By ALLIE VUGRINCIC

Staff writer

AUSTINTOWN — The Rotary Club of Austintown recently marked 50 years with a celebration — but the mark the club has left on the community through its service goes much deeper.

The Austintown Rotary formed when members of the Youngstown Rotary saw Austintown as a developing community and decided to form a separate chapter, said Mitch Dalvin, a member of the club for the past 36 years.

“Austintown Rotary was formed 51 years ago,” Dalvin said. “We just had our 50th anniversary party — we’re a little late.”

Dalvin said in the past few decades, the club has been responsible for large projects such as building the bandshell in Austintown Township Park in the mid-1980s, installing handicapped playground equipment in the park, and more recently landscaping an area of the park called Celebration Grove with 100 trees planted and maintained to mark 100 years of Rotary International.

The club also does a “fly the flag” fundraiser program, which puts flags up twice a year to cover six commemorations — Memorial Day, Flag Day and the Fourth of July, and later in the year Labor Day, 9/11 and Veterans Day.

Gary Reel, a Rotary member for about two decades, said the program helps support girls volleyball, the swim team and band at Austintown Fitch High School.

Also in the schools, Rotary works with the high school Interact Club to perform service work, and yearly gives out dictionaries to third-graders at the intermediate school, said Reel, a retired teacher.

“For a lot of these third-graders it’s the first book that they’ve owned themselves,” said Reel. He said the dictionaries help in the classroom, giving all of the students and teachers the same source.

He said this year one young teacher at the intermediate school recalled Reel giving him his third grade dictionary years ago.