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District 5550
District 5550 is an
all-Canadian district comprised of forty-seven Rotary Clubs with a
total membership of approximately 1,969. Twenty-three clubs are
located in Saskatchewan, twenty-one in Manitoba, and three in
northwest Ontario. The Clubs range in size from twelve to one
hundred seven members. Although District 5550 is one of the largest
Districts in the Rotary world, what makes it unique is not its size
but its rich history.
A number of
District 5550 Rotarians filled significant Rotary offices at the
international level. Walter J. Clubb of the Winnipeg Club served as
second vice-president of the International Association of Rotary
Clubs in 1913-14. J. F. C. .Menlove, also a member of the Winnipeg
Club, served as first vice-president in 1913-14, but did not make
it through to president. That honour fell to Dr. Leslie Pidgeon, a
member of the Winnipeg Club, (1915-1925), who was elected president
of the international body in 1917-18. Joseph J. Caulder,
successively a member of the Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, and Regina Rotary
Clubs, served on eighteen international committees – some as chair -
between 1922 and 1961.
The City of Winnipeg in 1910
In the late 1800s, Winnipeg,
Manitoba had gained worldwide recognition for its meteoric growth;
by 1900, it had become home to the largest cash wheat market in
North America. The city was Western Canadian headquarters for three
railways: the Canadian Pacific, the Grand Trunk National, and the
Canadian Northern. Settlers were pouring into the western plains
through Winnipeg, leading Chicago journalist William E. Curtis to
predict in 1911 that Winnipeg “is destined to become one of the
greatest distributing commercial centers of the continent as well as
a manufacturing community of great importance.” Winnipeg acquired
the sobriquet, Chicago of the North. The city gradually won the
attention of international entertainers of the day such as Charlie
Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Harry Houdini, and others who regularly
performed there. It is not surprising that Rotary should take root
in Winnipeg.
The Rotary Club of Winnipeg
In his 1935 book, This
Rotarian Age, Paul Harris described the formation of the
Winnipeg Rotary Club as follows:
Naturally, Canada presented the most logical field outside of
the United States for extension, and chance made Winnipeg the
most available city. The bombardment of Winnipeg’s ramparts
began in 1909 and never ceased until capitulation in November
1910. Thus the movement was provided with an excuse for
discarding the name, “National Association of Rotary Clubs,” and
appropriating the more pretentious “International Association of
Rotary Clubs.”
Harris’s account is only
partially correct. The incentive for creating a Rotary Club in
Winnipeg came from within, not from Chicago. The organizer of the
Winnipeg Rotary Club and arguably the father of Rotary
International, was a little-known Canadian named P. A. C. McIntyre.
McIntyre was
employed by Berry Brothers, varnish manufacturers in Winnipeg. In
the summer of 1910, while returning from a varnish manufacturers’
conference in Detroit, McIntyre stopped in Chicago, to visit his
cousin Will Lander, who was with the U.S. Postal Service and a
member of the Chicago Rotary Club. Lander explained Rotary to
McIntyre and arranged for him to have lunch with Paul Harris and
Chesley Perry, Secretary of the National Association of Rotary
Clubs, who inspired him with the Rotary story. After lunch, Paul
Harris took McIntyre back to his office and gave him some literature
about Rotary. It was said that McIntyre returned to Winnipeg “just
filled with Rotary.”
Because McIntyre
was not well acquainted in Winnipeg, he felt that a Rotary Club
would be an excellent means of enlarging his circle of business
friends there. He was impressed with the Objects of Rotary,
particularly the notion of bringing men from different businesses
and professions together for the purpose of doing business with each
other (a principal object in 1910). McIntyre discussed the
possibility of forming a Rotary Club in Winnipeg with his friend and
lawyer A. W. Morley. Morley was enthusiastic about the idea, so
they began corresponding with Chesley Perry. The historical records
of the formation of the Club including the first meeting were later
donated to the Province of Manitoba Archives for safe keeping. They
form the basis of the following account.
In the fall of
1910, McIntyre spoke to a number of friends regarding the formation
of a Rotary Club. A great deal of discussion took place prior to
calling the first meeting, during which time someone contacted the
Rotary Club of Boston and obtained a copy of its bylaws. Also,
numerous communications – nicknamed Harris’s bombardments – took
place with the Chicago Rotary Club.
On
3 November 1910, the first meeting of the Winnipeg Rotary Club took
place in the YMCA building. The following attended: P. A. C.
McIntyre, William N. Brown, W. T. Pearce, R. Kershaw, A. W.
Morley. At the meeting, it was agreed that a Rotary Club should be
formed. The minutes of the meeting read as follows: “It was moved by
A. W. Morley, seconded by W. N. Brown that the club be organized
and be called the Winnipeg Rotary Club. Carried.” Thus the Rotary
Club of Winnipeg became the seventeenth Rotary Club in the world and
the first Rotary Club outside of the United States. The newly formed
Club did not, at that time, seek formal recognition or a charter
from the recently organized National Association of Rotary Clubs.
The November meeting was adjourned for four days to permit the
initial five attendees to seek out other members. The membership
drive was successful, as ten men attended the next Rotary meeting on
7 November at A. W. Morley’s office in the McArthur Building in
Winnipeg. McIntyre told the group about his meeting with Harris and
Perry. He reiterated the objects of the Rotary Clubs, drawing
special attention to “the binding together of men in different
trades and professions for the purpose of doing business with each
other.” A second motion creating a Winnipeg Rotary Club was passed,
and a slate of officers elected. The first president was George A.
Kobold.
A
third meeting of the new Club took place on 15 November 1910 at
which Morley showed the Club the set of Rotary bylaws that had been
obtained from the Rotary Club of Boston. Using a pen, Morley changed
the Boston by-laws into by-laws for the Winnipeg Rotary Club and the
Club adopted them. At a meeting on 7 December 1910, a letter from
Ches Perry was read which stated: “It is evident that this will now
have to be the International Association.”
At
a meeting on 11 October 1911, the Club collected one dollar per
person as the fee for the National Association of Rotary Clubs. The
Club secretary sent the money to the National Association with a
request for a formal charter. On 13 April 1912, Paul Harris signed
the charter of the Rotary Club of Winnipeg. At that time the
Winnipeg Club was recognized as Club Number thirty-five. Five
members applied for letters patent under the authority of the Joint
Stock Companies Act of Manitoba and the Winnipeg Rotary Club Ltd.
came into existence on 14 September 1912.
On
2 February 1914, the lieutenant-governor of Manitoba signed into law
“An Act to incorporate The Rotary Club of Winnipeg,” which was
passed by the Manitoba legislature. The incorporators were: James
Francis Campbell Menlove, manager; James Woodburn Hillhouse,
secretary; James Hamilton Gordon Russell, architect; Luther Judge
Rumford, manager; John Alexander Campbell, grocer; Herbert Thomas
Reade, chartered accountant; Walter James Clubb, tobacconist;
Charles Edward Fletcher, manager; and Arthur Willans Morley,
barrister-at-law. The corporation - called the “club” – was managed
by a board of directors composed of six members. The board had the
usual powers granted to corporations, but the Club had incorporated
principally to prevent anyone else from using the Rotary name in
Manitoba. As far as is known, the Winnipeg Club was the first of
many clubs around the world to incorporate, legally, necessitating
Rotary International to form a policy regarding the relationship
between incorporated clubs and Rotary International. The 1921 Rotary
Constitution and By-laws Committee drafted the following policy:
“[The] governing body of Rotary International may permit any
member club or any club that may be organized hereafter to
become a body corporate under the laws of the country or
political division where such club is located and may permit
such club to alter or construct its constitution … provided such
club shall, so far as is possible, retain or embody in its
constitution the fundamental principles of Rotary as defined by
Rotary International.”
Similar policies exist
today. For insurance purposes, most Clubs either incorporate or
incorporate an unusual activity rather than the club itself.
The Internationalization of Rotary
As discussed above, the
National Association of Rotary Clubs was formed in Chicago in 1910.
The Winnipeg Club was admitted to membership in October 1911. Rotary
clubs had been established also in Dublin, London, and Belfast. A
delegation led by Winnipeg Club president W. J. Clubb attended the
third annual convention of the National Association held in
Duluth, Minnesota, on 6 to 9 August 1912. Taking a cue from
Chesley Perry’s observation in 1911 that the National Association
would have to become an “international association,” Clubb moved the
motion: “that
the name of the organization be changed from National Association of
Rotary Clubs to International Association of Rotary Clubs.”
The motion carried, and the
third convention of the National Association became the first
convention of the International Association of Rotary Clubs. In
1921, under the presidency of Crawford McCullough, the name was
changed again to Rotary International.
The Winnipeg International Goodwill Meeting
Paul Harris always had a
friendly attitude toward Canada and Canadian Rotarians.
He once observed: “One
hundred unbroken years of American-Canadian friendship which has
existed along three thousand miles of unfortified borderland
discredits the case of those who proclaim the inevitability of war.”
On another occasion, he wrote graciously about the Winnipeg Goodwill
Meeting: “One of the most interesting developments is the
organization of meetings between Rotarians of various countries.
Among the oldest is the inter-country meeting held yearly between
Rotarians of Canada and the United States by the Rotary Club of
Winnipeg.” In 1935, Paul Harris sent a message of congratulations to
the Rotary Club of Winnipeg on the occasion of the Club’s
twenty-fifth the anniversary. The letter was read at the
International Goodwill Meeting. Inter-country Goodwill Meetings
were a product of the Fourth Object of Rotary , the so-called
international objective of “advancement of international
understanding, goodwill, and peace” introduced by Halifax Rotarian
Donald MacRae in 1921. The Winnipeg Club’s goodwill weekend hosting
Rotarians from North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the western
provinces was launched in 1924 and after eighty years is still
functioning. Paul Harris had a personal knowledge of it having
attended the 1929 meeting and delivering a speech titled “Early Days
of Rotary and its First Meetings in Chicago.” In a letter dated 22
February 1941 for the seventeenth meeting he reminisced about his
visit to the 1929 Goodwill Meeting:
To Rotarians in
attendance at this seventeenth annual goodwill meeting of the
Rotary Club of Winnipeg, the city which by its joining the
Rotary fellowship long years ago converted a dream of
internationality into an actual fact. Greetings!
I still treasure
happy memories of the goodwill meeting I attended in 1929.
Perhaps Rotary’s most fascinating objective is the
promotion of international understanding and goodwill. For
centuries the ideal of a world at peace has been a will of the
wisp ever beckoning us on, but always eluding our grasp.
Burns’s plan for the brotherhood of man
rang out through the darkness of his period in Clarion Tones. He
predicted the ultimate achievement of the high purpose even as
we are predicting it now. The concept is so natural and human
that it will not go down.
The United States and Canada are
fortunate indeed that we speak the same language and inherited
many common traditions. These facts impose great
responsibilities on citizens of both countries. We have been
singly blessed and it is for us to be the great exemplars of the
practicability of the doctrine which we espouse.
Let us continue in our efforts to promote
understanding and goodwill with courage unabated and with
necessary enthusiasm as the years roll on.
Friends in attendance at the seventeenth annual
meeting sponsored by the Winnipeg Rotary Club, more power to you
and may each and every one of you become true and vigorous
proponents of the highest ideal of the human mind. Be you now
and always Ambassadors of goodwill.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Harris
Gordon Hunter, a past president of the Winnipeg Club, thought that a
proper recognition should be accorded all out-of-town Rotarians
attending Goodwill Meetings. He created the Order of Rotary
International Fellowship which was unveiled at a Goodwill Meeting
on 17 February 1934. All out of town Rotarians who attend a
minimum of five Goodwill Meetings become members of the Order which
entitles them to wear a distinctive medal designed by Hunter.
Model United Nations Assembly (MUNA)
Another significant international program sponsored by the Rotary
Club of Winnipeg is the Model United Nations Assembly (MUNA), an
annual event for high school students from Manitoba, Saskatchewan,
Northern Ontario, and the Northern U.S.A. |
