Bladensburg Rotary Club

 

 

THE ROTARY CLUB OF BLADENSBURG: OUR BEGINNINGS

Our Club actually began meeting over a year before our Charter was granted. Charter President Ollie Zinsmeister remembers several meetings in the home of the College Park Club president, and early histories tell us that Charter Officers were elected in a meeting at the General Outdoor Advertising Company offices, where Charter Member James Whitehead was branch manager. We were the third new Rotary club College Park sponsored in three years, having previously worked to establish clubs in District Heights and Laurel - and we like to believe they saved the best for last.

Under Ollie's leadership, the Club (still in provisional status) held its first 12:15 luncheon meeting at the Prince George's Country Club in Landover on Thursday, February 5, 1959. The College Park Club furnished speakers for our first two meetings. Volume 1, number 1, of the Blade was published on February 9, 1959, consisting of an inspirational message from Charter President Ollie Zinsmeister and several news items - including a request that material for the Blade be sent to Charter Member Bill Porterfield, our first Blade editor, and an appeal for suggestions for good speakers to be sent to Charter Member Bill Mitchell, who served as program chair - both continuing in these positions through the provisional period and first year. Charter Member John Moore chaired our first classification committee. By our second year, Bill Porterfield was our Club treasurer, and Bill Mitchell (Community Service) and John Moore (International Service) were lane directors serving on Board. All three are still with us, John as an active member, and the two others as honorary members.

Bladensburg was welcomed into District 762 as their "Alaska Club" - their 49^th club, chartered shortly after Alaska became our 49^th state. Our Charter Presentation was held at the Prince George's Country Club on the evening of March 31, 1959. Ollie's place card - preserved all these years in a scrapbook, is decorated with a round white button face, complete with red cloth top hat and bowtie - possibly intended to represent a snowman? The program included group singing (also a feature of our early Club meetings) and several performances by "The Senators", a vocal quartet. A welcome from the Honorable C. Howard Brown, Mayor of Bladensburg, was followed by the presentation of our Charter, by District Governor John C. Krusen. The principal speaker (addressing us on the subject of "Living Rotary") was PDG Reuben Steinmeyer. Charter President Ollie Zinsmeister recalls that we received many gifts from other clubs - a Rotary banner, bell, gavel, American flag, and badge case. Congratulatory letters poured in, including greetings from clubs in Australia, Canada, England, and Italy, and six clubs in South America.

Four new members joined the Club in its first year - one of them Russ Maske, who gave the invocation at our 1960 Charter Night, and by 1963 had joined the others on the Board, as Club secretary. We began bringing home District Awards for our activities right away. At the District Conference in 1960, the end of our first year as a Rotary Club, we were awarded an Honorable Mention for Best Community Service Program, as well as a plaque for Best Club Bulletin. After the College Park Rotary Anns invited the Bladensburg wives to one of their meetings, Marge Zinsmeister gathered the Bladensburg group together and we soon had an active group of Rotary Anns, meeting the first Wednesday of each month at the Prince George's County Club, with Bessie Mitchell serving as their president (and Wanda Maske as treasurer) in their third year, followed by Marguerite Moore as president in year four.

Club activities in these early years included sending several local boys to the YMCA Camp each year, beginning in 1959, our first summer. Other first-year activities included a "service above self" essay contest at Bladensburg High School (first prize was a wristwatch), and donated subscriptions to The Rotarian and plaques with the Four Way Test to the Bladensburg and DuVal High Schools. By the second year, International Lane Director John Moore reported 100% of our members were contributors to the Rotary Foundation. We are still working to recapture records of some of these early years, but it is clear we were a very active club.

Our scholarship program in place by 1963, when we offered a Bladensburg High School graduate a $200 full-tuition scholarship to Prince George's Community College (soon increased to two scholarships a year), and we had begun our Salvation Army bell-ringing. Reports in the Charter Night program that year mention an annual crab feast and golf tournament (a golf outing for fellowship that became a fundraiser later). Memorable projects from the mid-1960s included the lighting of the Peace Cross in Bladensburg, contributions to the Edgemeade School for emotionally disturbed boys, the distribution of 4-Way Test book covers to students at Bladensburg High School, and the presentation of framed copies of the 4-Way Test to the Montgomery Ward department store in Prince George's Plaza, for display in public areas. (Copies were also given to all store employees). For several years, the Club gave support to an elementary school in LaLucha, Costa Rica (a continuing project funded by donations members made to our International Service fund in lieu of sending Christmas cards). We helped build a playground at the Prince George's Retarded Children's Day Care Center, donated a freezer to them, and gave wooden puzzles to the Center's children at Christmas. We donated a month's rent to a needy family to save them from eviction. We sponsored a concert at Bladensburg High School by the Kent University Symphony Band, housing band members in Club members' homes, giving the proceeds to the high school to purchase band uniforms, helped support a student chorus called "The Vast Majority Singers", and donated funds to the Bladensburg Junior High School library.

Our first fundraiser was a concession stand at the County Fair in Upper Marlboro - with proceeds going to equip a dental chair in the County Health Building clinic. We continued this for several years, donating the second year's profits (along with Christmas donations from members) to purchase an X-Ray machine for the County Health Building's Crippled Children Rehabilitation Room. In 1963, we held our first pancake dinner - "all you can eat for $1.00", and served over 500 people. Our fundraisers were supplemented by donations to the Club's Project Fund that members originally made each year in lieu of giving each other Christmas presents, and later by donating the money they would have spent sending each other Christmas cards - instead displaying a single card from each member at Club meetings. The Club also scheduled a couple of "Million Dollar Meals" a year at which members were served sandwiches and the funds that would have paid for a real Rotary lunch were donated to the Foundation.

By our tenth anniversary, the Club had doubled in size, from 24 to 48 members. Much has changed since those early years. Even the District 762 we joined is no more, becoming District 7620 in 1991, when all Rotary District numbers added a zero to their designations. But our energy and enthusiasm, as well as many of our activities, remain the same, building on the solid foundation built by our Charter Members and members who participated in building the Club in its earlier years, whom we honor at Charter Night.

 

CONTRIBUTIONS OF OUR PRESENT MEMBERS - SOME HIGHLIGHTS

Only four Charter Members remain with the Club, three as honorary members. Honorary Member Ollie Zinsmeister (now a member of the Parole-Annapolis Club) was not only Charter President, but also served as President in 1989-90 - the year we received a Governor's Citation for sponsoring the creation and distribution of a thousand "Drug Free, It's a Way of Life!" posters - printed by the sign company owned by former member Tom Kerley and using a slogan suggested by the Club's first female member, former member Patti Lewis. Ollie created our Rotarian of the Year award, initially called the Ollie Zinsmeister Award and first presented in 1961 (to Charter Member Raleigh A. Donley, Sr., a Club member until his death in 1967 and the creator of the scrapbook of Club memorabilia that is the source for much of the information we have about our early years). Ollie himself was our Rotarian of the Year in 1968 and was one of six co-winners of the Club's first Hall of Fame awards in 1972.

Charter Member John Moore, still an active member of the Club today, served as our President in 1968-69. He was our Rotarian of the Year in 1964 and received the Club's Hall of Fame award in 1973. Charter Member Bill Mitchell is now an honorary member. He served as our sixth President, in 1964-65, was Rotarian of the Year in 1967, and received the Hall of Fame award in 1972. Charter Member Bill Porterfield, our President in 1966-67, was Rotarian of the Year in 1983 and received the Hall of Fame award in 1980. Bill Mitchell and Bill Porterfield, along with Russ Maske (who joined the Club in its first year, served as President in 1967-68, and received his own share of awards - Rotarian of the Year in 1985, Hall of Fame in 1972 and 1998), amused themselves at the 1962 District Conference in Ocean City (with the help of other members, says Russ - Raleigh Donley included) by writing a Club song that is still sometimes sung at meetings today (though it never sounds quite the same without Bill Mitchell playing his trumpet):

In Bladensburg, it's Rotary;

In Rotary, it's Bladensburg.

We all work together

to promote good will.

For in Bladensburg, it's Rotary;

In Rotary, it's Bladensburg.

Though John Wilkerson (Hall of Fame, 1996) is the only remaining member of the Club who joined us in the 1970s (1971), there are several members who first joined us in the 1980s. John Hoglund (President 2003-04, Hall of Fame 1995) joined us in 1980, followed by Milt Jernigan (Hall of Fame 1998). Mike McKeever (President 1987-88 and 2004-05, Rotarian of the Year 1986 and 1998, Hall of Fame 1991 and 2006, Bob Mitchell (President 1991-92, Rotarian of the Year 2001, Hall of Fame 1991), and Joe Slert (President 1988-89, Rotarian of the Year 2003, Hall of Fame 1990) in 1982. Jim Miller (President 2005-06, Rotarian of the Year 1990 and 2000, Hall of Fame 1997) joined the Club in 1986, and Dr. Floyd Holmgrain (Hall of Fame 2001) in 1987.

In the 1990s, 1992 was a particularly good recruitment year for the Bladensburg Club. Joanne Goldsmith, Honorary Member George Kapusta (Hall of Fame, 2000), and Scott Stanger (President 1999-2000, Hall of Fame 2003) all joined the Club in 1992, along with our first District Governor (2002-03), Bob Grill (President 1996-97 (half year), 1997-98, and 2006-07, Rotarian of the Year 1996 and 2004, Hall of Fame 1999). Fred Leinemann and next year's president Judy Cappuccilli (President 2002-03, Rotarian of the Year 1999 and 2006, Hall of Fame 2004) joined the Club in 1996, and our current president, Eolia Sibila (Hall of Fame 2005) in 1998.

The new century has brought us a new group of hard-working and enthusiastic new Rotarians just beginning their service to the Club and community - Mike Ahearn and Mary Dudley in 2003, Wallis Sibila and Beyhan Trock in 2004, Dr. Bill DuBoyce and Ann Swann in 2006, and a large group in 2007 - Roger Candelaria, Peggy Magee, and Jeff Allen, along with two "old" Rotarians rejoining the Club, Jan Kalshoven and Sydney Pierce. In January 2008 our most recent member was added, Hercule Clark, and we have hopes that yet another new member may be joining us before Charter Night.

Each new generation of Rotarians brings something new to the Club, as each draws on the wisdom and builds on the accomplishments of those who came before. We were fortunate in our beginnings, and on our history of good Rotarians, old and new, who have guided us since the beginning and continue to put "Service Above Self" as we join together to work toward a better world. 

THE ROTARY CLUB OF BLADENSBURG: OUR BEGINNINGS

Our Club actually began meeting over a year before our Charter was granted. Charter President Ollie Zinsmeister remembers several meetings in the home of the College Park Club president, and early histories tell us that Charter Officers were elected in a meeting at the General Outdoor Advertising Company offices, where Charter Member James Whitehead was branch manager. We were the third new Rotary club College Park sponsored in three years, having previously worked to establish clubs in District Heights and Laurel - and we like to believe they saved the best for last.

Under Ollie's leadership, the Club (still in provisional status) held its first 12:15 luncheon meeting at the Prince George's Country Club in Landover on Thursday, February 5, 1959. The College Park Club furnished speakers for our first two meetings. Volume 1, number 1, of the Blade was published on February 9, 1959, consisting of an inspirational message from Charter President Ollie Zinsmeister and several news items - including a request that material for the Blade be sent to Charter Member Bill Porterfield, our first Blade editor, and an appeal for suggestions for good speakers to be sent to Charter Member Bill Mitchell, who served as program chair - both continuing in these positions through the provisional period and first year. Charter Member John Moore chaired our first classification committee. By our second year, Bill Porterfield was our Club treasurer, and Bill Mitchell (Community Service) and John Moore (International Service) were lane directors serving on Board. All three are still with us, John as an active member, and the two others as honorary members.

Bladensburg was welcomed into District 762 as their "Alaska Club" - their 49^th club, chartered shortly after Alaska became our 49^th state. Our Charter Presentation was held at the Prince George's Country Club on the evening of March 31, 1959. Ollie's place card - preserved all these years in a scrapbook, is decorated with a round white button face, complete with red cloth top hat and bowtie - possibly intended to represent a snowman? The program included group singing (also a feature of our early Club meetings) and several performances by "The Senators", a vocal quartet. A welcome from the Honorable C. Howard Brown, Mayor of Bladensburg, was followed by the presentation of our Charter, by District Governor John C. Krusen. The principal speaker (addressing us on the subject of "Living Rotary") was PDG Reuben Steinmeyer. Charter President Ollie Zinsmeister recalls that we received many gifts from other clubs - a Rotary banner, bell, gavel, American flag, and badge case. Congratulatory letters poured in, including greetings from clubs in Australia, Canada, England, and Italy, and six clubs in South America.

Four new members joined the Club in its first year - one of them Russ Maske, who gave the invocation at our 1960 Charter Night, and by 1963 had joined the others on the Board, as Club secretary. We began bringing home District Awards for our activities right away. At the District Conference in 1960, the end of our first year as a Rotary Club, we were awarded an Honorable Mention for Best Community Service Program, as well as a plaque for Best Club Bulletin. After the College Park Rotary Anns invited the Bladensburg wives to one of their meetings, Marge Zinsmeister gathered the Bladensburg group together and we soon had an active group of Rotary Anns, meeting the first Wednesday of each month at the Prince George's County Club, with Bessie Mitchell serving as their president (and Wanda Maske as treasurer) in their third year, followed by Marguerite Moore as president in year four.

Club activities in these early years included sending several local boys to the YMCA Camp each year, beginning in 1959, our first summer. Other first-year activities included a "service above self" essay contest at Bladensburg High School (first prize was a wristwatch), and donated subscriptions to The Rotarian and plaques with the Four Way Test to the Bladensburg and DuVal High Schools. By the second year, International Lane Director John Moore reported 100% of our members were contributors to the Rotary Foundation. We are still working to recapture records of some of these early years, but it is clear we were a very active club.

Our scholarship program in place by 1963, when we offered a Bladensburg High School graduate a $200 full-tuition scholarship to Prince George's Community College (soon increased to two scholarships a year), and we had begun our Salvation Army bell-ringing. Reports in the Charter Night program that year mention an annual crab feast and golf tournament (a golf outing for fellowship that became a fundraiser later). Memorable projects from the mid-1960s included the lighting of the Peace Cross in Bladensburg, contributions to the Edgemeade School for emotionally disturbed boys, the distribution of 4-Way Test book covers to students at Bladensburg High School, and the presentation of framed copies of the 4-Way Test to the Montgomery Ward department store in Prince George's Plaza, for display in public areas. (Copies were also given to all store employees). For several years, the Club gave support to an elementary school in LaLucha, Costa Rica (a continuing project funded by donations members made to our International Service fund in lieu of sending Christmas cards). We helped build a playground at the Prince George's Retarded Children's Day Care Center, donated a freezer to them, and gave wooden puzzles to the Center's children at Christmas. We donated a month's rent to a needy family to save them from eviction. We sponsored a concert at Bladensburg High School by the Kent University Symphony Band, housing band members in Club members' homes, giving the proceeds to the high school to purchase band uniforms, helped support a student chorus called "The Vast Majority Singers", and donated funds to the Bladensburg Junior High School library.

Our first fundraiser was a concession stand at the County Fair in Upper Marlboro - with proceeds going to equip a dental chair in the County Health Building clinic. We continued this for several years, donating the second year's profits (along with Christmas donations from members) to purchase an X-Ray machine for the County Health Building's Crippled Children Rehabilitation Room. In 1963, we held our first pancake dinner - "all you can eat for $1.00", and served over 500 people. Our fundraisers were supplemented by donations to the Club's Project Fund that members originally made each year in lieu of giving each other Christmas presents, and later by donating the money they would have spent sending each other Christmas cards - instead displaying a single card from each member at Club meetings. The Club also scheduled a couple of "Million Dollar Meals" a year at which members were served sandwiches and the funds that would have paid for a real Rotary lunch were donated to the Foundation.

By our tenth anniversary, the Club had doubled in size, from 24 to 48 members. Much has changed since those early years. Even the District 762 we joined is no more, becoming District 7620 in 1991, when all Rotary District numbers added a zero to their designations. But our energy and enthusiasm, as well as many of our activities, remain the same, building on the solid foundation built by our Charter Members and members who participated in building the Club in its earlier years, whom we honor at Charter Night.

 

CONTRIBUTIONS OF OUR PRESENT MEMBERS - SOME HIGHLIGHTS

Only four Charter Members remain with the Club, three as honorary members. Honorary Member Ollie Zinsmeister (now a member of the Parole-Annapolis Club) was not only Charter President, but also served as President in 1989-90 - the year we received a Governor's Citation for sponsoring the creation and distribution of a thousand "Drug Free, It's a Way of Life!" posters - printed by the sign company owned by former member Tom Kerley and using a slogan suggested by the Club's first female member, former member Patti Lewis. Ollie created our Rotarian of the Year award, initially called the Ollie Zinsmeister Award and first presented in 1961 (to Charter Member Raleigh A. Donley, Sr., a Club member until his death in 1967 and the creator of the scrapbook of Club memorabilia that is the source for much of the information we have about our early years). Ollie himself was our Rotarian of the Year in 1968 and was one of six co-winners of the Club's first Hall of Fame awards in 1972.

Charter Member John Moore, still an active member of the Club today, served as our President in 1968-69. He was our Rotarian of the Year in 1964 and received the Club's Hall of Fame award in 1973. Charter Member Bill Mitchell is now an honorary member. He served as our sixth President, in 1964-65, was Rotarian of the Year in 1967, and received the Hall of Fame award in 1972. Charter Member Bill Porterfield, our President in 1966-67, was Rotarian of the Year in 1983 and received the Hall of Fame award in 1980. Bill Mitchell and Bill Porterfield, along with Russ Maske (who joined the Club in its first year, served as President in 1967-68, and received his own share of awards - Rotarian of the Year in 1985, Hall of Fame in 1972 and 1998), amused themselves at the 1962 District Conference in Ocean City (with the help of other members, says Russ - Raleigh Donley included) by writing a Club song that is still sometimes sung at meetings today (though it never sounds quite the same without Bill Mitchell playing his trumpet):

In Bladensburg, it's Rotary;

In Rotary, it's Bladensburg.

We all work together

to promote good will.

For in Bladensburg, it's Rotary;

In Rotary, it's Bladensburg.

Though John Wilkerson (Hall of Fame, 1996) is the only remaining member of the Club who joined us in the 1970s (1971), there are several members who first joined us in the 1980s. John Hoglund (President 2003-04, Hall of Fame 1995) joined us in 1980, followed by Milt Jernigan (Hall of Fame 1998). Mike McKeever (President 1987-88 and 2004-05, Rotarian of the Year 1986 and 1998, Hall of Fame 1991 and 2006, Bob Mitchell (President 1991-92, Rotarian of the Year 2001, Hall of Fame 1991), and Joe Slert (President 1988-89, Rotarian of the Year 2003, Hall of Fame 1990) in 1982. Jim Miller (President 2005-06, Rotarian of the Year 1990 and 2000, Hall of Fame 1997) joined the Club in 1986, and Dr. Floyd Holmgrain (Hall of Fame 2001) in 1987.

In the 1990s, 1992 was a particularly good recruitment year for the Bladensburg Club. Joanne Goldsmith, Honorary Member George Kapusta (Hall of Fame, 2000), and Scott Stanger (President 1999-2000, Hall of Fame 2003) all joined the Club in 1992, along with our first District Governor (2002-03), Bob Grill (President 1996-97 (half year), 1997-98, and 2006-07, Rotarian of the Year 1996 and 2004, Hall of Fame 1999). Fred Leinemann and next year's president Judy Cappuccilli (President 2002-03, Rotarian of the Year 1999 and 2006, Hall of Fame 2004) joined the Club in 1996, and our current president, Eolia Sibila (Hall of Fame 2005) in 1998.

The new century has brought us a new group of hard-working and enthusiastic new Rotarians just beginning their service to the Club and community - Mike Ahearn and Mary Dudley in 2003, Wallis Sibila and Beyhan Trock in 2004, Dr. Bill DuBoyce and Ann Swann in 2006, and a large group in 2007 - Roger Candelaria, Peggy Magee, and Jeff Allen, along with two "old" Rotarians rejoining the Club, Jan Kalshoven and Sydney Pierce. In January 2008 our most recent member was added, Hercule Clark, and we have hopes that yet another new member may be joining us before Charter Night.

Each new generation of Rotarians brings something new to the Club, as each draws on the wisdom and builds on the accomplishments of those who came before. We were fortunate in our beginnings, and on our history of good Rotarians, old and new, who have guided us since the beginning and continue to put "Service Above Self" as we join together to work toward a better world.

 

OUR FIRST FUND-RAISER - A CONCESSION STAND AT THE COUNTY FAIR

Upper Marlboro, September 1958

Among those pictured are Club Past Presidents George McDaniel (1965) and George Kenridge (1962), Club Members Jack Malakatis and Dr. Ron Miller, and Marty Whipps, the general manager of Harvey Dairy. (Many thanks to Russ Maske for helping us identify them.)