Three
TEETHING PROBLEMS

In February 1965 Rotarian President John Chow Pak Lum confessed in his report to the 30th Annual Conference of Rotary District 330 that the new PJ Club had taken on more than it could chew, and that 'the present board' of Directors was of the opinion that the two major projects which it had undertaken were in fact 'too big for a small club like ours to be able to successfully accomplish...' In making this statement the President could have been interpreted as implying that the PJ Club had been born almost before its time and that its membership and their plans came close to outstripping the capacity of the still fledgling urban community of PJ itself. Ambitious plans certainly were to remain a feature of the PJ Club's activities, but in most cases the Club was to demonstrate its ability to carry them out.

Nevertheless, the move to establish the PJ Club in the first place, which was conceived in the minds of the leaders of the Kuala Lumpur Rotary Club of 1960/61, was bold as well as imaginative. For even though in 1961 Petaling Jaya was clearly well established and thriving, it was still little more than a dormitory suburb of Kuala Lumpur and its emergence as an industrial and urban centre in its own right was only beginning to become apparent. Yet, the decision taken by the KL Rotarians, led by their President Len Kaye, and with the support of his successor-elect, Gurbaksh Singh Sambhi, and of that Rotarian stalwart, P.P. T. Sivapragasam, to promote the establishment of a club in PJ while they were also in the midst of organising another new club in Kuantan was a brave gesture of faith and confidence in the future of the new township. But the KL group had done their homework and their confidence was to prove fully justified by the end of the first decade of PJ Rotary's existence. Its first few years, however, were ones of trial and tribulation.

The KL Club's initiative met with a quick response. On 19 June 1960 at the PJ Club in Jalan Selangor which was to be the new club's first home, a preliminary meeting was held, convened by Len Kaye, and attended by fifteen interested individuals who already lived in or had established business concerns in Petaling Jaya. This meeting had no difficulty in adopting the proposal to establish the Rotary Club of Petaling Jaya, and four months later (i.e. on 4 October) the 'organization meeting' took place, by which the new club formally took shape on a provisional basis and commenced to hold regular meetings. After this, all that remained to be done was, with the sponsorship of KL Rotary, to apply for membership of Rotary International, admission to which was approved on 6 January 1961. Finally, on the 16th of the following month, PJ Rotary held its first installation dinner or 'Charter Night', an occasion graced by the presence of the Sultan and Tengku Ampuan of Selangor. The Sultan consented to become the Club's Patron and accepted the invitation to become its first honorary member, thereby establishing a relationship with the royal house of Selangor which has subsisted to the present time. Albert Abel, the Development Officer attached to the PJ Development Corporation, was formally installed as the Club's first President by Haji Mustapha Albakri, the then Chairman of the Elections Commission, in his capacity as Governor of Rotary District 330, of which he was the third Malaysian incumbent.*

* Actually, he was the fourth, if one includes the expatriate A.W. Cressford, his two Malaysian predecessors being Dato Hj. M. Eusoff and Khoo Teik Ee. All came from the KL Rotary Club.

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