October 27,2014 Spokesman

"President John Pruitt called the meeting to order at 6:30

 

 Jason Overleese led the Pledge of Allegiance

 

Dave Dubois - Rotary Moment - A concept of either providing Thanksgiving food baskets for John Muir or providing frozen meat by using funds from the club was discussed as options. Also, we are looking to adopt 5 families and provide gifts to families prior to Christmas.

 

 Brian Tucker - Polio Moment - 44 years ago 125 countries had Polio, 71 did not.  By 1991, all the America's were polio free, by 1994 the western hemisphere was polio free, by 2014, only Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan have polio. The efforts of the foundation have been swift and steady with staggering results for ending polio.

 

Rick Walters: Happy Dollars

 

 Announcements:

 John Pruitt - Marianne Webb's memorial service will be held at St. Thomas Church (Medina) at 11:00am Saturday (Nov. 1st). Please send all donations to th Overlake Hospital. Please keep Bob's family in your wishes.

 Christmas Cruise - Dec. 6th 3:30pm, $100 per person

 Bob Cohon - International Student of the month program kicked off and his team interviewed 3 students that will be joining us starting next month.

 Bob Webb - Veterans Day - ALL MILITARY VETERANS PLEASE WEAR EITHER YOUR UNIFORM OR BRING ANY MEMORABILIA FROM YOUR SERVICE. We will ask each veteran to provide a few minutes to talk about their service to our country.

 

Program: Meet the new members!

 This was a great meeting where we met the new members Samir Saluja and Ben Premak. Samir started off the program with his magical use of powerpoint, and explained how he grew up in Pittsburg and getting an early start with civil work at 4H. He had an exciting life of traveling, after graduating from Michigan, with the Grateful Dead selling burritos (not sure we want to know what was in them!), then joining the peace corps and traveling for a few more years overseas. He then went to work for Emerson electronics, and found his way to Washington and now works at Microsoft. He is a proud dad to an 18 month old boy!

 

Ben Premak provided a great story of his life that involved his roots in Texas, his love of Japanese culture, and a great story about meeting his wife on a trip to go teach English in Japan. It was fate! They were in the same program, same travel schedule, and lived within a few minutes of each other in Japan. They were married soon after! Upon graduating from Penn State with his law degree, he passed the bar exam in WA. but not after he toured Iceland for a number of months! Ben has an insatiable travel bug, and he is an avid cyclist, although now he rides his custom built dog sled training tricycle. He and his wife moved to WA. this last year, and breed a new type of dog that looks like half of a wolf mixed with a little husky. They have a small business of breeding and new puppies are on the way in couple months!  Ben is an avid Yoga practitioner, and is a constitutionalist! "