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Speakers
Jan 27, 2017
American Roots - Made in America
Feb 03, 2017
Abraham Lincoln
Feb 10, 2017
Feb 17, 2017
Feb 24, 2017
Mar 03, 2017
Mar 10, 2017
Mar 17, 2017
Mar 24, 2017
View entire list
Executives & Directors
President
 
First Vice President
 
Second Vice President
 
Secretary
 
Treasurer
 
Sergeant-at-Arms
 
Immediate Past President
 
Director Term End 2017
 
Director Term End 2017
 
Director Term End 2018
 
Director Term End 2018
 
Community Service Chair
 
International Service Chair
 
Vocational Service Chair
 
Youth Service Chair
 
Rotary Foundation Chair
 
Club Protection Officer
 
Communications-WJ Bulletin Ed
 
Communications-PR External
 
Web Administrator
 
Administrative Coordinator
 
Russell Hampton
National Awards Services Inc.
Sage
Welcome to the Rotary Club of Portland, Maine!
Portland Rotary
Service Above Self
We meet Fridays at 12:15 PM
Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
88 Spring Street
Portland, ME  04101
United States
DistrictSiteIcon District Site
VenueMap Venue Map
Rotary This Week
 
Portland Rotary
meets this week at the
Clarion Hotel
 1230 Congress Street, Portland
                                
*02/27/17 Ben Waxman/Whitney Reynolds - American Roots, Made in America

Ben Waxman is a Portland native, third-generation textile worker, and co-founder of Portland, Maine based company American Roots (AR). Founded in 2015 and successfully launched in the fall of 2015, American Roots is a 100% American made textile and apparel company that specializes in direct retail and business to business sales.

Ben left a 16-year career in American politics and organized labor with the national AFL-CIO in 2013 to begin the process of launching a company that would create good paying jobs in his home town. Ben, along with his fiance, Whitney Reynolds, had the idea to provide good jobs and to make a high-quality clothing product made with 100% American-made materials and to keep it at an affordable price.

With an extensive national network of business, labor, and political organizations, Ben has been able to create a significant sales base. With a focus on sales, workforce development, and significant public relations background, Ben along with the American Roots team, has worked tirelessly to expand the American Roots name in its first year.

Ben is a Portland, Maine native, who attended Portland High School and some college time. Ben was inspired by his mother, Dory Waxman of Old Port Wool and his father Dan to pursue building American Roots and continuing a family tradition of textiles. He is an avid fly fisherman, Red Sox fan and family man.

Whitney left a twenty-year career in the hospitality industry in the spring of 2015 to join Ben in the launching of AR. With a background in finance, customer service and management, Whitney made the adjustment to manufacturing with a set of solid workforce skills. She has a primary focus as the Chief Financial Officer, as well as oversight on production, R&D, product line, vendor relations, and staff development. Whitney is originally from Rochester, New York, and graduated from Fordham University. She is an outdoors enthusiast and used to ski competitively.

American Roots had over 10,000 individual units sold in year one with estimated sales in 2017 of 25,000 units to customers across the country. Ben continues to work to broaden the AR brand and network through his personal connections and targeted marketing tactics along with some affinity marketing models.

Ben and Whitney reside in Westbrook, Maine and are expecting their first child in March.

 

Volunteer Opportunities
Following is a list of our Club's volunteer projects. If you know of other opportunities, please contact Loretta: lrowe@maine.rr.com
 
                                When
Project                    Who to Contact             
Soup kitchen             4th Wednesday ea month       
Preble Street             (4-6:30 p.m.) 
Resource Ctr              Erik Greven
                                egrev95@aol.com

Game Night               3rd Tuesday ea month
Cedar Unit                 Mike Fortunato             
Long Creek                michael.k.fortunato@gmail.com 
Youth Center             or Jim Willey
                                jimandbarbarawilley@gmail.com

Read to                     Dates & Times (you set)
students at                Sylvie Montello at
Portland                    montes@portlandschools.org
schools                              
 
Mentoring at                    Glenn Nerbak
Portland High                  nerbak@mac.com
School

Membership                  Leisa Collins
Mentoring Duos               leisa.g.collins@gmail.com
 
02/20/17 Daniel Sonenberg, USM Composer, Opera Made in Maine
On this Historic Inauguration-Day Friday, we were able to set aside the political events in Washington to come together and talk baseball and opera.....or, to be specific, we heard about an unusual combination of both: a baseball opera.
 
Dan Sonenberg has been working with Portland Ovations on his latest project. The USM School of music professor, composer, drummer and father of triplets is nearly done with The Summer King, an opera about Negro-League baseball legend Josh Gibson. We heard a short clip from a workshop performance at the Merrill, where it was first performed in a stripped-down format in 2014. Professor Sonenberg commented on the scale of the project, noting that “This is a two-hour opera and a fourteen-year odyssey.” The project is on course for a fully staged world premiere later this year in Pittsburgh - a remarkable achievement and a rarity in the world of contemporary opera - where few operas are written and even fewer are performed at all, let alone by a high-level company.
 
Josh Gibson came from Pittsburgh, is arguably one of the greatest hitters ever, as well as a solid defensive catcher, playing baseball from 1930-47. He died just before the color barrier in baseball was broken, and had he lived, he would surely have joined other aging heroes of the Negro Leagues in Major League Baseball. His is a tragic story and not well known among the public.
 
Sonenberg described the many challenges of writing an opera – the number of roles, the number of instruments and types of music, the libretto, and even issues of practicality, like a boys’ choir that comes on toward the end. This, surprisingly turns out to be an impractical factor given that kids need to go to bed, and therefore finding those performers for a run would be challenging.
 
Portland Ovations and its director Aimee Petrin made what he called a “wild decision” to produce the initial performance. He noted that an opera score is often just “a great paperweight,” mostly because unlike a book that can be picked up and read, it’s something that exists in a strange imaginary space, despite there being a score. “It’s not real until it’s heard and seen,” he noted, adding that there is a huge gulf between going from a small workshop to a premiere. 
 
He said it would never have reached the point where it is now without the early support of Ovations, and a small, but critical, grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which provided something of a “seal of approval” for the project.
 
It’s the experience of a dream coming true, says Sonenberg.

For more information, go to: www.danielsonenberg.org
 
(Photo: Rusty Atwood, Aimee Petrin, Daniel Sonenberg, and President Laura Young.)
 
02/20/17 Bits & Pieces
President Laura Young opened the meeting at the Clarion Hotel by welcoming 50 Club members, 5 visiting Rotarians and 5 guests.

 
Russ Burleigh and Alan Nye led us in invocation with prayer and the club “swearing in” to uphold the Four-Way Test. Would that it be a cornerstone of an incoming administration. We Pledged our Allegiance to the Flag and we sang the National Anthem.

(Photo: District Governor Marge Barker.)
 
Visiting Rotarians included our District Governor Marge Barker, Past District Governor Sheila Rollins, Jim Schmidt from the Casco Bay Sunrise Club, Kitty Chadbourne, and Dennis Robillard both from the Saco Bay Sunset Club. Guests included Andy Stone, brought by Bill Blount; Aimee Petrin, guest of Rusty Atwood; Susy Sonenberg, mother of our guest speaker. Ogy Nikolic, who was received into the club today, brought as his guests, his wife Sanja, and daughter Anastasija.
 

 
President Laura delivered appreciation for members with assigned tasks for this week’s luncheon meeting, and to Lili Brown for her efforts with the Lyseth School reading program.
 


Glenn Nerbak shared a Rotary Moment, which focused on his appreciation for the Club’s dedication to service that appealed to him, and the examples set by Jack Carr, John Marr, and Kris Rosado. Glenn provided a few slides showing Interact Club members engaged in a variety of service projects focused on hunger and Crutches4Africa. President Laura thanked Glenn for his critical role in establishing an Interact Club at Portland High School.
 

 
John Lock tried to help Loretta Rowe win the $1,240 raffle pot, but her drawing the Seven of Clubs did not help.
 

 
Gracie Johnston led us a cappella, as we sang “We Shall Overcome.”
 

 
(Photo: Prez. Laura Young, Russell Voss, Steve Mortimer, Ogy Nikolic, Jill Chase, Terri St. Angelo and Linda Varrell.)
 
Four new Rotarians were introduced: Linda Varrell presented Terri St. Angelo, a principal in Anderson-Watkins Insurance Agency; President Laura presented Julie Chase, the Dean of Business and Community Partnerships at Southern Maine Community College, and Steve Mortimer, CEO of Maine Management Consulting; and Russell Voss presented Ogy Nikolic, founder of OGO Sense, a digital marketing agency.
 
Ogy took a moment to share that his initial involvement with Rotary resulted from a question he asked a group of U.S. soldiers in Bosnia, "How could he come to America as an exchange student." One of the soldiers told him his mom was in Rotary, and she could help. That mom turned out to be Kitty Chadbourne of the Saco Bay Sunset Club, who not only arranged for Ogy to become an exchange student, but was present at Friday’s lunch as Ogy became a member of our Rotary Club. We were all touched by Ogy’s telling of his story, and the reach that Rotary has.
 

 
PDG Sheila Rollins took a moment to thank Past President Bowen Depke with an award for the club for the most new members in District 7880, and an award for the Club’s top rate of contributions for the Rotary Foundation, all during Bowen’s presidency during 2015-16.
 

 
Jim Schmidt of the Casco Bay Sunrise Club invited members to their fundraiser – Party With A Purpose – a buffet and charitable auction at Dimillo’s, on February 1st from 5:30 to 8:30 pm., all to benefit the Maine Children's Cancer Program. For more information, call: 207-662-6274. Buy tickets at: mmc.org/mccpbenefit
 
This Week's Duty Assignments

Invocation:  David Small
Program Reporter:  Jake Bourdeau
Bits & Pieces Reporter:  Alan Nye
Registration/Greeter: Larry Gross
Sell Meal Tickets:  Jan Chapman
Raffle:  Jake Bourdeau
Badge Box:  None
Collect Meal Tickets:  Katie Brown
*
Song Leader:  Russ Burleigh
Pianist:  None
Sgt-at-Arms (Early):  Matt Tassey
Sgt-at-Arms (Late):  Mike Fortunato

*if no hotel staff available
 

Rotary Meeting Locations

If you would like to mark your calendars,
we are scheduled at the following locations
through June 2017:

2017:
Jan 27 - Clarion Hotel

Feb  3  - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Feb 10 -
Clarion Hotel
Feb 17 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Feb 24 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay

Mar   3 - Clarion Hotel
Mar 10 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Mar 17 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Mar 24 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Mar 31 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay

Apr   7 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Apr 14 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay

Apr 21 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Apr 28 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay

May  5 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
May 12 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay

May 19 - Clarion Hotel
May 26 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay

Jun  2 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Jun  9 -
Clarion Hotel
Jun 16 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Jun 23 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay
Jun 30 - Holiday Inn By-the-Bay


Blue BOLD dates are scheduled Board meeting days.

Any questions, please contact Loretta at: lrowe@maine.rr.com

PRINTED SCHEDULES ARE AVAILABLE AT THE CHECK-IN TABLE.
 

From The World of Tennis

ROTARY DOUBLES TENNIS LEAGUE
Winter/Spring Session 2017 

The teams for the Winter-Spring 2017 Rotary Tennis league are listed below. For information, contact Tennis Commissioner, Erik Jorgensen.

Here are the fourth week scores:

TEAM 1 TEAM 2 TEAM 3 TEAM 4 TEAM 5 TEAM 6
Blakeslee Barns Seddon Chikuta
Gross
Bourdeau
Hall Pullen Thompson Moore Ingram Chipman
Asch Herodes Blount Jorgensen Nickerson Putnam
Burleigh
Carr
St Hilaire Young Grammer Millick
5 7 2 8 3 4