Bethel Park Lions Club celebrates 80th anniversary

Part of Bethel Presbyterian Church is eminently familiar to Jay Wells.

“When I joined the club, we met right in this same room,” he said.

The group he referenced is the Bethel Park Lions Club, which is celebrating the 80th anniversary of its establishment. The club was organized on Dec. 9, 1942, and its charter was presented on Feb. 9, 1943.

Wells has been a member for about 70% of its existence, having joined in 1967.

“I’ve been there ever since. They haven’t kicked me out yet,” the longtime club secretary and past president joked prior to the start of the group’s latest meeting, on Jan. 17.

Bethel Park’s founding came 26 years after Melvin Jones of Chicago started the international nonpolitical service organization, which today has more than 1.4 million throughout the world.

Wells, a 1958 Bethel High School graduate, was encouraged to become a Lion by his experiences in another state.

“When I graduated from dental school in the summer of ’65,” he said, “I went into the Air Force Dental Corps, and I asked to be stationed in San Antonio, Texas,” about 150 miles from Corpus Christi, where some of his relatives lived.

An uncle and aunt were active in Corpus Christi’s Lions Club.

“They would take me cabinet meetings, which were a big deal for them. It would be a weekend event. They’d drive down to the Rio Grande Valley and go to a hotel,” Wells said. “I got to go over the border with my aunt and her friends. She was an inveterate shopper, and there were a lot of open-air markets in Matamoros and some of the other border towns.”

After completing his Air Force stint, Wells returned to Western Pennsylvania.

“My uncle had written to the president of the Bethel Lions Club about me, asking him to invite me to join,” he said.

The leader at the time was Wells family friend Bill Schnabel, who died in 2007 at age 91.

“Bill invited me to the Lions, and I wanted to get active back here in my hometown,” Wells said. “I was looking forward to opening a dental office.”

A few years later, Wells decided to run for political office and served two terms in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, starting in 1971, when he was 30.

These days, he continues to attend Lions meetings regularly with his wife, Leona, as they help the club in supporting a variety of causes.

For example, the club received donations of about 10,000 pairs of eyeglasses last year in conjunction with Lions International’s long-standing work to improve the lives of the visually impaired and prevent avoidable blindness.

Each year, the George Meyer Scholarship, named after a late club member, is awarded to a Bethel Park student. The 2022 honoree was Olivia Magnu, who received $2,500 toward attending the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy.

The club’s 12.5-acre park off Irishtown Road is available for use by reservation from May through October and features numerous amenities, including a covered pavilion, picnic tables and benches, recreation areas, a full kitchen and two newly renovated restrooms. Playground equipment recently was moved there from the municipal Pine Tree Park.

Boy Scouts working on their Eagle projects have contributed to improvements at the park. Teddy Allison, a member of Troop 1313 in Peters Township, worked on restoring a fence and contributed extra funds raised by a spaghetti dinner to the Lions.

Russell Willison, who belongs to the same troop — and is the grandson of two Bethel Park Lions Club past presidents, Jim and Judy Willison — is working on improvements to the park’s trail system. Members have suggested the name Battistone Trail for club stalwarts Carl and the late Dominick Battistone Jr., who was 90 when he died in 2021.

The club meets at the park from June through September and at the church from October through May. Meetings start at 6 p.m. the first and third Tuesdays of each month.

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/BethelParkLionsClub. The mailing address is Bethel Park Lions Club, P.O. Box 55, Bethel Park, Pa. 15102.