Palmer Kiwanis club turns 70 this month

PALMER — The Palmer Kiwanis club celebrated its 70th birthday this month and at Tuesday’s regular meeting, current members reflected on the seven decades of community service.

“I think it’s neat to be a part of Palmer history,” Kiwanis member Dr. Stephen Brown said.

Kiwanis plans to commemorate the anniversary during a banquet on Sept. 27 at the St. John Lutheran Church in Palmer, starting at 6 p.m. The event is open to the public.

Brown is the Agriculture and Horticulture facility professor at the UAF Experimental Farm. He’s an active member of the Palmer Kiwanis. He said that at one point, the Palmer club had the highest volume of members with PhD’s in the country.

The club was founded by agriculture researches in 1949. Several current members including Brown either work in agriculture or have some background in it.

“There’s still a sprinkling of that,” Jonathon Rockey, past president said.

Over the last 70 years, people from all walks of life have joined Palmer Kiwanis. Its current roster reflects diversity, but they all are bound by the service club’s core mission to support local youth.

Rockey is a pastor at St. John Lutheran Church. Secretary Sandra Garley was an administrator for the City of Palmer and her husband Patrick is a well-known local artist. Current President John White was a fireman.

“The common thread all members have is a strong commitment to serve the area’s youth,” Garley said.

The Palmer Kiwanis has made major contributions to the City of Palmer, helping establish important landmarks, projects, scholarships, and annual community events and contributions.

Their first project was establishing the Hermon Brothers Fields near the Alaska State Fairgrounds. The park is still heavily used by the Mat-Su Miners and Little League teams to this day.

In the early days, the Kiwanis club helped established the main park downtown that later became the A-Moosement Park. It started with a fairly bare plot with a pavilion.

Eventually, a group of community leaders like Janet Kincaid got together to raise money and build the park area as people know it today. According to Kincaid, the Palmer Lion’s Club was the biggest donor at $20,000.

The city has since taken over the A-Moosement Park and oversees the entire area, which is behind the Palmer Moose Lodge near the Matanuska Valley Federal Credit Union office.

Garley noted that every year, volunteers from groups and churches across the community all pitch in to help clean up the park and repaint the structures throughout the year.

“The A-Moosement Park is a really good example of a community with its various service clubs and individuals coming together to create something that has been a featured part of the park system for the community for years,” Garley said.

Over time, the Palmer Kiwanis expanded outside the small town of Palmer. Now, they engage in projects across the Valley and offer annual scholarships that are open to students across the school district.

Above all, their focus is children and that will always guide their decisions going forward, according to Rockey. Money raised from the community goes right back into the community, particularly for children’s programs like their local adoption of the International Dictionary Project.

Each year, Kiwanis works to put a dictionary in the hands of every third grader in need across the Valley, whether the child goes to a public, private or charter or home school.

Members have already gathered all the dictionaries and they’re set to give them out in October. They distribute about 1,500 dictionaries annually, depending on school enrollment. This program started in 2012 and they’ve handed out a total of 16,872 dictionaries.

“I think that’s our biggest project right now,” Rockey said.

Kiwanis has offered eighth-grade student awards since the outset. These awards go to high-performing students in each Valley middle school’s 8th grade class, based on scholarship and citizenship.

Palmer Kiwanis still engages with the community on a daily basis with new and reoccurring events and projects. They work closely with nonprofits, local businesses and other community groups to support the public.

They stay close to their mission and most of their current endeavors are geared toward local children. Rockey said that they’ve sponsored a little league team for the last 60 plus years, since the league first formed.

Kiwanis contributes backpacks to the annual Stuff the Bus school supply giveaway by United Way of Mat-Su each year.

They conduct the official vote tallies for the Alaska State Fair during the annual meeting. The club is written the in the fair’s official bylaws to count and certify the vote.

Kiwanis members always ring bells for the Salvation Army during the holidays. That’s Brown’s time to shine, literally.

“Some people wish I didn’t,” Brown joked.

Each holiday season, Brown throws on bright, colorful suits and rings the bell for the Salvation Army’s annual fundraiser, showing off garish designs like pastel colored flamingos.

“We take pictures of him and he always has some weird suit to wear,” Rockey said with a laugh.

Brown said there’s a method to his madness.

“It brings in money. People are like, ‘if you’ve got enough guts to wear that suit, I’m giving you money,’” Brown chuckled.

The Palmer Kiwanis is always looking for new members, especially young ones to carry on tradition of their service to the community.

longtime member Pete Probasco joined in 1967. He was a club lieutenant governor for Alaska’s Kiwanis chapters. He helped open new Kiwanis clubs and he offered aid to clubs across the state.

“One of the big challenges facing Kiwanis is the aging of the population. There are clubs that no longer exist in Anchorage simply because they reached maturity and are no longer here,” Probasco said.

The longest serving Palmer Kiwanis member, Sig Restad is 91 and still attends to meetings.

Kiwanis also has college, high school and elementary age service club chapters under their umbrella, where students are encouraged to learn to be more community minded and service oriented.

“There’s great value in belonging to an organization like Kiwanis. It’s a value to the community but it’s also a personal value. Somehow we need to let the younger people in our community know that there is that value, that they need to spend a little bit of their time here,” Garley said.

Palmer Kiwanis meetings are held weekly on Tuesdays inside Turkey Red’s event room. They host a variety of speakers, representing local volunteer and business groups.

The first Tuesdays of each month are lunch meetings, from noon to 1 p.m. and the last two Tuesdays of each month are evening meetings from 6 to 7 p.m.

The public is welcome, and membership is not required to attend.

For more information, visit their Facebook site “Kiwanis Club of Palmer Alaska” or the Kiwanis homepage at: kiwanis.org.

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter Jacob Mann at jacob.mann@frontiersman.com