Ron Hollenbeck introduced our speaker Cindy Kline, who spoke about her father Ned Dull, 91, who has a perfect 65-year attendance at Rotary.

 Cindy noted that she is a retired teacher who lives in Springboro..

 Cindy started by talking about her dad growing up in the small town of Ohio City, which has about 1,000 people. It is in northwest Ohio and her dad Ned was born there in 1923, the only child of a former school teacher and lumber dealer. His mother taught him to play bridge when he was in the sixth grade.

Cindy said her dad worked and lived in the summers on his uncle and aunt's farm, where a team of horses was used to move farm equipment. Later a Fordson tractor was used and Ned learned to drive it when he was 12 years old. He also ran a huckster route for a country grocery store and picked tomatoes in nearby farms for five cents a basket, she said.

He was captain of the school basketball and baseball team and played percussion in the band. He walked by Cindy's mother's house on the way to school each day and started dating her mom in eighth grade. His graduating class had 28 students, she said.

Cindy had placed a ball cap with Ned's name on it for everyone to see for the first part of her story. She changed the cap to one with the Ohio State University logo for the next part of the story. 

 Ned went to Ohio State after high school  and was deferred when World War II broke out, as he was in the ROTC program and studying engineering. He lived in an engineering fraternity on 13th Street, she said. But after two years, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and trained at Fort McCllellan in Alabama. He was then transferred to Charleston, S.C., to the Citadel to become an officer and finish college, or so he thought. He was there about two years and then....here she shows his WWII cap....President Dwight David Eisenhower intervened. He gave Gen. Miller the freedom to form the 100th infantry division in the army and told him he could use any men he wanted, she said. He went to the academies and tool all the men from the Citadel, Air Force and Navy academies to form the army division, she said.

Once trained, they left for the invasion of France. Some 6,500 men went over on the George Washington ship, going into Marseille at the same time the group went into Normandy in the north. There were one out of three casualties from their group.

 

Before he had to ship out, he and Cindy's mom, who were 20 at the time and could not get married without parental consent in Ohio, got married in Charleston. Her mom took a train down to Charleston.

Cindy said her dad served in the army for three and a half years, walking all over Germany and France and ending up working in a railroad battalion before returning to the states.

He thought he would go back to school and finish his engineering degree when he came home from the war, but his father  had just bought a lumber yard in Van Wert and asked him to come work with him and his mother for a while. He said he would give it a try for a few months and 48 years later he was still there, selling both coal and lumber. 

Ned and his wife had four daughters during this time. Several future son-in-laws spent a few summers helping out though there were no sons to come and work at the yard.

 

Cindy said her dad provided material estimates to residential contractors in the Van Wert area. One Thanksgiving they had a boxcar load of lumber delivered from the state of Washington. On Thanksgiving Day, Cindy, her dad and all her sisters spent the day unloading and putting away the lumber. "I remember opening the car door on the boxcar and seeing only about a five-inch opening where lumber was piled clear to the top," she said "It took all day for us to put it away," she said. 

It was during this time that her father joined the Van Wert Rotary after his father took senior active status so there was an opening for his classification, she said. 

Ned sold the lumber yard in 1992 and thus ended the Dull Lumber and Supply Company. in Van Wert.

 

Here Cindy brought out the large Knight Templar Chapeaux. She said her dad decided to join the Masonic fraternity in Van Wert once he started in the lumber business. He quickly became an officer in many different bodies of the fraternity, she said.

In 1954 he started a Knight Templar drill team of 21 men. The Knight Templars are a Christian branch of the Masonic Fraternity, she said. In 1955 he took the team to New York to compete in the National Drill competitions and they came in third.  The team (here she showed a picture of the drill team) then won three class "B" national competitions and three class "A" national competitions. No team has won this much before or since that time, she said.

Ned became a 33rd degree Mason, the Commander of the state of Ohio, Grand Master of the United States of America, and Grand Sovereign of the Red Cross of Constantine for the United States, Mexico, and the Philippines. He travelled to all 50 states and nine countries in Europe, attending Rotary in all these areas also.

He got to knight Roy Rogers in California and her and his wife were invited to their ranch. They brought back pictures signed by Roy to each of the girls and Dale Evans even made a trip to visit her mother when she was very ill.

He also got to knight Ernest Borgnine and enjoyed an afternoon with the actor and his wife, and Ned and his wife presented a hand carved walnut Masonic emblem to President Ford in the Oval Office.

After her mother died in 1991, Ned moved to Springfield, Ill., where he became the Recorder of the United Grand Imperial Council of the Red Cross of Constantine for the United States, Mexico and the Philippines, where he kept busy for the next 20 years.

Two years ago Ned moved into the Springboro home of Cindy and her husband and son. He plays advanced bridge three days a week at Hithergreen, attends Rotary and Masonic functions all around Ohio. They even found and met with an old WWII friend who now lives in Covington, Ky.

Cindy said the final hat her father wears is that of DAD and GRANDPA. He has four daughters, 11 grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren.