Josh then was deployed directly to Iraq from Korea, serving one year as a Chaplain assistant and sergeant of an air assault Infantry Unit in Anbar Province in 2004.
Josh then moved to Tulsa and started training to re-gain his athletic scholarship at the University of Tulsa in track and field, a scholarship that was lost after a one-year involuntary extended service in the Army. After 18 months of training, Josh earned his scholarship back at TU, where he went on to graduate in 2 1/2 years with honors with a degree in graphic design and advertising. During this time, he also met his future wife. Erin and Josh were married in June 2009.
Josh recently started working with the Folds of Honor Foundation as a logistics manager and graphic designer. He also helps manage the Patriot Golf Course, and is the creator, chief editor, and designer for “The Eagle” newsletter. Josh’s position is unique in that he works directly with Major Dan Rooney, implementing his intent for both the Folds of Honor Foundation and the Patriot Golf Course.
Josh, thank you for being our speaker today! We’re looking forward to it.
A LOOK BACK AT AMERICA’S FIRST LADIES
Martha Jefferson (1749-1782)
Thomas Jefferson was a widower. When he became President in 1801, his wife, Martha, had been dead nineteen years. During his two administrations, Dolley Madison, Secretary of State James Madison’s vivacious wife, frequently acted as hostess at presidential dinners, and their eldest daughter Martha (Patsy) also helped out on occasion. She got the eye of Thomas.
Martha Jefferson, six years younger than her husband, was by all accounts attractive and agreeable. “A little above middle height,” Sarah Randolph, her great-granddaughter, described her, “with a lithe and exquisitely formed figure…a model of graceful and queenlike carriage…well educated for her day, and a constant reader.”
An officer on Baron de Riedesel’s staff who visited Monicello in January, 1779 found her “in all respects a very agreeable, sensible & accomplished Lady”, and the Marquis de Chastellux, who met her in the spring of 1782, called her “a mild and amiable wife.” But she remains a shadowy figure. After her death in September 1782, Jefferson destroyed all her correspondence and rarely spoke of her thereafter.
CONFIDENCE
Is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.
A ROTARY MOMENT
If you joined Southside and chose to progress, perhaps to a club officer, club president, even district governor or Rotary International president, you will learn leadership skills that you can use in your work for the rest of your life. This is how it happened to me.
Also, when you go to a Rotary club meeting, you will interact with people from a broad spectrum of businesses and professions. It is a valuable membership benefit to be able to mix, and become friends with, people with knowledge and influence beyond your own industry. And because Rotarians enjoy helping other Rotarians, the chances are they will ask you to share your expertise. At the same time, you will have a rich reservoir of information available on subjects you are not yet familiar with.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily.
TODAY
Is the day our International President, Ray Klinginsmith, will be speaking to the Rotarians of District 6110 at the John Q. Hammons Center in Rogers, Arkansas. He is one great speaker!
CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?
Absolutely ridiculous! Protecting the ozone and arresting global warming is so important to the Environmental Protection Agency it is even researching the impact of cow belches and flatulence on global warming.
LIFE AND TIMES OF PAUL HARRIS
One day in the fall of 1900, Paul P. Harris met attorney Bob Frank for dinner in a well-off neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. They took a walk around the area and stopped at shops along the way. Harris was impressed by how Frank had made friends with many of the shopkeepers.
Since moving to Chicago to set up his law practice, Harris had not encountered the kind of camaraderie that Frank enjoyed with his fellow businessmen. He wondered whether there was a way to channel and expand this type of fellowship, which reminded him of the New England town where he’d grown up.
“The thought persisted that I was experiencing only what had happened to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others in the great city…I was sure that there must be many other young men who had come from farms and small villages to establish themselves in Chicago…Why not bring them together? If others were longing for fellowship as I was, something would come of it.”
Eventually, Harris persuaded other local businessmen to meet and discuss forming a club for commercial trade, community, and fellowship. His vision laid the foundation for the Rotary of today.
A WILL ROGERS QUOTE
“The Republicans mopped up, the Democrats gummed up, and I will now try and sum up. Things are terribly dull now. We won’t have any more serious comedy until Congress meets.”
DID YOU KNOW THAT…
Rotary’s first convention held in the Southern Hemisphere was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1948.
I BELIEVE THIS
Often times, a small change in attitude will make a huge change in someone’s life.
DUES
First quarter dues are due at this time.
A LITTLE HUMOR
Why did the guy bury his horse on a hillside?
Because he was dead!
PROPOSED NEW MEMBERS
Russ Robinson has proposed two people for membership into Southside. They are:
Jordan Taylor
Jerry Taylor
Classification, Financial Services
Should you have any objections, please let them be known to our president, Tom Wilson
GET UP AND GET MOVING
I think many people today have lingering disorders. Their maladies may not be physical; they may be emotional, but they are deep-seated, lingering disorders nonetheless. They could stem from being unwilling to forgive, holding on to past resentments, blaming the past for their behavior, or other emotional wounds.
These lingering disorders can affect your personality, your relationships, and your self-image. Just as the man lying by the pool, some people sit back year after year, waiting for a miracle to happen, waiting for some big event to come along to make everything better. I say get up and get moving…
ANOTHER ROTARY MOMENT
Violin virtuoso and polio survivor Itzhak Perlman and the New York Philharmonic played to a sold-out audience recently at a concert to help end polio. “There’s no reason anyone should get this disease,” said Perlman, who contracted polio at age four and overcame physical challenges to become one of the world’s most celebrated musicians. This concert raised over $100,000.00 for Rotary International’s fight against this dreaded disease.
HOW ABOUT THIS?
There is only one good substitute for the endearment of a sister, and that is the endearment of some other fellow’s sister.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY (JULY 22)
1933: First around-the-world solo flight is completed by Wiley Post in the Winnie Mae. The flight began on July 15. (He died two years later in a plane crash in Point Barrow, Alaska, with Will Rogers.)
1991: Jeffrey Dahmer: Milwaukee police find human body parts in his apartment. He admitted to killing and dismembering 17 men.
2003: Iraq War: American Troops kill Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, during a raid on a home in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Birthdays
Danny Glover, Actor (1946)
Alex Trebek, Game Show Host (1940)
Bob Dole, Politician (1923)
Rose Kennedy, Mother of President Kennedy (1890)
Deaths
John Dillinger, Outlaw (1934)
Florenz Ziegfeld, Creator of Ziegfeld Follies (1932)
Carl Sandburg, Poet (1967)
ANOTHER WILL ROGERS QUOTE (You can probably tell, I like Will Rogers)
“A wife is the cheapest thing you can get in the long run in the female line.”
NEXT WEEK’S PROGRAM
Will be a Club Assembly with our President, Tom Wilson being the “Rotarian of the Day.”
