The Little Rock Rotary Club has issued a booklet to commemorate its 100th anniversary. Appropriately, it’s in the shape of a receipt book, a basic tool of business.
It’s a time capsule.
Objectives of the organization in 1914 included: “To promote the scientizing of acquaintances as an opportunity for service and an aid to success.”
Scientizing?
That apparently meant buddying up with the members of the all-guys club.
Some of the businesses reflect the era: telegraph, typewriters, ice and wholesale cigars. And rubber tires - for auto-mobiles, you know, not those ironclad wooden wheels for wagons, which were doomed. There was an Overland auto dealership. The Overland brand is long gone and all but lost in a series of buyouts, but its genealogy eventually included the famous Jeep, the go-anywhere workhorse of World War II.
Cigars. Of course.
Those were the days when smokers were predominantly men (women ran the risk of opprobrium for partaking of that vice in the open).
All of the members (photos are included in the anniversary reprint) were white men.
There were some with Jewish names, but that was about it.
Women and ethnic minorities are included these days.
In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court forced Rotary International and its local clubs to accept women as members. Sharon Vogelpohl is the current president of the Little Rock chapter.
Addresses were all in what we now nostalgically call downtown.
Phone numbers two, three or four digits. There were plenty of number combinations in those days. No need for prefixes.
But as the city grew, there was such a need. Eventually, the first two-digit exchange with a name evolved. It was MO, short for Mohawk. Later, the letters were dropped and it became 663 and so on.
Speaking of rotary dial phones, let’s get back to the topic at hand.
Rotary’s symbol is the sprocket, the cog.
Part of the machine. Fitting in, turning the wheels of commerce and progress.
Progress, certainly. But at a price.
Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing by inventing the assembly line, which produced mass goods like nobody’s business.
But the work could become numbing, dehumanizing.
Social critics took notice. Ever see Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times? His character, the Little Tramp, gets caught up in the wheels and gears (which look like the Rotary symbol) of progress and is chewed up and spat out. Well, that movie was made in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression and when machinery was seen as mockery to those out of work.
Mockery, that is, until the American Machine was engaged to turn our war materiel to defeat the Axis.
But modernity can still be a threat. Ask anyone who is digitally overwhelmed.
We were warned 30 years ago, when Pac-Man the game became popular - you will be eaten.
Although in another 100 years, that sentiment may sound a bit quaint.
If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or email him at
Business, Pages 65 on 01/26/2014