saw Jean Bernardo's Induction for a second year as President with a lunch at Bryanston Country Club
It was a most enjoyable lunch with excellent food and congratulations to Jean for going 'Smart Casual' and getting away from our over 60 years of Black Tie Dinners. When thinking about this I did wonder if it wasn't 'White Tie'when it started? Probably not as I have a photograph of a family member as President of the Rotary Club of Barnes taken in the late 1920's and that's Black Tie.
PDG Ken Stonestreet had the pleasure of inducting Jean for her second term in a row which was a very nice gesture on her part.
Ann President June Virtue inducted Debby Steenhof and Penny Robinson as Presidents for half a year each. A very good idea as it does spread the load.
All the photographs are on the separate Induction Page as it means we could put them all in willynilly but there are no captions because if I were to caption them all you would only get The Ramble much too late.
You can easily save a copy for yourself as they are in jpg format so click and save.
This Week
David Kinghorn is going to talk to us about Robert Stevenson, the Scottish engineer famed for his design and construction of lighthouses. I can find nothing about David Kinghorn so here is a short introduction to Robert Stevenson.
Robert Stevenson was born in Glasgow on 8th June 1772. Robert’s father Alan and his brother Hugh ran a trading company from the city dealing in goods from the West Indies, and it was on a trip to the island of St Kitts that the brothers met their early end, when they contracted and died from a fever.
Without a regular income, Robert’s mother was left to bring up young Robert as best she could. Robert received his early education at a charity school before the family moved to Edinburgh where he was enrolled at the High School. A deeply religious person, it was through her church work that Robert’s mother met, and later married, Thomas Smith. A talented and ingenious mechanic, Thomas had recently been appointed engineer to the newly formed Northern Lighthouse Board.
Throughout his latter teenage years Robert quite literally served his apprenticeship as assistant to his stepfather. Together they worked to supervise and improve the handful of crude coal-fired lighthouses that existed at that time, introducing innovations such as lamps and reflectors.
Robert worked hard, and so impressed, that at the tender age of just 19 he was left to supervise the construction of his first lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbrae in the River Clyde. Perhaps recognising his lack of a more formal education, Robert also began to attend lectures in mathematics and science at the Andersonian Institute (now University of Strathclyde) in Glasgow.
Seasonal by its very nature, Robert successfully combined his practical summer work of constructing lighthouses in the Orkney Islands, whilst devoting the winter months to academic study at Edinburgh University.
In 1797 Robert was appointed engineer to the Lighthouse Board and two years later married his stepsister Jean, Thomas Smith’s eldest daughter by an earlier marriage.
When Tamara Smiley Hamilton was 13 years
old, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles,
where her family lived, erupted in violence.
In August 1965, police pulled over an African American man for a driving offense and the situation spiraled out of control. Long-simmering tensions in the largely black neighborhood came to the surface, and for six days the community was torn by riots, fire, looting, and violence. Thirty-four people died, over 1,000 were injured, and thousands more were arrested. Hamilton can still recall hearing glass shattering and seeing embers flying as buildings burned.
"I remember thinking, 'This can’t be all there is to my life. If I survive this, then I am supposed to do something with my life,'" she says.
Hamilton decided then to devote herself to peace and inclusion. To develop her leadership skills, she participated in a local youth council and in a camp sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, where she met young people from different backgrounds.
"I started learning about building relationships and peacebuilding at an early age," says Hamilton.
As she pursued a career in education and university administration, she promoted diversity: As dean of students at Occidental College in Los Angeles, she was charged with recruiting African American students, and at the National Education Association, she created a career development program for employees who felt stuck in lower-level positions.
After retiring from the NEA in 2012, Hamilton started Audacious Coaching, a consulting firm that helps organizations improve cross-cultural communication and foster inclusive workplaces.
Part of her mission is to make people aware of their prejudices. "Sometimes you’re not aware of your own biases, and you can do things that are stinging to others," she says. She became a Rotarian a year ago after learning about a water purification project that the Herndon club supports in Africa. Being part of Rotary meshes perfectly with her lifelong desire to promote peace and understanding. "When I saw what Rotary was doing with those kinds of service projects, I was hooked."
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