It was 100 years ago when the city's first Lions Club formed in Little Rock, and almost immediately it set out to raise money for rat eradication. True story, retold March 17 inside the Pleasant Valley Country Club banquet hall. It was during the Great War, and what a novel fit! Lions hate rats, as everyone knows, which is why even the Bible doesn't pretend that in the halcyon restoration God has in store, lions will lie down with rats.
The Little Rock Founders Lions Club invited Lions from all across Arkansas and beyond to its centennial banquet. Keynote speaker Bill Biggs from Omaha, Neb., gave a speech that, in tenor and timbre, must've reminded several in attendance of the late Paul Harvey.
Several on this night boasted that the Little Rock service organization is the oldest continuous Lions Club in the world, and there are some 46,000 worldwide. Biggs is a past Lions Clubs International president.
"You're the No. 1 club, and don't ever forget it, and act like it," he said.
Peter Kumpe received recognition on behalf of his father, Roy, a past district governor largely credited with founding the World Services for the Blind in 1946. Several current clients of the program were on hand, as well as some staff from the Arkansas Lions Eye Bank and Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
High Profile on 04/03/2016