By David F. Rooney
Reduced to just 12 members the Revelstoke Lions Club has voted to disband, club president Buddy Rozander said Tuesday.
The club’s members are paid up until January. That will mark their formal end.
“Our high point was back in the dam days,” he said, referring to the years that the Revelstoke and Mica dams were being built. At that time about a quarter of BC’s construction workers were employed in Revelstoke. But once the dams were built the town’s population rapidly shrank. So, too, did the membership of many local service organizations.
Now it’s all over for the Lions. And you have to wonder about the viability of other service clubs.
The major issue for everyone from the soon-to-be extinct Lions to the Loyal Order of the Moose and the Knights of Pythias is membership.
“We were at that (recent) Volunteer Fair,” Rozander said, shaking his head. “And it didn’t help.”
Younger people in Revelstoke — those in their 30s and 40s — are focused on building their careers and families and don’t have time they to spare for service-club involvement. That leaves people over 50 and 60. Many of them have already committed their time to one club or another.
“The only club that seems to be holding its own is the Rotary Club,” he said.
And that’s likely because it is a business-oriented club whose members regard their meetings as an important means of connecting with other businessmen and businesswomen.
Rozander indicated that the club could reverse its decision if there was a sudden influx of new members but he’s not counting on that. In all likelihood, the local Lions Club’s lease on life can be measured in weeks — not years.
