I want to wish each of you and your family a bright new year full of prosperity, health, and spiritual awareness. As we ring in the New Year, our club is off and running for an exciting year of newly planned activities which we hope will have some appeal to everyone in our club. I would like to thank our new members of the Retirees Club Board for agreeing to serve during this coming year and encourage all members to attend at least one function during this coming year. The new members are: Helen Osborne, Vice President; and Mike Abrams, Secretary. They join Stan Briggs, Treasurer; Roger Craycraft, Immediate Past President; Shirley Rice; Bob Fruth; Ernie Stamper; Carol Tipton; and me.

Our Christmas luncheon in December was a huge success and we hope everyone enjoyed the reception, lunch, and entertainment. The new hotel was beautiful and we have had many positive compliments on the entertainment, decorations and quality of food and service. There were roughly 100 participants and several persons were lucky enough to win door prizes.

We also thanked departing Board of Director members Gaige Paulsen and Carol Young for their many years of service. As you may recall we conducted a reception following our October 2009 benefits meeting with the purpose of identifying activities in which you, our membership, might be interested in participating during this coming year. We did this so our club members would be better informed as to the dates and times of our activities and hopefully that will translate into more interest and involvement. Based on the results of that effort we are including our scheduled events calendar for the year with this newsletter. Things are going to be jammed packed and exciting for this coming year and your Board is hoping you will join in the fun and entertainment.

Our annual events calendar had lunch at Hall’s on the River in March, but since Hall’s does not serve lunch during the winter season, we decided to exchange this event with our September event. As a result, we begin our annual events for 2010 with our Quarterly Meeting on March 11th. We are going to lunch at Chili’s Restaurant and then tour Historic Waveland -- see the Next Event section for details. Because of waning interest in our past Spring Keeneland Outing, we felt that eliminating this event and focusing on other different events was appropriate this year. We will be having a Spring Golf Scramble on June 8 with a makeup day of June 10. Since the date is several weeks away we have a signup sheet currently available (click for signup sheet) and will be getting more information out in the May timeframe. We have included another list of coming events in the newsletter for your review and we hope and encourage each member to participate as much as possible.

Membership is going to be another area we will focus on this coming year, because without Ashland’s financial sponsorship, we can only survive with dues from our membership. Therefore, we will be using emails and newsletters to encourage those who are not currently involved to at least provide financial support with the hopes that they will participate as much as possible.

We want to encourage you to provide us with your comments and suggestions relative to any aspect of our club. We strive to represent you and your desires, but without input it is difficult to achieve. Please feel free to contact me or any other Board member on your suggestions for our club.