The Prez Sez 

By Bill Davison 

I would like to begin by extending a warm welcome to our newest members - Norah & William Wolff.  We hope you enjoy your membership now and even more so in the future when we can return to our traditional in-person meetings.

As promised in last month’s Newsletter, we have been working to identify and test a temporary replacement for our Thursday Morning Programs that would offer the same amount of information and interaction as they have been doing. We recognized that this would be very difficult, and probably impossible, to achieve but it gave us a good target.

We decided to try an online approach using the program Zoom and ran two test programs with reduced size audiences that seemed to work out quite well. The programs included a 30 minute socializing time before the presentations and a 1 hour Q & A afterwards – much like our normal meetings. Jim Larrimore and Bob Meyer, speaking on the IAEA and Winston Churchill respectively, did a fine job of maintaining the high quality of our presentations. If you’d like to learn more about their presentations and link to the visuals they used, please go to our website http://northcountyworldaffairs.org/programs/

Going forward we will be scheduling meetings similar to these on a biweekly basis. You all, I believe, received invitations to the first full participation meeting on April 30 at which Bill Thayer spoke about an inspirational adventure in Antarctica in the early 20th century.  Two more programs are scheduled for May and are described in the May Programs section below.

Finally, in case you’re curious, I think it’s fair to say that we still have no real knowledge about how long it will be before our traditional Thursday Morning Programs can resume. For planning purposes, a minimum duration of a few months still seems appropriate. I will, of course, try to keep everyone up to date on where things stand and what the future looks to hold as events evolve.

Thank You and Please Stay Healthy.

Note:  All recipients are requested to keep Lewis Sherman (lgsherman75@gmail.com) informed of any mail or email address changes.  Also, if you do not receive your newsletter via email by the 23rd of the month, let Ray Sutton know in person at the next meeting or by email to rsutto2@gmail.com, or by phone:  760-547-5713.