Washington Lions Club marks 50 years

WASHINGTON — Members of the local Lions Club celebrated half a century of volunteerism with a meal and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Washington YMCA Tuesday afternoon, the anniversary of the chapter’s founding.

As a volunteer group, the Lions Club focuses on providing people with the disability services they need, especially those related to vision impairment and hearing loss, among others. Members said they were proud to work behind the scenes and out of the limelight.

“For a club to make it to 50 years is fantastic,” Lions Club District Governor Mike Renken said. “The service that they do in the community … is one of the best-kept secrets there is.”

The occasion marks decades of service, with an impact especially clear to the group’s remaining charter members, Alan Olson, Yaro Chmelar and Ron Andersen.

In some ways, the club is drastically different from its original form in Washington. In the years since its founding, the Lions Club has merged with the women-only Lioness Club, has expanded its mission to focus on diabetes in addition to other health issues, and has rotated through a long list of members.

“I would bet that we don’t have a single project that we’re doing now that we were doing when we first got together,” Olson said. “We had an awful time finding something that we could do that would give us sufficient funds to help pay for the glasses and the hearing aids and that stuff … We always ask the question, when we go to do the financial portion of a project, ‘Is this something that’s going to be useful for people, or is it just going to be publicity?’”

Still, the core principals are unchanged, according to founding members.

"How we do it might have changed, but the emphasis is still sight and hearing, ever since we started,“ Andersen said.

One Lions program called Iowa KidSight was piloted by the Washington group in 2001. The service project involves a specially-made camera that photographs young children’s eyes to highlight anomalies, allowing providers to recommend examination and treatment options before many kids know or can communicate their own vision impairments.

Iowa KidSight Program Director Lori Short said she was amazed at the initiative’s success.

“I have the privilege of seeing what the service they extend really does for people’s lives,” she said. “They catch things that — if not caught early — would lead to permanent vision loss. They truly impact people’s lives, and they do it every day.”

Short said Washington’s Lions were the gold standard when it came to service.

“They do everything I need them to do,” she said. “I don’t need them just to screen kids, I also need them to help us raise funds, I also need them to be leaders in their communities and in carrying out the service, encouraging and enabling others … they don’t slack in the arena.”

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