Janesville Blackhawk Golden Kiwanis

Blackhawk Golden ‘K’ General Meeting
Minutes
January 7th, 2026

President Richard Johnson presided, and called the meeting to order with a ring of the bell at 9:30AM. This week we had a special meeting location, Oak Park Place.

Richard Johnson led with the singing of America, the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Invocation: Richard Johnson, mentioning our meeting location, and the children.

Member Health: John Janes had a status update on Ron Shuler, who had problems from Thursday onwards.
Ryan Lewis had a status update on Dave Thill, who is having mobility issues.

Other Announcements: Carl Cramer spoke upon a hand-out he provided, a list of all committees and their chairpersons.

Committee Reports: John Janes announced new sign-up sheets are going around for Daniels Sentry.  Sales numbers are in for last weekend: $525 in tickets and donations.  Another $1,050 were earned from members’ tickets sales elsewhere.  [Editor’s note: The word was, the April Wright and Ryan Lewis duo were the highest earners at Sentry. 😊]
Tom Neumann announced we are planning the St. Patty’s Day dinner March 18th.  The venue hasn’t been chosen.

Jenny Turco introduced the day’s speaker, Jeff Kersten.  Jeff works at the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection for the State of Wisconsin.  He was previously a police officer in fraud mitigation.  Jeff now provides options for multiple presentations he can give about empowering the people of our great state to better themselves, such as the one he is doing today, Consumer Protection.

Jeff proceeded to present upon many strategies for understanding and dealing with fraud and scam attempts.

Examples were given with complimenting materials, including a pamphlet and full booklet.

The presentation was well received and appreciated.

Jenny Turco thanked Jeff Kersten for speaking and presented him with a Kiwanis Parker pen.

Richard Johnson adjourned the meeting with a ring of the bell at 11AM.

On this day:
1610 Galileo Galilei discovers the first three moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa and Ganymede
1714 Typewriter patented by Englishman Henry Mill (built years later)
1782 First US commercial bank, Bank of North America, opens in Philadelphia
1784 1st US seed business established by David Landreth, Philadelphia
1785 1st balloon flight across English Channel by Jean Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries
1927 Commercial transatlantic telephone service inaugurated between New York & London
1927 Harlem Globetrotters play their 1st game in Hinckley, Illinois
1929 “Buck Rogers” sci-fi comic strip’s 1st appearance in a newspaper
1929 One of the first adventure comic strips “Tarzan” is first published
1934 “Flash Gordon” comic strip created and drawn by Alex Raymond debuts
1954 Georgetown-IBM experiment, the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held at IBM headquarters in New York City
1958 Gibson Guitars receives US patent for their ‘Flying V’ electric guitar model; eventually used by Albert Collins, Jimi Hendrix, Marc Bolan of T-Rex, Dave Davies of the Kinks, and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top
1963 1st class postage raised from 4 cents to 5 cents
1968 Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off and, a few days later, made a soft landing on the Moon.
1972 Discovery of the first black hole Cygnus X-1 in the constellation Cygnus reported in a paper in “Nature” by Louise Webster and Paul Murdin [1]
1985 Lou Brock & Hoyt Wilhelm are elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame
1990 Tower of Pisa closed to the public after leaning too far
1992 AT&T releases video-telephone ($1,499)
International Programmers’ Day is a day to remember the accomplishments of computer programmers and software developers and to honor them for their work. A programmer may go by a number of names, like computer programmer, software programmer, software engineer, software developer, or coder. Titles and descriptions of the job vary. Similar names may be used interchangeably, or different names may be used for different roles.
Bobbleheads are celebrated today with National Bobblehead Day, a holiday created by the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum. The heads of bobbleheads are often oversized compared to their bodies and are connected to them with a spring or hook, so they move around—or bobble—if they are lightly tapped. These collectible figurines go by other names like wobbler, nodder, and wacky wobbler.

Minutes by Ryan Lewis.
Credit: Dave Figi, and Ryan Lewis, photographs.