At the Aug 17 Club Assembly, Dave Wilson shared with the club members his Rotary Moment.
 
Dave Wilson – 1965-1966 Rotary exchange student to Sweden sponsored by the Wyoming Rotary Club.
 
In WWII, his mother was a RN, his father was a soldier (later a building superintendent) and they were married in Holland.
 
In 1965, he was treasurer of the Wyoming HS Interact Club in old District 741. (Secretary’s note: In 1991, a zero was added to the end of each District number to allow increases in the number of Districts without having to renumber existing Districts and we became District 7410 – taken from the history of the Tunkhannock Rotary Club 1925-2015.) The Interactors would go to some of the Rotary meetings. His mother talked about Europe a lot and that got him interested in sometime traveling to Europe to see where his parents got married.  Then, someone gave a talk about the student exchange program and that piqued his interest in being an exchange student. He was only 15 years old and at that time Rotary was looking for seniors or gap year students.  But he wanted to do his junior year abroad and became one of the youngest outbound exchange students.
 
Rotary was trying to promote world peace since this was 20 year after the war.  He got selected to go to Sweden. He had his 16th birthday in Sweden and stayed with one family for the whole year.  He took Swedish lessons and had to transfer his credits from Sweden to Wyoming to graduate with his class. He had to use British English in writing etc. & there was a lot of UK influence in Sweden.
 
Rotary opened his career, since he became a social worker (also a degree in German), and eventually a director of social services at Clark Summit.  Patty Ehrenzeller was his sponsor for Tunkhannock Rotary in March 2005.  He keeps in contact with his Swedish mom (in her 90’s) and he has contact with several of our former inbound exchange students since his time in the Tunkhannock club.