National Heritage Program

National Heritage Programs are one of the most popular sponsorships throughout all of SERTOMA.  We are committed to providing education about the importance of our American freedom and democracy.  At the Round Rock City Council Meeting on February 12th, Mayor Nyle Maxwell will proclaim February 16th through the 22nd as “SERTOMA National Freedom Week”.  During that week, club members will provide live performances to 5th graders at eight (8) Elementary Schools in the RRISD. The skits should help about 1,500 kids understand our “Bill of Rights.”  You are welcome to attend any of the ‘shows.’ Here’s our schedule:

Tom Gill, Richard Prete, and Dot Gill will be the ‘cast’ on Tuesday and Wednesday, while Alan McGraw, Marvin Felux, and Joe Lehane will perform on Thursday and Friday.

Marvin Felux
National Heritage Program Coordinator

Sixth Annual Tree Lot Awards for 2003

One of our traditions during the Appreciation Banquet is to poke fun at the “going’s-on” that occurred during the Christmas tree sales.  Here’s a recap of this year’s awards:

Richard Prete: “300,000 bowls of Nabisco Shredded Wheat” Award

This is the approximate number of bowls of cereal that one would need to consume to equal the amount of roughage endured when Richard had to ‘eat’ 200 plus trees after we shut down the tree lot.

Kim Haugen: “Purveyor of Bad Booze” Award

Apparently Donna ordered Kim to clean out his liquor cabinet. He came to the tree lot with several bottles of different exotic distilled spirits including a bottle of “mean” Deutschland Schnapps. It looked like and smelled like furniture stripper. Additional analysis concluded that it even tasted like furniture stripper.

Mike Whelpley: “Loneliest Man in the World” Award

Mike was one of our three ‘tree lot bosses’.  He was in fact very lonely because on the first night no one signed up to help him sell trees.

Rufus Honeycutt: “Short End of the Stick” Award

On the Saturday that we set up the tree lot, Rufus complained that the marking on our measuring sticks, had faded and that someone should redo them. Quickly he as elected to be that someone.  He did a beautiful job, painting the sticks white with neat black numbers. However all his measurements were short by one foot so he had to re-do them.

Cecil Latham: “Bring Him to His Knees” award.

On one extremely windy day, Cecil and A.J. opened the lot a bit early. He sold a very large tree before anyone else arrived. Cecil was trying to load the tree on top of a Suburban by himself.  A big gust of wind came along that blew the tree off the car, hitting Cecil in the head, dropping him to his knees.

Dick Reid: “No, Who-Is-On-Second, I-Don’t-Know Is On First” Award.

Like Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s comedy skit, Dick’s attempts to put the tree lot work schedule onto our website in a high tech but member-friendly manner was ‘Cute, funny, but not very useful.’

Marvin Felux
Staff Reporter

Bits & Pieces