Mar 11
Charles Burke, President and CEO of the War Memorial, filling in for an ailing Christopher Pratt, gave us an outstanding talk about the status of the improvements at the War Memorial. His slide presentation was interrupted by applause when he announced that the WM was looking forward to hosting the Men’s Club in the Ballroom in November.
The new 2022 Men’s Club Directory was printed and was available at the February 22nd meeting. Unfortunately, there were some mistakes in the Di-rectory. The most glaring error was applied to John Woodhouse. Not only was his entry omitted from the Directory, but he was quite surprised to be listed as deceased on the Memorials page. John would like everyone to know that he is very much alive and well. Those who see him at the luncheons have not been visited by a poltergeist. The missing entry and memo-rials listing was due to a mistake (operator error) made when updating the database. The Directory is printed based on information from the database.
We have too many different listings and specialized reports in our Men’s Club, something we’ve been trying to fix. Ideally users need just one database source that can be used by any member as needed. This source shouldn’t depend on one person to develop specialized reports for each individual.
Unfortunately the database programs are written in a language (FoxPro) that works in earlier versions of Windows, but nothing later than XP. When we took over the system 9 or 10 years ago, only a few members knew the language and the programming. There are even fewer now! Even though the system has been updated through the years, it’s not networked. We’re trying to move to more modern software that can accommodate multiple users and that any member can securely access.
If you missed either of the February Men’s Club meetings at the Tompkins Center, you missed out on some very interesting topics. The meeting on the 8th with Nolan Finley and Stephen Henderson was our largest turnout since the beginning of pandemic. It looks like we had 92 attendees. I’m sure that spouses and friends enjoyed the presentation.
We have even more great speakers for March and following months. It would be nice to see member attendance at the luncheons top February’s. The speakers committee has done a magnificent job in finding speakers of interest to all of us.
On March 8th our speaker will be Christopher Pratt. You may remember Chris when he was the choir director at Grosse Pointe South. The South choir has had many presentations at Senior Men’s Club events. As you will see from the speaker article in the following pages he’s taken a position with the MEA as UniServ Director of South Oakland Districts. It should be interesting to see what the future holds for Chris.
On March 22nd we will hear from Chairman Jeff Laethem and the Chief Executive Officer Mary Sue Lanigan of the Michigan Parkinson Foundation. The foundation provides assistance and education to those who have Parkinson disease and their families.
We’re looking forward to both presentations.
Henry Fischer
Men's Club of Grosse Pointe 