Glenn C. Mead,

1912-13

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

"Glenn was the right man to succeed Paul Harris," said Rotary's first secretary, Chesley R. Perry. "He gave the organization the practical common sense which was its outstanding need at that particular moment."

Glenn C. Mead, the second man to head the National Association of Rotary Clubs, came by his common sense early. Born on a farm in rural Erie County, Pennsylvania, which his parents had literally hewn out of the wilderness; he grew up inured to the hard routines of farm life. Despite his father's early death from Civil War injuries and the family's poverty, Glenn graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, at age 17, and from Harvard – cum laude – four years later.

He taught the classics at the Episcopal Academy of Philadelphia, simultaneously studying law and eventually gaining admission to the bar in Philadelphia in 1900.

Early in his practice, he became a political reformer, helping .to improve city streets and housing and to develop mercantile I centers and railroads. As counsel for the famous Reading. Railroad, he earned the reputation: "A Glenn Mead contract is a perfect contract."

In 1910, he assisted in organizing the Rotary Club of Philadelphia and served as its charter president.

At the Portland Convention of 1911, he was elected a director of the National Association of Rotary Clubs, and a year later in Duluth, was chosen as President of the newly renamed International Association.

Glenn worked closely with Ches Perry on association materiél and the financing of THE ROTARIAN magazine. He also organized the first Rotary fund drive for disaster relief when tornadoes and floods devastated the U.S. Midwest. But most of all he made his mark in the way he "federated scattered clubs into a brotherhood," in the words of one presidential successor, Allen D. Albert (1915-16).

Glenn Mead died 24 May 1954.