SANPETE COUNTY, UT – By the end of the month, every third grader at eight elementary schools in and around Sanpete County (420 children in all) will walk home with their own dictionary.

The first wave arrived the morning of Oct. 13 at Manti, Gunnison and Ephraim elementary schools. Mt. Pleasant, Spring City, Fountain Green and Eureka on Wednesday Oct. 14. Fairview and Moroni on Oct. 20.

It is the first distribution the newly chartered Rotary Club of Sanpete County has run on its own. It is also the first fruit of a summer-long raffle.

The raffle’s prize, a Browning A-Bolt 3 Hunter in 6.5 Creedmoor rifle, ended up in the hands of a man who was in the middle of a project when the phone rang.

“Today’s your lucky day,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“One might be a little skeptical answering a phone and hearing that,” said Michael Brook, the raffle winner. “As I was very busy, I’m glad I didn’t hang up.”

Brook had purchased tickets months earlier at a Sanpete Cares Coalition meeting. He thought of it as a donation. “At the time I bought the tickets all I was thinking about was, ‘this is a good cause to support,'” he said. His tickets, with others sold at Hermansen’s Hardware in Ephraim and at community events across the county all summer, raised the $3,000 to $4,000 the Rotary club spends each year to put A Student’s Dictionary in the hands of every third grader in the area.

The books serve an important purpose. In Utah, roughly 52 percent of third graders read at grade level, according to club co-founder Dan Bradshaw. Fourth grade is when students shift from learning to read to reading to learn, and not every household in rural Sanpete can lean on a tablet or a phone to close the gap.

The dictionary itself is a sturdy paperback with a reference section covering the U.S. Constitution, sign language, cloud types, U.S. presidents and facts on all fifty states. Rotary has been putting these books into Sanpete third-grader’s hands since about 2001, when the project launched statewide after two Utah Rotarians’ wives spotted the booth at a Rotary International convention. The original Ephraim Rotary club dissolved around 2002 or 2003, but Wally Brown and his wife of the Sugar House Rotary Club in Salt Lake City kept the dictionaries coming to Sanpete for years.

Until mid-September, the Sanpete group existed only as a satellite of the Richfield Rotary Club. Dan and his wife, Holly Bradshaw, submitted the formal charter application to Rotary International’s headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, in the first week of August with 16 members, one more than the 15 required. Rotary International approved the charter in mid-September, making the Rotary Club of Sanpete County the newest chartered club in District 5420 in several years. District 5420 encompasses Utah.

“We’re quite a different community in Sanpete County,” Dan said. “We wanted to stand on our own, create our own service projects, our own identity, and have the club have our own feel for the specific needs of the cities in Sanpete County.”

The rifle raffle was the idea of club member Luke Rowley. The rifle itself was ordered and held by Carl Hermansen, a federally licensed firearms dealer whose family hardware store has served Ephraim since 1937.

“I’m not much of a gun person, I’m not much of a hunter,” Dan said. “I had to rely on my two friends to coach me on what would be an appropriate rifle that people would be interested in having a hand at winning.”

What they picked landed for Brook, who said he wasn’t “really into guns” either, but changed his mind when he saw it. “What a beautifully crafted work of art,” he said. “It’s almost like receiving something I wanted, but didn’t know that I wanted, until it was in my hands. I’m so thankful and my appreciation has grown.”

Brook has since mounted a scope. He said he hunted as a kid, but “always said, ‘If I’m shooting at something it’s pretty safe,’ as I was a rather poor shot. I’m sure my wife can probably outshoot me, but with the quality of this rifle, hopefully that will change.”

The dictionary project is one line in a broader ledger the young club has already opened. On the Fourth of July, when the Mount Pleasant pancake breakfast lost its usual sponsor with only days to spare, a chain of phone calls from the city manager, to the Coffee Depot, to a Rotarian at the Sanpete Food Pantry, and back to the Bradshaws landed the project with the Rotary Club. Forty volunteers pulled the breakfast off, served more than 600 people, and cleared a mid-summer fundraising need for the food pantry.

On Aug. 1, the club cut a cash check to Nancy Bean at the Sanpete Clothing Resource Bank, whose back-to-school event needed new underclothing for the children.

And every Rotary club in Utah, Sanpete included, has thrown funding and volunteers behind a water project in the Oljato chapter of the Navajo Nation, near Monument Valley, replacing the two or three five-gallon jugs many seniors were surviving on with proper nearly-three-hundred-gallon water cubes. Holly credits that Navajo work with drawing her into Rotary in the first place, watching Dan and his parents help children and seniors there through the Bountiful club.

Rotary’s motto is “Service Above Self.” Its Four-Way Test (Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?) is the filter the club runs its projects through. Holly said she tested the four questions on a difficult family situation before she took them at face value.

“It proved to be a great facilitator to get through a very sticky situation,” she said. “You’re not stepping on others’ toes. You’re really trying to build for all concerned.”

The test resonates for Brook as well. He said his respect for Rotary “dramatically increased” when he learned about it after winning the raffle. “If we all considered these questions and built them into our interactions with others, the world would be a much better place,” he said. “They are excellent guidelines for all of us to live by.”

Brook pointed back to the Sanpete Cares Coalition meeting where he bought the ticket as part of the same fabric. “It’s a coalition that works on different projects to support our community,” he said, “and the Rotary Club is a part of that support and community building.”

The Rotary Club of Sanpete County meets for lunch at noon on the third Tuesday of each month, usually in Ephraim. Meetings typically feature a community speaker and visitors are welcome. To join or to donate to the club’s next project, call Dan Bradshaw at 801-518-7055 or visit rotary.org.