The Leo story

Jim Graver coached the baseball team at Abington High School, north of Philadelphia, and was a member of the Glenside Lions Club. Service clubs for adults met all over the township. There was nothing of the kind for the students he coached, and no particular reason there could not be.

He put it to his own club with William Ernst, another Glenside Lion, and on 5 December 1957 the Lions chartered a club of thirty-five students at the high school, most of them off his team. It took the school’s colours, maroon and gold, and it took its name from three words.

Lions Clubs International took the idea on as a sponsored programme in 1964, and in October 1967 the board made it official. The adoption was less a plan for growth than an acknowledgement of it (there were already more than two hundred Leo clubs in eighteen countries by then), and in the single year that followed, the programme reached 918 clubs in forty-eight.

What the association standardised was the shape, not the work. A club charters on one of two tracks: Alpha, for ages 12 to 18, which runs largely through schools, and Omega, for 18 to 30, in universities and communities. It declares one at charter rather than holding members of both, and on either track it is chartered and backed by a sponsoring Lions club.

What was left alone is the service itself. A Leo club decides what its own community needs, plans it, and finds the money for it. That was true of thirty-five students in Pennsylvania, and it is true of a club chartering in Jaffna or Malé today.