District Governor was guest speaker at Rotary Club
By GREG COLLINS for the News Herald

Teacher of the Month, Debbie Brooks from Chandler Elementary School, with Rotarian Charley Corbin, was honored by Kilgore Rotary Club last week.

Rotary 5830 District Governor John Jetter was the guest speaker for the Kilgore Rotary Club on Wednesday. He spoke about Texas State Parks. Jetter is one of only 32 people to ever visit all 138 state parks in Texas.

The District Governor presented information and slides about the parks, telling about how the journey took several years and saw him sometimes sleep in the back of his SUV, sometimes sleep in a tent and sometimes take his Airstream Travel Trailer for sleeping.

To document each park, he picked up a booklet from the Texas Parks Department which allows him to get a stamp from each park visited. He also took a photo at the gate of each park and then took a photo at some identifying feature in each park.

He recorded information about each park and presented his favorites in several different categories. The categories ranged from prettiest to best for travel trailers to worst to natural wonders.

He gave information on how to find the state parks and things that would be enticing to different people, and he gave information on how to best travel to the parks.

Rotarians in Kilgore were very interested in the information, and some had traveled to some of the parks he described and gave their own account of the park in question.

In other Rotary news, Debbie Brooks, a second grade teacher at Chandler Elementary, was honored as Teacher of the Month. She has been a teacher in Kilgore for 30-plus years, most of them in the elementary grades. She has been at Chandler for the last few years and will retire from teaching when school ends in May. She was accompanied to the meeting by Julie Hope, assistant principal at Chandler Elementary.

The District Assembly is scheduled for April 19 in Gilmer, and club members were encouraged to take part in this event. Steve Brown will be one of the speakers at the event as will Tom Sartor.

Sammy York attended the PETS seminar in Dallas this weekend to prepare for his year as president. He will assume office on July 1.

The Scholar Athlete Banquet is set for Thursday, April 24 at Meadowbrook Country Club. A male and female scholar athlete from Kilgore High, Sabine High and Kilgore College will be honored that evening.

The Rotary Golf Tournament is scheduled for Monday, May 5. Tee off will be at noon following a hamburger luncheon. The tournament is a two-person potpourri tourney with six holes of scramble, six holes of best ball and six holes of alternate shot. Cash prizes will be awarded the winners in low gross and low net.

The District Conference is set for May 16-18 in Tyler, and then Steve Brown will take over as the District Governor on June 28.

This next week, the program has not been set as of yet.

The Kilgore Rotary Club meets each Wednesday at noon in the Meadowbrook Country Club. Guests are always welcome.