Rotary Club of Signal Hill member Charles Parks, who recently donated $50,000 in property to The Rotary Foundation
According to Carol Churchill, who is on the foundation committee of the Rotary Club of Signal Hill, Parks’s donation, along with a $150,000 securities donation by member Robert Long in 2013, has contributed over $200,000 to The Rotary Foundation’s perpetual fund.
“I would bet it’s the largest donation from just a few people in the club,” she said in a phone interview with the Signal Tribune.
While the Rotary Club of Signal Hill currently has 38 members, its nonprofit parent organization Rotary International has 1.2 million members in 35,000 clubs worldwide, according to its website.
Rotary’s primary goals are to: promote peace; fight disease; provide clean water, sanitation and hygiene; save mothers and children; support education; and grow local economies.
The Signal Hill chapter has focused primarily on supporting education through an annual school-supplies-in-backpacks program. This year, they contributed $30,000 in school supplies in 2,100 backpacks, donated from local businesses such as Costco, and assembled in August by volunteers working at the police station.
“We have a good time,” Churchill said about the weeklong effort.
Churchill said the club also contributes two members every two weeks to help distribute brown-bag lunches to shut-in seniors. Club members are also active in other municipal activities, such as concerts and parades.
“It makes you feel really good,” she said of the Rotary’s efforts helping others.
This echoes Parks’s feeling as well. His favorite quote, which he attributes to actor Whitman B. Mayo, is, “Help somebody to help somebody, to help somebody help somebody.”
Parks, now 82, moved to Long Beach from Austin, Texas in 1952.
“I worked at Douglas [Aircraft] when I came out here,” he said in an interview with the Signal Tribune. “I loved it because at one I time I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. But it was so unstable. If you’re lucky enough to get tenure, you’ll be there forever. But if you’re not that lucky, you could be right at that point of getting tenure and they’d lay you off.”
He checked the newspapers and saw an ad to become a police officer.
“I’d never thought about that before,” he said. “I signed up. I was kind of young at the time because I didn’t have any military experience. I had to wait a whole year.”
Parks served with the Long Beach Police Department for 33 years, developing numerous programs to improve efficiency and achieving the rank of police commander.
After retiring around the age of 54, Parks said he felt too young to simply stop working, so he continued in public service with two successive five-year terms on the Long Beach Water Commission.
Following those terms, Parks served as an appointed foreman to the Los Angeles County Civil Grand Jury for one year in 2004 to 2005. He was then appointed to the Los Angeles County Commission on Economy and Efficiency, developing a program for retired police officers to serve in a backup reserve corps.
“I’ve had close to 50 years of public service, or maybe more,” he said. “It just happened. It was not a part of my ‘bucket list.’ I really had no idea I would become involved in any kind of city government.”
Parks also had an extensive education, completing coursework for a master’s degree in math at California State University, Long Beach while in the police department. Just before submitting his thesis, he said, he was awarded a National Urban Fellowship, which took him to Yale University and brought him a mentor-fellowship with former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and a master’s degree from Occidental College.
The fellowship required a one-year leave-of-absence from his job, he said, while he was a single parent of four sons, the youngest of whom was 5 years old at the time.
The property that Parks donated to The Rotary Foundation was land he had purchased as a young man on the advice of his father.
Parks’s father, who lived in Fresno at the time, knew that the property owners in Pixley, Calif. (north of Bakersfield) were selling and recommended it to Parks as an investment.
“I bought that when I was a single man back in my early 20s,” Parks said. “It was $3,500 for five acres of land.”
Rotary Club of Signal Hill member Charles Parks (left), who donated $50,000 in property to The Rotary Foundation, with wife May (right), at their wedding in 2006 in the Ice Chapel, Quebec City, Canada
“The Central Valley is the richest valley in the whole state,” he said. “I think it took about 10 acres to make it profitable. But I could not buy the property next to mine because they didn’t want to sell, so I have kept that property all this time.”
Though he didn’t plant the trees, Parks shared an anecdote about pistachio nuts involving actress Elizabeth Taylor after her 1960 film BUtterfield 8, which he loved.
“A friend of mine was a bodyguard for Elizabeth Taylor,” Parks recalled. “At or about the same time, an article came out about my sons and myself as a single parent. [My friend] took this article to Elizabeth and said, ‘This guy’s really in love with you,’ and she read the article and she autographed it, ‘Good luck, Charlie and the boys,’ and she took a little sprig of her hair on a bobby pin and put it on a cloth [to give me]. And she was married to Richard Burton at the time [!] and he liked pistachio nuts and so he sent me a five-pound bag of pistachio nuts.”
Parks said that as the years passed, he knew he was probably not going to move to Pixley as he had once thought, but selling the property was prohibitive because of capital-gains tax.
“I had thought once of building a house on there and then building an apartment for myself and then I could travel around the country and around the world and take the other building and lease it to some family,” he said. “I wouldn’t be tied down to it.”
The idea to donate the property instead of selling began with Churchill.
“I happened to be talking to Carol one day, and she goes, ‘Why don’t you donate it to the Rotary?'” Parks recalled. “And I thought that was pretty good because I belong to the Rotary and [they] have done a lot of wonderful things throughout the world.”
Parks connects the value of Rotary Club efforts to his experience growing up near Austin, Texas.
“The goal of Rotary is to stamp out polio worldwide,” he said. “Growing up in Texas, [we had] the March of Dimes and they used to have a little metal button with a red cross on it and a dime to pin on your shirt. It took me back [!] and I thought that was a good idea.”
Parks’s own mother had passed away from tuberculosis when he was 15 and she was 37.
“She was an unusual woman. I knew she did not have a formal education, and I don’t know how far in grade school she went, but she [was] unbelievable, very health conscious,” he said. “She was a great woman. I think about her at least once a week.”
Churchill helped with the appraisal and paperwork to transfer Parks’s land to The Rotary Foundation, which took a couple of years and was finalized in November.
Churchill said all donations funnel up to The Rotary Foundation in Chicago. Chapters can then request grants for local projects, though donators can earmark funds for special-interest projects, which Long had done for his interest in clean water.
Parks’s donation is not marked for any specific local use but instead contributes to the foundation’s larger purpose, which is primarily eradicating polio.
Lance Woods, Rotary Club of Signal Hill’s president, in a phone interview with the Signal Tribune, emphasized Rotary’s stellar progress in worldwide polio vaccination.
“There used to be 400,000 cases a year,” he said. “This year we’ve only had 16 cases.”
Completely eliminating portfolio is The Rotary Foundation’s primary purpose, according to its website, which notes, “We began our fight against polio in 1979 with a project to immunize 6 million children in the Philippines. Today, polio remains endemic in only three countries— down from 125 in 1988.”
Woods explained that there are a lot of costly logistics involved in this fight, including that vaccines must be kept at a low temperature in insulated boxes while being transported to each child.
Rotary Club of Signal Hill member Charles Parks, who donated $50,000 in property to The Rotary Foundation, at Curley’s Café, club meeting place
In an effort to raise more local awareness about polio, Woods hosted a local World Polio Day meeting on Oct. 24 at the Kaiser Permanente medical offices in Signal Hill, inviting local leaders such as the mayor, police chief and city council members to understand the disease with information on Rotary’s website, Endpolio.org.
Parks said he not only appreciates Rotary’s anti-polio efforts but also Woods’s local efforts in bringing prominent speakers to the chapter meetings, such as L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell and the heads of the Long Beach port and airport.
Parks himself is now fully retired, enjoying traveling with his wife May. They most recently visited the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
He had met May while traveling, in fact, becoming engaged on a trip to Cuba, and marrying in the below-freezing Ice Chapel in Quebec City, Canada, 11 years ago.
“We did some extracurricular things like ice carving, ice fishing on the St. Lawrence River and dog sledding,” he recalled.
They held a reception at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) on their return to Long Beach.
Of Parks’s donation, Woods said he was pleased that it was going to such a good cause, having driven to Pixley with Churchill to help assess the property.
“He bought that when he was such a young man, and now he’s in his 80s!” Woods exclaimed. “Some plans, you just don’t do them. But this way [the land value] gets stretched— doubled, in fact, because of the matching.”
He encouraged others to consider donating unused property to The Rotary Foundation and to join the Rotary Club to learn how they too can help. He added that the Rotary’s motto is “service above self.”
“We meet every Thursday morning,” he said, “at the world-famous Curley’s.”
