Exchanging club banners is a Rotary tradition. When a Rotarian “makes up” at another club, he often takes a banner from his home club to present to the club he is visiting in exchange for a banner from that club, which he will then present to his home club when he returns.
Over the years, the Rotary Club of Fairhope has accumulated a large collection of club banners, which are shown in the galleries on the linked pages. Here is our own club banner.
The banners in this gallery are divided into geographic regions. The selection of regions and assignment to those regions was fairly arbitrary except in the case of those in the United States, in which case the states were divided along the lines of the regions established by the U.S. Census Bureau.
- United States
- Canada
- Latin America
- Europe and UK
- India
- Australia and New Zealand
- Asia-Pacific
- Africa
- Themes, Conventions, and Other
Some of the banners pictured on the linked pages are very old and in poor condition. Many have not been properly stored and taken care of; some have suffered water damage. Many display the impressions of staples because they had been affixed to assemblages such as the one shown below. These collections were created by PDG Denis Inkel in the late 1990s, partly to display the banners and partly to cover the windows in our then meeting place, the Fairhope Yacht Club, which looked out on water and produced a lot of glare. In subsequent years these collections had not always been handled gently, and the attached banners have suffered accordingly, but some have survived remarkably well.
In some cases, both the front (recto) and back (verso) of a banner are shown because the back of the banner has signatures, a description of the banner design, or other features of interest.
Many of the banners pictured here (and all of those manufactured for the Russell-Hampton club supplies company) have a label on the back allowing presenters to record the details of the banner presentation. Very few of these have been filled in, but the label on the back of the Orange, Texas, banner indicates that it was presented by the club to Clarence Bishop when he visited on August 10, 1993. Similarly, an unnamed Fairhope Rotarian received a banner from Roscommon, Michigan, on February 18, 1992.
If you see the banner from your club here and would like to send us a better example (or a photo of it), we would be glad to receive it!