After speaking of Margaret, I need to speak of Gordon. Ive felt a special kinship to him as a Rotarian, as I tread the path of the District Governorship. He is possibily the oldest living Past District Governor in Rotary. He turned over the gavel to his successor twenty-one days before I was born. We have chatted on the challenges of being Governor, and his challenges almost six decades ago will be the same challenges I face, as they are timeless challenges to any organization like Rotary. But I learned something new about Gordon today. They had a running slide show of Gordon and Margarets life together, and in it I saw a young man in the uniform of a naval officer. I asked him about that. He was a sailor in WWII. Commander of a Small Boat Group. Meaning he led the landing craft that got soldiers and Marines ashore on many D-Days in the Pacific. The Marshalls, Saipan, Peleliu, the Philippines, and Okinawa, ending the war with only one Purple Heart, for all that exposure. He came home, went to law school on the GI Bill, married his college sweetheart, hung out his shingle in Valley Falls, Kansas, where he was born and grew up, and raised a fine family of five children and an unknown to me number of grand-children and great-grandchildren. Some of us really do have a Norman Rockwell kind of life. Good on ya, Gordon. And thank you for the foundation you helped build, that I will try to maintain and grow.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 20:13:26 +0000