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President Julie began closing our chat rooms at 12:28 and called the meeting to order by muting all attendees at 12:33. After a quick reminder to stay muted unless and until it is your turn to speak, President Julie turned control over to Jenn Dubey for a very heartfelt invocation that included a prayer that we will soon be able to meet face to face once again. For today’s patriotic song, President Julie shared a video of the US Army Field Band performing “The Star Spangled Banner” at Fort McHenry on Defenders Day. If you aren’t familiar with Defenders Day, it commemorates the defense of Baltimore from September 12th through 14th during the War of 1812. The events inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words to what would become our National Anthem in 1931. Don’t let the term “Field Band” fool you – the group included harp, cello and vocals as well as traditional band instruments. Cindy Kangas introduced her guest, Anna Martiny with New York Life. Diane Sanborn reported that the health of the club was good, and we welcomed Rebecca Bahar-Cook back after knee surgery. Irv Nichols shared a personal remembrance of Vergil Pinckney who was a member of our club from 1960 – 75 or 80. Vergil died on January 6th at the age of 94. Irv remembers bowling with him on a Rotary team as part of a service club league. Not only was he the best bowler on the team, he was an awfully nice young man. More details about his life are at https://estesleadley.com/obituaries/vergil-pinckney/. President Julie quickly reminded us that Covid vaccines are now available to older individuals with sign up through county health departments. Each county is different and things are changing rapidly. A helpful Rotarian (Berl Schwartz I believe) let us know via Chat the Meijer was also starting to accept sign ups as well. Martin Luther King Day will be celebrated differently this year, without a large event due to the pandemic. There will be a virtual celebration from 7 -8 pm Monday on WILX, with Bernice King as the featured guest. President Julie had also attended a recent event at the Broad Art Museum where she was pleased to see Hari Kern. There are several exhibits that are particularly noteworthy including “Interstate of Mind” and “Seeds of Resistance”. Those wanting to attend need to request and entry time in advance. Under the heading of Rotarians doing great things, President Julie shared that Ed Castellani was recently recognized by Michigan Lawyers Weekly as an inaugural “Michigan Go To Lawyer” for 2021 in business law. Only twenty business lawyers in the entire state received this recognition. Ed leads the Business and Tax department at Fraser Trebilcock. In addition to practicing law for over three decades, he is also a certified public accountant. Our special music, introduced by Steve Robinson, featured the PULSE Saxophone Quartet from Lansing Michigan. Steve is very familiar with this quartet as his son, Owen, is the tenor saxophonist. These four young men entertained us with Memory from Nepomuk’s Dances by Marcelo Zarvos. Observant Rotarians may have noticed that they were standing on sheets of plywood before they got to the section of the piece that involved some stomping. President Julie thanked Chair of the Month Melody Warzecha and reminded us that questions should be typed in the Chat before turning the meeting over to Chair of the Day Justin Sheehan. Justin introduced us all to Metro Melik Brown, CEO of Lansing Made and a true renaissance man. It is hard to imagine that any one person could be doing more to promote the Lansing area or be more enthusiastic in doing so. Melik is originally from Oscoda and came to East Lansing to attend MSU. He quickly discovered that college was not going to work for him, and it didn’t take him long to discover the other side of 127 and all that Lansing had to offer. He calls Lansing a small, big town with lots of big town opportunities. Over the years, he has utilized many avenues to promote the area. He hosted (and produced and everything else) a one hour call in TV program on a public access channel to highlight all of the cool things in Lansing. He started Lansing Made and worked to define our identity as a city, including working with Ben Graham to create a Lansing Made logo. The logo appears on t-shirts and sweatshirts available on http://www.lansingmade.com. To promote events in the area, he created a series of videos titled “What’s the Haps?”. He began staging events around 517 Day, starting with a community celebration at the Lansing City Market that he tried, unsuccessfully, to keep under the radar. In addition to promoting events, he works to promote local businesses and is a huge proponent of buying local. During the pandemic, he has been working with WLNS and regularly posts videos on his YouTube channel and utilizes the Lansing public access station. In summary, he believes that all of us should spend more time saying positive things about Lansing. He was joined by his beautiful 7 month old son who had been fairly patient during the entire presentation. Since Melik was reading and answering questions as he went, there were no questions left at the end of his presentation! President Julie thanked Melik for presenting and explained that we make a donation to our foundation that will fund grants to local organizations. Next week’s meeting will occur on Zoom and our speaker will be David Mielnicki on commercial real estate. Our meeting was adjourned at 1:30. Linda Lynch's email is: linda.j.lynch@gmail.com |
Dave spent the last 16 years in the field of real estate appraisal; Initially appraising single-family residential homes for lending purposes between 2004 and 2009. During that time, Dave began appraising commercial real estate which opened the door for his position at CBRE. Over an 11 year span at CBRE, he appraised a wide array of commercial real estate ranging from land and residential subdivisions to light industrial buildings, churches, schools, and multi-tenant office buildings.