The Mathews Lions Club held a dedication ceremony Saturday for its new building on Windsor Road.
The 50’x75’ 1½-story Heritage metal building was a long time coming. Lion Layton Merithew said it took around five years of setting up rental tents and hauling rental tables and chairs to events to raise enough money to put up the basic building. The design phase began in 2015 and the building was erected in 2016. And then the real work began.
Club members “did all the construction pretty much ourselves,” said Merithew. This included the wiring, plumbing, insulation, sheetrock and any other jobs. Only the HVAC was done outside, by local contractor Jennings Haynes. After a break because of the pandemic, the finishing touches were finally added and the building was ready for occupancy.
Merithew said there’s “significant pride in the membership in having a place of our own.”
“It expands our ability to serve the community in additional directions that we hadn’t even considered,” he said, including installing the regional eyeglass recycling facility. It also will help increase the longevity of the club’s equipment.
The structure provides interior space to park the club’s food and rental equipment trailers, and it has a common area for gatherings when the trailers are moved outside. It also has a kitchen/utility area, a handicapped-accessible bathroom, laundry facilities, and upstairs storage space, said Merithew.
At Saturday’s dedication, the Rev. Dede Parrish, pastor of St. Paul and Beulah United Methodist churches, gave the keynote address. She said the building had been a dream of the Lions for many years, and that the late Ben Thompson, a longtime dedicated Lion, had donated the land “in order to fulfill that dream.” It was in his name that the building was dedicated.
But it took the men and women of the club to make the building a reality, she said.
“Many hours and hard work went into purchasing, putting up, and taking down tents, chairs, and tables to fund this building,” she said. “This was not an easy feat and took a lot of physical labor and dedication … and the building is totally debt-free.”
Parrish dedicated the building “to the glory of God first … (and) second … as a testimony of love for this community.”
“May the building be strong and withstand the test of time,” she said, continuing with, “may the members of the Mathews Lions Club, past, present, and future, be examples of hospitality, charity and love. And many they do even greater work from this point forward.”
Merithew said that one of the things the Lions wanted to accomplish with the building was to provide space in addition to that provided by the Mathews Family YMCA for Mathews residents when there are emergencies in the county.
“If the county wants us to serve in a time of emergency, we can,” he said. “We can cook, and we have a place to put people.”
Merithew said the Mathews Lions Club is now the regional processing center for eyeglasses for the four-county region and has new equipment coming in to clean, grade, box and send out refurbished eyeglasses all over the world.
Member Elwood Everington recalled one Mathews resident, John Raymond Bassett, who had been deaf since the age of four and needed a cochlear implant. The Lions Club raised the money for that, said Everington, adding that Bassett was formerly non-verbal, but after the implant, he had speech therapy and learned to talk, then was able to address the Lions Club. Everington said, with emotion, “When I get tired, it makes me realize what all the hard work is for.”