The Joiners

In the literary world of the '203 and '303, the most comical character on the U.S. scene was the hale & hearty joiner who slapped his fellow businessmen on the back at service-club luncheons and addressed total strangers as "Tom," "Dick" or "Harry." Sinclair Lewis called him "Babbitt," H. L. Mencken called him "boob," and many another writer dismissed him simply as "a Rotarian."

Last week, as nearly 9,000 Rotarians gathered in Seattle for the 45th annual convention of the world's largest service club, a back or two was certainly slapped. Total strangers called each other by their first names without let or hindrance. But the names were called in accents that ranged from the flat twang of the Western plains through Teutonic gutterals and mellifluous Urdu to the cool precision of Oxford English. And they weren't all Tom and Harry. There were Karls and Kims and Bongs and Phyas and Mohammed Alis and Yoshinoris and Joaquins and Chaunceys as well. Their identification tags bore legends as disparate as "Funeral Director, Waxahachie, Texas" and "Medicine, Wagga Wagga, Australia." A Good Proposition. Rotary International, like the other U.S. service clubs (Lions, Kiwanis, Exchange, etc.), was founded with the simple idea of giving plain but often circumscribed businessmen a chance to meet and make friends.

It embodied no high-flown phrases. One of the four founding fathers, a tailor, admitted frankly that "the idea of my making a lot of new friends--who presumably would be working overtime to get people to come and have their clothes made at my place--struck me as a pretty good proposition." As the club has expanded to include some 390,000 members in 89 countries, the underlying principle is still the same one of friendship and understanding.

Last week no less a diplomat than Secretary of State John Foster Dulles traveled to Seattle to acknowledge Ro-tary's influence. "You are here," he said, "because you share ideals in common." Tall, short, thin, fat, balding or bearded, none of the Rotarians seemed to care a fig for political hairsplitting. There were no thundering denunciations from the speaker's platform, no thinly veiled polit ical polemics, no sweeping resolutions. "We do not believe," said Rotary International Secretary George Means, "in resoluting about anything unless we can do something about it."

Pretty Much the Same. From all over the world came reports that Rotary was doing things. Often, what it did seemed so puny as to be almost insignificant in the vast sweep of world affairs. It had, for instance, brought 57 young students from 18 nations to study together in Sweden. It organized a blood-bank program in war-torn Korea. It sent a young Pakistani to make friends in Washington's Yakima Valley. It is sponsoring an international network of radio hams. Its magazines had kept Rotarians in Kenya, Viet Nam and Trieste posted on the activities of their fellows in Ceylon, Wichita and Sioux City.

It had even done something, in its quiet way, about Joe McCarthy's overblown reputation overseas. Jim Watch-hurst, of Warrington, England, remarked: "When we in Warrington hear of Wisconsin, U.S.A., we do not think of the junior Senator but of Bob Linse, the Rotary-sponsored student at our University of Manchester."

What did all this prove? "I've found," answered Rotary's newly inducted President Herbert J. Taylor, an aluminum man from Chicago, "that Rotary Clubs the world over are pretty much the same, whether they are in Bangkok or Boise. Rotary provides something that is unique: a common bond between different peoples." And that, in the context of a dark, gloomy day for diplomacy, was something to slap a back about.

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