OUR CITIZENS’ LUNCH CLUB.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLVI, Issue 2165, 3 July 1922, Page 4

OUR CITIZENS’ LUNCH CLUB.

It was the opinion of a great American that one year's weekly attendance at a public lunch club would convert its members from mere villagers to citizens of cosmopolitan instinct. For that reason we have congistenly fostered and assisted the Palmerston North Citizens' Lunch Club. For the past eighteen months the Lunch Club has grown in public favour until we are enabled to note from the next quarter's syllabus, a copy of which is to hand, that during the last quarter the places assigned to no less than eight local speakers were taken by distinguished visitors who hailed from Russia, South Africa, Chiua, Java, the South Seas, the United Kingdom, and from other parts of the Dominion. The quarter's programme opens on the 4th of July with a debtate between a visiting Shakespearean who is the proud possessor of fourteen championship gold medals in elocution, and a local student of the Baconian theory. The Club now has seventy members whose ranks are being joined every week by prominent citizens. The organisation is simplicity itself, the subjects as various as they are interesting and instructive, and the element of surprise in the advent Of distinguished men lends freshness to the proceedings. Membership entails nothing more than approval by the majority, the payment of balf-a-qrown per annum, and of one shilling for lunch.