Greetings from the Rotary Club of St. Andrews

June 2012

I thought that before I hand over to our new President Jim Macgregor, I should just          

bring you up to date on all that has been happening in our Club since Christmas.

As I told you in my last letter we were trying to move into a new age (for us) of communication via email and our website.   This has been quite successful and now all our meetings, events, special occasions and details of new members are all on the website.  You can follow everything we do by clicking onto The Rotary Club of St. Andrews and there you will find details of speakers we have had, what has happened recently and what is going to happen in the future weeks.

One of our members, John Black, has spent many hours transferring all the old Bulletins and Star magazines onto the web so that they will be there as a history of what our club had done over the years and, as you all know, we have the wonderful scrapbooks which Ian Johnston has kept over the years which also show the history of our Club.  Ian has decided the time has come for him to retire from the Publicity scene after fifteen years of committed and devoted service.  He has attended every event we have had and taken photographs as well as writing an article for the Citizen newspaper each week.  He has been a very loyal, devoted Rotarian since joining the Club thirty four years ago.

Since the start of the year we have had some very good speakers with interesting things to tell us.

One of our new members Arthur Griffiths gave his vocational talk After qualifying as a vet, he was sent to Staffordshire as a Veterinary Officer before getting a posting to Edinburgh in 1982. He was promoted to the post of Divisional Veterinary Manager in 1989, just in time for the outbreak of BSE. During his career between 1967 and 2002 he has been involved in the management of every notifiable disease outbreak, including brucellosis, TB, swine fever, foot & mouth disease (twice).  In 2002 he became an external examiner for the Dick Vet (4 years), set up a Veterinary audit for Lithuania in 2004, organised the Chief Veterinary Officers' Conference, drew up contingency plans for salmon farms and has been the principal advisor to the Ministry's Legal Department.  In March 2011, he decided the time had come to retire.

Burns Lunch this year was organised by the two Jimmies (my two henchmen) and a great job they did with Bob Philip piping in the Haggis. 

Peter Davidson gave us a very interesting talk on the Life of Paul Harris the founder of Rotary and we are proud to have nine of our members who have been made Paul Harris Fellows for the outstanding work they have done in Rotary. We had a young man from Dundee telling us about the work he was doing in China. Colin Mitchell took some of our Rotaract Club to visit the Bull Sales in Stirling. Colin has managed to get a thriving Rotaract Club going (ages between 18-30 years) mainly students from all different countries around the world, so we are hoping this Club will continue to grow as the years go by.   He also took them to see the new lambs born in the spring.

We had a visit to the Byre to see Jim MacGregors latest production, which included Zac, one of the Ambassadorial Scholars taking part in it. He was the student who spoke at our Joint meeting with Inner Wheel. He is a very able young man from Ohio.

Then we had Gordon Wowk, a new member, give his vocational talk. Gordon was born and educated in Dundee and St Andrews. After graduating he became Assistant Principal Teacher of Modern Languages at Auchmuty High School in Glenrothes. Later he moved to Dunfermline High School as Principal of German.  Subsequently he was appointed Depute Rector of Dunfermline High School from which he retired in 2008.  Gordon is an accomplished musician particularly in jazz and he has played with the Colin Thomson Band and the Gavin Irvine Trio.

Past Presidents Sylvia Donaldson and Alan Constable, along with Alan