Back when Bill Ridgway’s uncle pulled him
into his first Rotary Club meeting about 20
years ago, Ridgway wasn’t sure he wanted to
join the service organization.
“I was in my late 20s, so I was pretty
intimidated,” he said, “maybe even the
youngest in the club. And there were no
women,” he laughed.
His uncle didn’t push him, said Ridgway,
48, a lifelong Barnegat resident and insurance
agent at W.B. Grant Agency.
“All he said to me was, “You think about
it, but remember one thing: We help a lot of
people. Not just here but around the
world.’”
That got him, he said.
On Wednesday night, Ridgway could say he’d
returned the gesture, in a way, as he stood
before a room full of friends at Lefty’s
Tavern on Main Street was sworn in, along with
nearly two dozen others, to the new Barnegat
Rotary Club.
Rotarians from around the state had come to
join him and the other members of the fledgling
club for dinner and speeches celebrating the
creation of the chapter and its members’
commitment to service.
As members explained, Rotary International is
a worldwide organization of clubs made up of
professionals who rally around a call to provide
humanitarian service locally and globally,
uphold high ethical standards and spread peace
and goodwill.
New Jersey’s district 7500 is an active
one. Encompassing 42 Rotary Clubs in Monmouth,
Ocean and Burlington counties, it claims 1,300
members, said Dan Cortese, who served as the
district head, or governor, from 2008 to 2009.
The clubs’ good works are legion. The
agenda for the district’s upcoming mid-year
assembly Jan. 31 is packed with springtime
fundraisers supporting everything from local
high school scholarship funds to food banks to a
charity devoted to providing life-saving cardiac
operations for children in developing countries.
Cortese, a member of the Forked River Rotary
Club, said he was seeking ways to grow his ranks
of Rotarians during his governorship. His own
club drew members form several towns away, but
“we had a hard time getting membership from
the Barnegat area,” he said.
Rather than give up potential Barnegat
Rotarians, Cortese said he, Ridgway and a few
other enterprising members of the Forked River
club decided to find new members in a
counterintuitive way.
“We said, let’s try something different
and start a club,” he said.
Rotary clubs typically center around weekly
breakfast, lunch or dinner gatherings – part
business meeting, part social club.
Ridgway’s innovation was to time the
Barnegat meetings for happy hour, so members
could stop in after work and still get home in
time for dinner with family.
It was tough going at first, said Pat
Shaffery, Ridgway’s friend and fellow charter
member of the Barnegat club.
“But they went full-steam ahead,” he
said. “Membership started to grow.”
Current District Governor Horton S. Hickerson
of Little Silver said there was a concerted
effort to pull younger members into the
organization. “That wasn’t always the
case,” he said, but those looking to
jump-start the Barnegat club had success finding
people in their late 20s who were interested in
the service and social aspects of Rotary.
Still, it took almost two years to gain
enough momentum to get a charter.
“There were a lot of nights we sat at the
bar, hoping someone would show up we’d
invited,” said Ridgway.
“I would tell him, ‘It’ll work out,
we’ll have 20 members,'” Cortese remembered,
laughing. “And then I’d buy him another
drink.” They ended up with 23.
And before being sworn in as the Barnegat
Rotary’s charter president on Wednesday night,
Ridgway was able to look around banquet room at
the same bar where he had sat making lists of
possible members and see the place packed with
new Rotarians and old friends happy to
congratulate him.
The camaraderie on display was a big part of
what makes the clubs that make up Rotary
International such a successful force for good,
Ridgway said.
“Without fellowship,” he said, “the
other things come hard.”
