The Rotary Club of Farragut has for a while had its collective eye focused on reaching the 100-member milestone number, and it happened – on Wednesday, April 24, 2019.
Farragut Rotary was founded on April 22, 1980. It has taken the club 14,246 days to reach that magic No. 100. A number is just a number, but the more members the club has, the more resources it has to carry out its projects and raise money for the deserving organizations we support.
The Rotary year runs from July 1 to June 30, and on July 1, 2018, the club began the year with 92 members. Past President Fred Martin, co-chair of the club’s membership committee, says the club has added 15 members this year and lost seven – to job changes and relocations mostly. So the net is eight, and that takes the membership total from 92 to 100.
On April 24, President Keith Bryson inducted the 100th member – Jennifer Patterson. Her sponsor into the club is Amanda DeBord. Jennifer is an Ohio native but a Knoxvillian at heart, she says. She has undergraduate degrees in Interdisciplinary Anthropology and French, and a minor in Linguistics from the University of Akron.
She and her friend Christopher Burger founded Century Harvest Farms Foundation in 2017, and she is the CEO. This is no fly-by-night business – Century Harvest Farms has been awarded TNCO’s Business of the Year award and Second Harvest Food Bank of East Tennessee’s Innovation Award.
During our meeting a week earlier, we inducted Scott Brockamp as our 98th member, and Mark Hastings was the 99th. Teri Jo Fox was Scott’s sponsor, and Ray Fisher sponsored Mark.
Scott owns HIS Security, a company he founded in 2008. His co-founder is Doug Fracker. They are in their ninth year and moved the business to Farragut in 2016. Before security, he worked in the auto mechanics and national telecommunications businesses.
Mark and Ray have been friends for 40 years. He’s originally from the Washington, D.C., area and attended the University of Tennessee, where he met his wife, Kathy. He has degrees in political science and history from UT, and Kathy has an undergraduate degree and master’s in speech therapy. Mark now works at State Farm Insurance.
Here are the 15 new members the club has added this year to date (and we’re hoping to add a few more before June 30): Cody Barnes, Sonya Ford, Scott Weinstein, Lucas Shouse, Dave Freudenberg (a past district governor from Boca Raton, Fla.), Brian Elton, Bruce Patterson, Richard Copeland, Greg Tilley, Cory Gerlach, Joshua Hornberger, Cindy Kraus, Mark Hastings, Scott Brockamp and Jennifer Patterson.
News and notes …
On Wednesday, May 15, the club is vacating its home at Fox Den Country Club because the 2019 Knoxville Open Pro Golf Tournament will be played that week. The club will meet at The Pavilion at Concord Park for our May Club Assembly and to celebrate having 100 members. We’ll also be raising money for Polio Plus with a fun day of “Pets for Polio.” Secretary Julie Blaylock will be taking pictures of you and your pets that day, so bring along the dogs and cats and camels to be photographed. You can have the pictures made for a small donation – $25 – to eradicate polio!
About 20 club members will be doing our annual Stream Cleanup on Saturday, May 18. Project Committee co-chair Teri Jo Fox says that our Little Turkey Creek stream cleanup will run from 8-11 a.m. Everyone will meet at David’s Abbey Carpet & Floors. “This way we’ll be done before midday, when it starts to get hot,” she says. The cleanup will be on the portion of the creek from across the street from David’s to behind Costco.
If you’re interested in exploring membership in Farragut Rotary, drop me an email. We meet at 12:15 p.m. each Wednesday at Fox Den Country Club. You also can call me at 865-659-3562.