The meeting was opened at 12:15 by Club President Patti Van Cleave and followed by the pledge of allegiance led by Liz Taylor. There were 30 people at this Thursday lunch in the Community House and the only visitor (sort of) was Winnetka’s Fire Chief, Alan Berkowsky. The speaker was Dr. Ben Duke, LCP.
ANNOUNCEMENTS: At 12:45 Terry Dason, head of the Winnetka/Northfield Chamber of Commerce told the group of an upcoming trip to South Africa and that there were still limited reservations available. Then, Barb Tubekis told of the 2017 Volunteer Center Recognition Event on May 4 at the WCH in the evening. President–elect Tom Nash reminded us of the May 12 Rotary Benefit dinner and added there were special Sox tix in the already excellent Silent Auction line-up.
There will be a membership Committee meeting at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 3 at Liz Taylor’s North Shore Community Bank. Membership Committee Chair David Berkenstein invited any and all interested parties to attend. Plus President Van Cleave noted anyone available can join her after the meeting in an historic cleaning of the WCH Rotary Closet. She opined this to the first such gargantuan effort since the founding of the club. Brooke Peppey then gave a brief recap of our Rotary Foundation.
Patti kicked off the Dig and Grin session with a tribute to Bill Leske and the First Bank and Trust facility. She was followed by Robert Mardirossian and Tony Kambich. It must be noted all was led by John Stone whose comic Dig and Grin anecdote had the crowd falling off their chairs.
SPEAKER: The speaker was Dr. Ben Duke a Chiropractic Physician whose topic for this day was the effect of “screen dependency” on the psyches of our youth today. He began with a brief history of human communications from grunts to smoke signals to telegraph wire to telephones to fax to cell phones to internet.
He noted kids 2-5 years old spend averagely 50% of their time in front of screens of one sort or another. Almost 2/3rds of kids under 10 get only one hour daily of physical activity. This compares to children pre-1995 who were active 4+ hours daily. The net result is a significant lack of development in the cerebral cortex of many kids. It is also extremely distracting when doing more important tasks.
He suggested parents generally need to exert much greater control over their children’s daily activities starting limiting access to TV, iPhones and computers.
He then entertained a lively Q&A led off by Jeanne Beckman followed by David Birkenstein, Heidi Sibert and Robert Mardirossian.
The meeting closed at 1:27 with no lottery winner – as usual.
