Rotarians Celebrate Arrival of Club Charter a Century Ago
Some 90 members of the Rotary Club of Everett gathered on a vacant downtown parking lot Tuesday to celebrate the 1917 arrival of the club’s official Rotary Charter. The site, at Hewitt and Wetmore, was the location a century ago of Weiser’s Café, where the fledgling club first met.
With club members wearing 1917-style straw hats and derbies, club historian and past president Larry O’Donnell led a reenactment of the time when the club’s first president, Clayton Williams, received the charter from Rotary. The Everett club had formed just a few months before, in December 1916, fostered by Rotary Clubs in Tacoma and Seattle. O’Donnell also saluted the centennial of the Rotary Foundation, created in 1917.