Commanders Corner       

Jan - Feb 2008

With the holidays behind us we should be getting on with the business of the new year. It's amazing how fast the last 6 months have passed, and it has been a pleasure to represent this Department as your commander since last June.
It was enjoyable meeting with so many members at our December DEC. Sarge looked great and it was good to see him keeping us all in line. We had a marathon session of a DEC meeting, hopefully we can shorten these meetings to around 90 minutes tops.
We should be in our new office in the State Capitol Building anyday, things have been quite hectic anticipating the move and were looking forward to finally getting settled in. I had the opportunity of attending the rededication of the Capitol-it is an amazing and beautiful building. We should feel very fortunate to be able to call this our home.
Jim Fiedler with national membership will be here in Feb. for about three weeks, let me know if you are available to help for a day and we can connect with Jim so we can help in getting some new members in our department.
Commander Marty Conatser has indicated that we are 65,000 members behind this time last year as our Jan.9th target date
approaches and has asked for all national leaders to sign up one new member in the next 30 days. I would like to ask our dept. leaders, district and post leaders to do the same.

Our Department oratorical will be Feb. 16th at the VA center, bldg 9 at 12:00 o'clock, and on March 8th please support the Pageant at the Airport Hilton at 6pm. Remember also to be working on Boys'State recruiting--no quotas again this year-- and don't forget the charter schools and home schoolers.

The upcoming session of our state legislature will decide the fate of the northern veterans nursing home. Please contact your state senators and representatives and encourage their support of this project. It looks very favorable, but a little extra effort on our part may make the difference in success or failure.

In closing, Adjutant Greg Rowley had some surgery recently and is doing pretty well, and Department President Debi Swafford is having surgery in the near future. Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers-wishing them a successful and speady recovery.

                                            My Honor to Serve
                                         
                                            Gary Schwartz
                                             Commander