Honored Guests, Rotarians, Friends of Rotary: We have assembled to launch a dauntless Classics scholar on a strenuous year-long Odyssey. We are here to congratulate him on his selection as a District Governor of Rotary International and to praise and thank him for accepting this arduous responsibility which requires visiting and speaking in many communities. In effect, he will be taking his classroom on the road for twelve months.

What is it that can justify such a substantial redirection of his life and of the lives of 520 other district governors throughout the world?

Well, the saga of Rotary is an astonishing one. Consider just a few facts. The Rotary Club was founded in America in 1905. There are now 28,000 Rotary Clubs in 155 countries. 67,000 new members were enlisted last year. Over the years, Rotarians have donated $320,000,000 for 30,000 scholarships. Rotary has mounted a worldwide campaign against polio which has already immunized one billion children. Every one of the 28,000 clubs benefits its own community with a variety of helpful programs. What is the magic of this organization? What is the motive force that has enabled Rotary to work these wonders? It is the answer to that question I wish to dwell on this evening.

Let us begin with a little story. Back in the Middle Ages a British knight was returning to the castle one evening after a long, hard day of skirmishes. His armor was dented, his helmet was skewgee, and his plume was broken off, his horse was limping and he was listing to one side on the saddle. The lord of the manner saw him coming and went out to greet him, "You look terrible! What hath befallen you, Sir Albert?" he asked.

The Knight straightened himself up and said, "Oh, Sire, I have been striving in your behalf all day, robbing and pillaging and burning the towns of your enemies to the west."

"You've been doing what?" asked the astonished nobleman. The knight repeated his statement louder and slower in case the fellow couldn't hear well.

"But I haven't any enemies to the west," cried the nobleman.

"Oh!" said the Knight. Then after a pause, "Well, I think you do now."

There is a moral to this story, friends. Enthusiasm is not enough. You have to have a sense of direction. You need to understand not only what you are doing, but why. Rotary has a compass that provides direction for all its activities and for the lives of its members. It is a model of clarity and simplicity, a three-word directive -- Service Above Self.

At Rotary's first convention in 1910, this objective was phrased, "He profits most who serves his fellows best." Over the years, several refinements of this motto eventually led to the present version. That "He profits most" phrase from the early times bears some thought. In the context of an association formed originally by business and professional men, one may suppose that the profit they had in mind was increased dollar gain. But making Rotarians wealthier is not what that slogan is all about. Service above self is a formula for activating an element of human nature that brings to the individual satisfactions far greater than monetary rewards.

This phenomenon is apparent in the sheer joy of the small child as he gives to his mother a picture he has drawn in kindergarten. It is the "giving" that delights the little kid. There is a spark of altruism in all human beings that all too often gets shunted aside in the growing up process by the scramble to get things for one's self. But that spark remains even if it isn't used.

The power generated by that innate generosity was studied and documented by Victor Frankl, an Austrian physician in World War II. As a Jew, Dr. Frankl was seized by the Nazis and interned in several of the most infamous prison camps that man's twisted mind has ever created. As one reads of the abominable living conditions and cruel guards, it seems that the lucky prisoners were those put to death in the gas chambers. The quarters were unheated, badly crowded and without plumbing facilities. The prisoners had only a starvation diet.

As a medical scientist, a trained observer of human health, Dr. Frankl was struck by a curious and unexpected thing. It was not the prisoners who were physically the strongest, who could, by force, obtain the most food who remained the healthiest. It was instead, those who tried to help others, those in whom kindliness and generosity prevailed. Whatever their size and physical constitution, they turned out to be the durable ones. Dr. Frankl was startled by this discovery and checked it and rechecked it over a long period of time before he acknowledged it as a medical fact. Service above self provides internal armor against the most devastating physical conditions.

And it does much more than that. It restores the soul. It provides remedy and protection for mental and emotional stress. I want to illustrate the point with another true story from World War II. The Allies had advanced to the Rhine River when just before Christmas, the Nazis mounted a bold and desperate counterattack which came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The tank battalion in which I served found itself on the north flank of the Nazi drive. We were in a small town in Belgium through which ran one of the few good roads to the industrial cities of the north. Our mission was to repel any enemy efforts to move northward along that road.

The tide of war had swept beyond the town several weeks before and the civilians who had survived in their basements or in the neighboring woods were trying to put together some pieces of their daily life when the war returned and their community once again became a battleground.

On Christmas morning as we waited for the next attack, the armor of our tanks sheltered us from the shrapnel of the artillery fire. We were therefore amazed to see a girl who could not have been more than eight or nine years old hurry from a nearby house to the side of our tank. She asked if we had any food to spare. She told us her mother had taken the younger children to another town, but she stayed behind to care for her grandfather who had been wounded and couldn't travel. The tank crew, with no hesitation gave her the rations that were in the tank. She said, "Thank you! Thank you! It is a lovely Christmas after all." And away she ran, her arms full of the ugly, brown heavily-waxed boxes of K rations.

The truly remarkable thing was that the soldiers who gave up their food also felt it was a lovely Christmas after all. These men who for weeks had been living outside in cold and snow, who had had little sleep and had been under imminent threat of death for days and nights, were powerfully restored by a simple act of generosity. Service above self -- acts of kindness, constitute a universal language that transcends adversity, that crosses any frontier, that speaks without an interpreter to any nation. It is a language the deaf can hear and the blind can read. It knits humanity together in a very positive way.

Human beings do not have a very good record of being able to live together in peace and friendship. The daily news offers a regular outpouring of struggle and conflict and cruelty throughout the world. One wag has suggested that if anyone who follows the news is not in a perpetual state of fear and depression, he needs to have his television set fixed.

The United States government has been sending troops and diplomatic missions to Haiti and Bosnia and the Middle East and the Far East and Africa to try to diminish the hatreds and strife and bloodshed. The intentions have undoubtedly been benevolent. The results are at best disappointing.

By contrast, Rotary International serves as an international healing and binding force of immense power. Rotary has innumerable programs of international service, each with its own inspirational record of helpfulness and friendships and accomplishments that move forward and gather momentum uninhibited by national boundaries or ancient hostilities.

Listen to this excerpt from the April issue of the Rotarian:

"The struggle to achieve polio eradication is a public-health story of epic proportions, unprecedented in terms of international cooperation, public/private teamwork, voluntary donations and personal sacrifice...

"Rotarians have helped lead the way by committing nearly $400 million in private funds to provide polio vaccine, technical support, medical personnel, laboratory equipment, and educational materials for health workers and parents.

"But even more important, Rotarians have generously offered their compassion, time and expertise...

"In India Rotarians recruited 150,000 volunteers to support that country's first National Immunization Day in 1995. This year, Rotarians helped 2.6 million health workers and volunteers vaccinate 117 million children."

Just think about those figures for a minute. 150,000 volunteers mobilized and 117 million children immunized!! And that's just in one country. President Clinton and a host of eminent dignitaries recently mounted a heavily publicized summons to volunteerism. How much more convincing that effort would have been if they had reported on the incredible accomplishments of Rotary and the human impulse responsible for its success!!

As you know, this is the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. That outpouring of American generosity to the devastated nations of Europe was unprecedented in its magnitude and in its inclusion of defeated enemies. It is a landmark assured of a place in the history books. Even so, its importance recedes in the minds of successive generations of students. The Marshall Plan's prominence in history's landscape will continue to subside over time.

By contrast the distinguishing feature of the Rotary Club movement is seldom, if ever, mentioned in news reports or media commentaries, but it has a power and a permanence that will go on producing greater and greater benefits regardless of whether historians or news people are even aware of it.

This is, indeed, a quiet gift that America, by generating the Rotary Club, has given to other peoples. However, Rotary's impact is needed just as much here, and is just as beneficial here, as anywhere else. As one who spent twenty-four years as a teacher and administrator at American colleges, I have been concerned about the growing proportion of our nation's young people whose plans and aspirations give no thought to service above self.

When I was a member of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, one of my assignments was to visit university campuses and meet with students significantly involved in the use of illegal mind-altering drugs. I had an affidavit from the United States Attorney General stating they could talk freely to me without any legal repercussions for themselves. These regular drug-users, for the most part, were not dummies. They were bright and sensitive people, but in many cases they felt no obligation to their parents, to the college they attended, to the country they lived in or to the laws of the land. Nothing was especially good or worth sacrificing for. Why not live it up and have some of everything? Those young people had never been effectively introduced to the ideals of their own society. They were not guided by any concept of the good life that transcended their own pleasures and desires. They were living in moral poverty. That experience of the Drug Commission was twenty-five years ago. Things haven't gotten any better since. I want to quote now from an article Leon Wieseltier wrote several months ago in The New Republic. He was commenting on the suicides of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult.

"The mansion of death in San Diego made one melancholy for many reasons, and one of them was... the crudity of their vision. They had mistaken the junk of the entertainment industry for the stuff of holy life. `We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars,' said one of the shaven talking heads on the tape they left behind, and `it's time to put into practice what we've learned....'

"`I've been on this planet for thirtyone years,'" one woman told the camera, `and there's nothing here for me.'"

Of course the drug-users in 1972 and the suicidal cult of today represent the fringes of society, but the problem of the absence of "the stuff of holy life" is pervasive. There is precious little in contemporary culture -- the movies, the books, the TV, the music, the classroom teaching -- that touches on human grandeur, that provides inspirational guidance for living a life.

In this modern moral wasteland, Rotary International has a number of programs that serve young people in all countries that can open their understanding and their lives to the benefits of a larger, much more satisfying purpose in life, the life of service. And that transmission of a higher awareness results as much from contact with the Rotarians who live by their motto as from the substance of the Rotary youth programs.

This point brings us back to this evening's honored guest. Dr. Ray Den Adel is the embodiment of the Rotary motto. In every aspect of his personal life and professional career he has contributed far beyond the call of duty. He will be an inspirational model of, and a cheerful and articulate spokesman for Service Above Self. In closing, I would observe that the person who fulfills that Rotary motto discovers the truth set forth by Dr. Harold Blake Walker -- We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.