Next Meeting: Tuesday, June 7. At noon, at the Coliseum Restaurant & Bar, as usual. This will be our business meeting for the month, and no doubt there will be Lion business to discuss.

The roses have been sold & delivered (please get your money in), the highway cleaned, vision screened, conventions held and donations made. We will probably hear more about some of these, plus plans for the summer months' activities. We do have a Summer Cornhole Tournament scheduled for the Coliseum Bar on July 30th, so we probably need to know more about that one. There is always Lion conversation - come and take part. Along the way you usually find out that there has been service going on that you didn't know about.

It is believed that one of our members is cruising the Mediterranean. The Program Chairman should probably contact this Lion to see if a travelogue program might result. Lots of interesting things to see there.

Highway Cleanup had eight paticipants - LINDA BERGREN, David York, DALE BURMESTER, JOHN JENSON (it's not true that he needed to refill his golf ball bag), MIKE KNOWLTON, SCOTT GROVER, Sam Carothers and Quintin Bovary.

Some of our money has gone to work: $100 to Wisconsin Lions Foundation as a Memorial to JIM KEMMETER, $250 to Restoring Hope Transplant House, $200 to the Lions Eye Bank of Wisconsin. More ways in which “We Serve.”

We have received $1,129 in donations to Madison Central Lions Foundation in memory of Lion JIM KEMMETER. JIM's long record of Lion service to his community continues, even when he's no longer there in person.

At our last meeting, SCOTT GROVER rang the bell, and since there were no volunteers for ceremonies, we went right to work. ADAM GROSSNICKLE introduced Abram Smith as a guest whose Application For Membership is in process, and he'll be joining us soon!

TailTwister JACK HEIM noted that the Foundation Fighting Blindness had a Vision Walk scheduled for late May. They specialize in research and treatment of retinal problems. We'll probably hear more about this.

JOHN JENSON, LINDA BERGREN and SCOTT GROVER and other Lions from other clubs participated in the Vision Screening at the recent NESCO Health Fair. Not as many participants/subjects as in other years - probably needs a little more effort to get the word out.

Speaker was DALE BURMESTER, Manager For Economic Planning for American Transmission Company, the outfit that “helps keeps the lights on.” And the furnaces, air conditioners, stoves, refrigerators, TVs, computers (!), and all the other trappings of civilization. It would be fair to say we can't get along without them, and we learned a lot about how and why they do what they do, which is create and manage the electric transmission lines that get the power from wherever it's produced to wherever it's needed. All this for less than 10% of your electric bill. From the minutiae of 84 aluminum wires and 19 steel ones at the core of those wires that run from tower to tower, the top wire being a lightning protector and the yellow-wrapped ones to divert birds from flying into them, the effect of heat (causes sag) and ice (adds weight) on the wires, the use of aluminum rather than costly copper, the fact that underground transmission is 8 to 10 times more expensive than overhead, to the broad area concerns of different locations for different sources (hydro, natural gas and coal, nuclear) spread over a usage area that runs from Manitoba to Louisiana, we heard a lot of interesting things about how they do it and what the problems are. Thanks for a good program, DALE!