Marc Vertin lives in Ventura, Calif., USA. He became a Rotarian in 1992, joining the Rotary Club of Ventura-Marina, where he was president, before moving on to the Rotary Club of Ventura in 1999. In March 2000, he helped drive a fire truck across California and Arizona to donate to the Rotary Club of Tlapacoyan, Mexico. Through this Rotary Foundation Matching Grant project, Rotary clubs from different districts and countries worked together to get Tlapacoyan the firefighting equipment and funds it needed. Vertin has since helped clubs buy two more fire engines and two ambulances. He was a district governor in 2002-03 and is now the District 5240 Rotary Foundation Committee chair.

I started with Rotary when I was in my 40s. I had just opened my own mortgage business, and one of my first clients said, “Hey, why don’t you come to lunch with me? I want to introduce you to some people.” I went with him to a small morning Rotary club, about 20 people, and I thought, “What kind of an organization is this?” Everybody seemed nice, and the meal was free. After eight meetings, I was asked to join.

One day, about six months after I’d joined, I was on the phone with my mother, and she asked what I’d been doing. When I told her, she said nonchalantly, “Oh. Well, your dad was in Rotary.”

She sent me his Rotary pin and a picture of him and her at a Rotary event in Santa Cruz in 1954. In her letter, she had another surprise: It turned out that my grandfather had been a Rotarian too.

I’d had Rotary blood in my veins all along, but the moment that finally made the light go on for me about the organization was when I went to a Special Olympics bowling tournament sponsored by the Rotary Club of Marina. More than 100 Special Olympians from all over the county came with their parents. This was the most important thing in their lives that year. Some of them, when they hit one pin during three games, their eyes lit up, their faces lit up, and they jumped up and down.

I was so touched. I thought, “That’s what Rotary is!” I became a Rotarian that instant. For people to find such joy in what we think is a simple thing, and for us to be so important in their lives, that’s special. And if it weren’t for us, this wouldn’t be happening.

I had been doing the club’s newsletter, and when I went on the Web and looked up Rotary, I realized I was part of something that was much bigger than me or anything I’d ever conceived of. This was a whole organization of resources that allowed me to do good for people all over the world.

I felt like a kid in a candy shop. Then I discovered Matching Grants. My first project was amazing, and like your first time for anything, you always remember it.

In 1998, I got a letter from a friend in the Rotary Club of Port Hueneme, Calif., about a club in Tlapacoyan, Mexico, that had sent a letter to every Rotary club in the United States. I still have the letter, framed. In broken English it said, “Please help us. We are a community of 62,000 people, and our firefighters are without buckets and hats. Can you help?” I thought, “Can you imagine living in a community with 62,000 people, and you have no fire engine?” I just thought that wasn’t right, and I wanted to see if I could do something.

It happened that the Ventura fire chief, Dennis Downs, was in my Rotary club, so I asked if he had any engines for sale. “As a matter of fact, we do,” he said. “I’ve got a 1977 Crown Firecoach, 50-foot Telesqurt, Detroit Diesel engine, automatic transmission, 1,500-gallon-per minute pump, 300-gallon tank, 58,000 miles. I’ll sell it to you for $17,500.” They kept their engines for 20 or 30 years and put them up for sale when they replaced them. Dennis said that because I was with Rotary, he’d put this one aside until we came up with the money.

I got other clubs to donate, and the Hueneme and Tlapacoyan clubs received a Matching Grant from The Rotary Foundation. With these matching funds, we had the full price. I wrote a check to the City of Ventura, got the pink slip, and drove the fire engine home.

I’d planned to drive it to Tlapacoyan but realized quickly that it was impossible. Going into Mexico involves a lot of restrictions, so I made a deal with the club in Mexico that I’d get the engine to El Paso, Texas, and the club would handle getting it across the border.

We still needed a little bit of money for fuel and food, so I decided I’d stop at certain clubs along the way, present a program about our fire engine, and ask for small donations.

We took off at 4 a.m. – and when I say “we,” I mean nine of us. The district governor and his wife and two motor homes went. Pat Askren, a fire chief and member of the Rotary Club of Fillmore, was licensed to drive the fire engine, and we also brought a mechanic. We put a big banner on the engine: Project Tlapacoyan.

A couple of days earlier, we’d gotten a call from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. The firefighters there had heard about our project and wanted us to come by one of the stations in East L.A. on our way to El Paso and pick up a bunch of equipment they wanted to donate. At the station, they piled on stuff.

Between Los Angeles and El Paso, Vertin and his team stopped at clubs in cities along the way, including Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., and Casa Grande and Tucson, Ariz. In each city, the community welcomed them, and they received donations from the clubs and fire stations.

When we pulled into El Paso, we met some of the members of the local club – a huge club of about 200 – at the business of one of the Rotarians. Irving J. “Sonny” Brown, a bigwig in the Rotary Club of El Paso who had served as vice president of Rotary International, loved international projects and thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He had the TV press there to document our arrival, and the local paper had also printed a story. At the hotel where we’d do our presentation, we finally met the president of the Tlapacoyan club, his son and daughter, and two members of their club who came to El Paso.

We handed over the fire engine, and the president cried. He couldn’t believe his dream had come true. Watching him cry made me cry.

Later, we got a call that the paperwork was finished and a Tlapacoyan club member was coming up to meet the new fire engine at a border crossing. The El Paso team would take the truck halfway over the bridge, and the Tlapacoyan Rotarians would come and pick it up.

From there, the journey went perfectly. No breakdowns. No fuel mishaps. It ran all the way down to Tlapacoyan.

About a month after the engine arrived, I received pictures of a huge ceremony. The mayor, the state governor, and local government officials attended, and they held a huge parade with the only fire engine in town going down Main Street.

Pretty soon, the real test came: The engine responded to a fire. That’s when they discovered that the pump worked so well that they ran out of water. Soon after that first fire, the Mexican navy donated a water tank that could be hooked up and pulled behind the fire engine so they’d always have enough water. 

What stays with me the most, through all the times after that when I arranged for other donations – ambulances, medical instrument sterilizers, computers, water tanks, wheelchairs – is the president of the Tlapacoyan club sitting in the fire engine, crying and hugging me, saying, “Thank you, thank you.”

Writer David Rensin interviewed Vertin as part of the research for his next book, Helping: How and Why We Help Each Other, In Our Own Words, an oral sociology of altruism in America.