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McMinnville Noon Kiwanis
McMinnville, Oregon

Clouds for Kids: Get Your Club Involved!

Clouds are important. They add beauty and variety to the sky. Earth without clouds would be rainless. Without rain earth would become sterile and lifeless. Yet clouds are taken pretty much for granted because of their common-ness . It is highly desirable to persuade young people, in particular, to LOOK UP AND SEE THE CLOUDS WITH FRESH EYES.

To this end the McMinnville Kiwanis Club haunched a project on August 25th to get the popular book, The Book of Clouds, into the libraries of all the elementary schools across the country, starting with McMinnville and our local Yamhill County and spreading to other cities and counties using Kiwanis clubs as the primary vehicle.

On the 25th we invited the principals of all the elementary schools in McMinnville to be our honored guests, at which time we explained the project and gave them autographed copies of The Book of Clouds. It was a small but auspicious start of a very large project. We have subsequently hand-delivered books to outlying elementary school libraries.

Here is how this project would work for your club. You could replicate our procedure of having the project as the program for a club meeting. The cost would be minimal. Barnes and Noble, publishers, have agreed to a 50% reduction in the price of the book for this project. Books would be ordered directly from Barnes and Noble. Unit price of the books is only $7.50 each. So the cost of participation is minimal in relation to the potential benefit in the lives of kids, and this is Kiwanis' main reason for becoming involved.

A word about the author of the book, Dr. John Day aka Cloudman: He is a member of the McMinnville Kiwanis club, a Hinson Fellow, a professor emeritus of Linfield College having taught meteorology for some 40 years. He has taken thousands of cloud pictures. In 2002 he was approached by Barnes and Noble about doing a book of clouds. The book appeared in print in fall of 2002, and now is out in a new softcover edition.

For more information, contact John Day at cloudmanday@comcast.net