We recently received correspondence from the daughter of George Wootton Jnr. (and granddaughter of George Wootton Snr.) who were both members of the Rotary Club of Hawthorn in the 1960s.
George Jnr., now aged 102, recently moved into a Residential Aged Care, Memory Support Unit. He retained fond memories of the distant past, including being a member of Rotary, and liked to talk about this time.
She wondered if some pictures to remind him of his time in Rotary would be helpful, and asked if we could send her a picture of the Hawthorn Rotary wheel emblem which she would frame and hang on the wall of his room.
Dennis Shore kindly provided the information that George Snr. joined the Club in 1956-57 and died in August 1976. George Wootton Jnr. joined the Club in 1964-65 and resigned in 1972-3.
Dennis also ascertained from The First 40 Years: 1953-1993 history of the Club, that George Snr. was a member of the Club’s board in 1961/62, and again in 1962/63 when he was Vocational Service director. There is a picture of George Snr. taken at the seventh luncheon of the Club on page 26 of The First 40 Years.
There were also references to George Wootton Jnr. in two other historical documents, the History of Hawthorn 1953-1967 and Thirty Years of Service 1953-1983.
We sent her an image of the Rotary Hawthorn logo to frame for her father’s wall. We also sent her electronic copies of two documents tracing the history of Rotary Hawthorn between 1953 and 1983 that contained references to her father and grandfather, plus photos and mention of Club events that hopefully rekindled in her father some happy memories of those times.
