Brief histories of the "First 100" Clubs

Rotary Club of Houston 53

Rotary International District 5890

Home Club of the Rotary International 1915 Convention

(the "philosophy" convention)

Home of the 1972 International Convention

The Rotary Club of Houston was founded in August of 1912 soon after newspaper executive Robert Cornell returned from an advertising convention in Dallas where he had met a member of the newly formed Minneapolis Rotary Club. 

The Club's official charter was 1 November of 1912, as shown in this duplicate charter issued in August of 1931, but signed by then president Glenn C. Mead.

The new Houston club began meeting in the Mecca Cafe where club president Cornell had to hear members complain about the $1 initiation fee and $2 annual dues.  A year later, club members and wives gathered for an evening banquet at the brand new Rice Hotel a day before its official opening. 

The club would meet there for the next seventy–three years.  In 1914, the club hosted 1288 Rotarians and wives who attended Rotary International’s 5^th Annual Convention in Houston. 

Thereafter the club’s membership grew steadily until September, 1963, when it became the world’s largest with 773 members, two more than the founding Chicago club’s total.  Meanwhile, RI credited Houston with bringing Rotary to numerous other Texas cities as far away as Amarillo, 600 miles to the northwest in the Texas panhandle.  In 1972, Houston again hosted the RI convention and its 14,000 delegates. When the Houston club reached its zenith with 941 members in 1985, there were 34 neighborhood Rotary clubs throughout Houston, 24 of which the Houston club had sponsored.

    The Houston club’s distinguished record of service to the community began in 1919 when it first supported the young residents of the Burnett Bayland County Home with Christmas parties and summer picnics, support that has continued uninterrupted for 82 years and today also involves computer mentoring to help the troubled youngsters improve their reading skills.  Following a club luncheon in 1944, Goodwill Industries was launched in Houston, and is now among the largest in the world. In 1958, the club began judging applications for the Houston Endowment’s “Jones Scholarships”, a continuing program which grew larger through the years and to date has awarded more than $44 million in scholarships.  In 1966, not long after Houston joined two other local clubs to save the area’s Little League from bankruptcy, club members began counseling inmates about to be released from the Texas prison system, a program of the Fresh Start Committee which currently also coordinates television conferencing to help female inmates improve their family, financial and health life skills.  In late 1970, five weeks after NFL Coach Vince Lombardi died of cancer, the first Rotary Lombardi Award dinner was held to recognize the outstanding college football lineman before 800 persons and guest speaker U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew.  To date proceeds of those annual banquets have raised just under $3 million for cancer research.

Charter and Anniversary Graphics from Dr. Wolfgang Ziegler

Texas "100 Clubs"

The Most of the First 100

Austin 63

Beaumont 72

Galveston 73

Waco 74

Fort Worth 75

Dallas 39

San Antonio 52

Houston 53