Newtown's Lion Club

The Connecticut Newtown Lions Club has been serving our community for over seventy six years. 

The Lions Club, founded in 1917 by Melvin Jones,  sticks to their motto, “We Serve” by donating it and participating in state as well as international activities and by contributing to the local community. The Lions Club spends their time raising money for activities such as the Classic Mustang Raffle, and the Great Pootatuck Duck Race, which have both become a highly anticipated event. The latter serves as a town festival and an important fundraiser for the Lions Club that enables their donations and raffles. 

The Lions Club is an international service organization with over 1.4 million members across 200 countries.

“The Duck Race was started, I wanna say, fifteen years ago and every duck has a number on the bottom that corresponds with the number on the ticket people buy. The first twenty ducks across the finish line win. We’ve tried to turn the Duck Race into a big community event so we ask local organizations to come and set the tent and explain what they do. We bring in guide dogs. Sometimes there are animals, llamas and things like that. It’s a lot of fun, a couple thousand people show up over the course of the day,” Lions Club member Walter Schweikert said.

Another popular Lions Club event is the yearly Classic Mustang Raffle. Until recently the Lions Club have been raffling off old mustangs, they have done this event for so many years that they have run out of older mustangs and have since been raffling off newer ones. 

“This is a fundraiser and all the money we raise from it goes right to charities for blindness, heart disease, cancer, juvenile diabetes, homeless shelters, food bags, a bunch of other charities,” Schweikert said. 

The Lions Club does quite a few local projects such as, numerous food drives, staffing at blood drives, and maintaining the flag on Main Street during the summer. Another event the Lions Club oversees is the ‘Stuff a Truck’. 

“What we do is, we go up to people and tell them that we are collecting food for our three food banks in this area. We give them a big cloth bag and you know, we tell them we would like them to fill it up  with nonperishable food stuff,” Schweikert said. 

This year the Newtown Lions club was able to fill the truck six times with canned goods to donate to the three food banks, Faith Food Pantry, Hospitality House, and The Bridgeport Rescue Mission. 

The lions club also provides aid to the hearing and the visually impaired, after natural disasters, protects the environment, diabetics, and childhood cancer patients.

“We do a vision screening, and around ten percent of the kids score abnormal in what the camera is scanning and we tell the parents the test results so the parents can take the kid to the eye doctor. In the last several years we’ve been screening about 2,000 kids a year,” Schweikert said. 

On October 26th, the Newtown Lions hosted their Model Train Show at the Community Center. This event was to help in raising funds and awareness for childhood cancer. 

“I think it was something like 4,000 dollars that they raised,” Schweikert said.