On November 27th, 2024, the beautiful fall weather took a turn towards winter. The Wagner Rotary convened with a few absences as the fire siren blew about 11:30 and there were other absences as well. It turned out to be a relaxing meeting as we cruised right through the agenda. President Weber gave a blessing for the food and asked for guidance for all Rotarians to give generously of our time and talents in our Wagner Community.

We got off to a rocky start however with Rotarian Jeff Doom leading us in song with Red River Valley. Several Rotarians started closing their songbooks after the first verse, but Doom kept right on plowing into the second verse. A sigh of relief went up as we all finished the song on several different keys.

Membership Minute Chairperson Patty Frei finished the Paul Harris Fellowship Month of November by sharing information about the Paul Harris Fellows and the Paul Harris Society. A Rotarian becomes a Paul Haris Fellow after giving contributions that support our Annual Fund, Polio Plus, or an approved Foundation Grant. A pin with corresponding stones is given after each accumulated $1,000 contribution. An example of Foundation Grants can be seen at our Wagner Lake at the Rotary Shelter and the Landscaping project.

Sergeant at Arms Jerry Weber issued the following fines: $2 to each member who was eating last week during the Membership Minute in order to save time for the program by Nick Dion; $2 to Jamie Soukup for his feed sales and not making it to the meeting; $2 to Becky Brunsing who hadn’t been present for several meetings; $2 to all the USD fans in the membership for beating NDSU in Football and Volleyball; $2 to Margaret Doom for her nice brown stocking hat; $2 to Jeff Doom for his high school hairdo for the day; $1 to Tim Thaler and Jerry Weber for wearing cool collars; $2 to Bill Frei for having really long arms for reading; $2 to Amanda Bechen for thinking we would have turkey for lunch. There were no Happy Fines, but Jeff Doom offered a $2 SAD fine for the poor job leading with the song for the day.

Secretary/Treasurer Craig Krsnak was busy as he was allowed to draw the lucky ticket number and went for the Queen but lost $89 with the Ten of Clubs. The report for attendance just gets worse and worse with Margaret Doom’s team having 12 misses and the Frei Team having 20 misses. This was our last meeting for November, so the Frei Team has an almost impossible task of making up during the December meetings.

The scheduled program for the day was unable to make it at the last minute so Jordan Weber passed out a new correspondence from District 5610 on a Membership Olympics. There are ten goals to be achieved starting on October first (which is long gone) and ending with the deadline of April 30, 2025.

There are ten goals. Completion of five of the options will win Gold, completion of four of the options will win Silver, and completion of three of the options will win Bronze.

All the options are about membership. The Wagner Club has already accomplished three of the goals and the rest of the meeting was spent on discussing how we could develop a new Rotary membership subcommittee with meetings and goals primarily for work projects. Several suggestions came out of the discussion and there was plenty of optimism about our goals.

We adjourned in our usual fashion by reciting The Four-Way Test of the things we think, say, or do: Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL & BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?