On Thursday, July 28, 1928, the incoming District Governor, Arthur Mayhew of Uvalde, delivered the Club's charter. Louis Schreiner, out-going president of the Kerrville Rotary Club, had sponsored formation of the Junction Club.
The first meeting was held in back of Patterson Building with the meal catered by Taylor café. Subsequent meetings were held at the Fritz Hotel (now Las Lomas Hotel.)
When he became the first president of the Junction Club, Coke R. Stevenson, then forty years of age, had been elected to the State Legislature, beginning a long career in state politics. It is unique that the Junction Rotary Club’s first president also served as a State Legislator during his first year in Rotary. How many Rotary Clubs can boast that their first president and charter member later became Governor of the State of Texas!
In compiling a brief history of the Junction Rotary Club in August, 1941, Secretary John M. Hankins wrote:
“In the month of March 1928, I received a telephone call from Louis Schreiner, who was president of the Kerrville Rotary Club in 1927-28. He told me to go get Coke (Stevenson), for Coke and me to come to Kerrville that morning and to be there before 12:00 noon. I saw Coke, and as neither of us knew what he wanted, we got in Coke’s Ford and went to Kerrville that morning. When we got there, Mr. Louis told us he wanted us to attend Rotary with him that day and that he was going to organize a Rotary Club in Junction. We insisted that the town was not able to finance a club, but he insisted that is was and gave us a survey sheet to fill out, which we did. Two or three weeks later he called me again and said he wanted Coke and me to go with him to Rotary lunch that day and to be there again before 12:00, which we did, and again we insisted that we could not finance a Rotary Club. He called us several times and along some time in May he called again and said George Peeler, the outgoing District Governor, was going to be there that day and he wanted us to talk to him, so we went down again and we still insisted that we could not finance a club, but he would not take no for an answer and told us he had made application for a charter for Junction the day before by telegraph, and had also telegraphed Rotary International the sum of $100.00 to pay for the charter and that we could either pay this money or come home and organize a club.”
Mr. Hankins concluded his summary with the statement, “We organized the Club.”
In the second year of the twenty-first century, Junction Rotary Club’s president is a woman! She is Dr. Barbara Hale Whitworth. The local club inducted its first female member, Frederica Burt Wyatt, on December 6, 1990, and she served as the first woman president in 1995-96.
By Frederica Wyatt