BROMLEY COLUMN: Hold for the president ...

By Ben Bromley

I have grave concerns about the future of my local Kiwanis Club.

Not because there's a scandal or anything like that. The club isn't funneling "happy bucks" into a slush fund for hiring dancing girls. In fact, the board of directors is so tight with its treasury that one year volunteers delivering bananas to a local assisted living facility were grilled for overspending — to the tune of about 4 bucks.

Yet I'm worried about Kiwanis.

Not because its name sounds like a fruit product for kids. Not because it's a singing club that seems to recruit primarily tone-deaf members. And not even because many Kiwanians — those are Kiwanis members, not a new brand of kiwi yogurt — are of such a vintage that they consider John McCain a whippersnapper.

The real reason I fear for the club's fate is that nine years ago this month, they made me a member. And worse yet, last fall they made me president.

Kiwanis is one of my community's busiest, most influential and longest-standing service organizations. Some say it is the town's premier club. I always believed that to be the case, until they put me in charge. Because if they're willing to hand the presidential gavel to a joker like me, how prestigious can this club be?

Groucho Marx famously said, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." And a club that would elect him president? Marx no doubt would resign on the spot.

We're halfway through my reign of terror — er, presidency — and miraculously the club hasn't disbanded. Yet.

This is not to say we haven't had some scrapes. My year got off to a rocky start when my secretary — the guy who does all the work but lets el presidente take the credit — resigned. He didn't just leave the club, or move out of town. He left the STATE. The guy went to Iowa — on purpose — rather than suffer the indignity of working under me.

Then last month, my successor left the club. He said it was because he had taken a new job out of town, but I suspect he didn't want to clean up the mess President Bromley will leave behind. The guy didn't want to play Gerald Ford to my Richard Nixon and be forced to pardon me for crimes against Kiwanis.

Between these departures, we were notified that our club didn't even exist as far as the state of Wisconsin was concerned. Apparently we stopped filing income reports with the state — we're a nonprofit, but The Man still wants to know what kind of money we're making — and hadn't been recognized by the state since 1997. If a Kiwanis Club meets each Tuesday for lunch but the state Department of Revenue isn't there to hear it, do the members still butcher "Let Me Call You Sweetheart?"

We all should have known it was going to be a rough year the minute they let me write the 2007-08 budget. Letting a writer handle the budget? You might as well ask a 3-year-old to make creme brule.

With a lot of help from our club treasurer, a banker who no doubt wonders what kind of mail-it-in college would give a bachelor's degree to a guy who'd have better luck reading "The Iliad" in the original Greek than a simple profit-and-loss statement, I managed to write a balanced budget. On the third try.

Despite all these challenges, the club has persevered. Our pancake breakfast made budget, and last week's rose sale sprung several husbands from the doghouse. We even paid our fee to the state and got the club officially reinstated.

I'm not going to say it's been easy. In handing the gavel to a guy whose life work is double-entendres and ridiculous puns, the club bought itself a year of groan-inducing jokes.

I don't worry about offending anyone. I figure if they were respectable people, they wouldn't be in a club that would have me as president.

President Ben Bromley's term runs through September. May God help the Baraboo Kiwanis Club.