Longtime Joliet volunteer Bill Lauer honored at YMCA gala

Joliet native Bill Lauer, 89, recently was honored for his service.

The Greater Joliet Area YMCA recognized Lauer’s 80 years of YMCA membership and more than 60 years of board service at its gala Feb. 24.

Lauer received the inaugural William R. Lauer Service to Youth Award at the gala, while Greater Joliet Area YMCA President and CEO Katy Leclair announced the establishment of the William R. Lauer Endowment Fund.

Leclair said Lauer joined the YMCA when he was 8.

“At the time, you couldn’t join until your eighth birthday month,” Leclair said. “His dad brought him in to join the Y.”

Lauer said he still serves on three committees at the YMCA: budget and finance, investment and the board of directors as a board member emeritus.

“I like to be active,” Lauer said with a chuckle.

Lauer said he survived a ruptured brain aneurysm in June 2007, which required emergency bypass surgery. At the time, Lauer’s chance of survival was slim, as were his odds of recovering if he did survive.

His first recollection after the rupture was in April 2008.

“I was watching TV, and [Barack] Obama was getting ready to run for president,” Lauer said.

Importance of service

Lauer said he has belonged to 10 nonprofits over the years. He credited his late father, Tom Lauer, a Rotarian and member of the YMCA, for nudging him into community service.

At the time, Bill Lauer had graduated from the University of Illinois, had served two years in the Army and was starting an insurance business.

“My father was a very civic-minded person,” Lauer said. “And he said to me, ‘Son, if you’re going to earn your living in the community, you’ve got to give back in some way.’ ”

Lauer said he first volunteered at the Boys Club in Joliet – now the Boys and Girls Club of Joliet – and the Community Chest, the forerunner of United Way. But the YMCA and the Rotary Club of Joliet resonated the most with him.

“My father was a Rotarian, so I had known about the organization,” Lauer said in a 2011 Herald-News story. “All our lives he told us, ‘You have an obligation to give back to your community.’ I was not asked to join Rotary until 1964 – in those days you couldn’t join, you had to be asked – and I had waited to be asked because I knew what Rotary was and what it was doing.”

[  Joliet Rotary celebrates 110 years of service ]

Lauer had more than 22 years of perfect attendance with the Rotary Club of Joliet when the organization presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award as part of its 110th anniversary celebration in 2023.

Lauer said he received that award for “having lived a long time.”

“It’s easy to get a Lifetime Achievement Award if you’ve been someplace for 60 years,” Lauer said with a smile.

But through those years, he served as the Rotary Club of Joliet’s attendance chairman and club membership chair, co-chaired the club’s 70th and 75th anniversary dinners, and served as district chair of the Group Study Exchange Program as well as on the district’s nominating committee.

He also created and chaired the club’s Avoidable Blindness Clinic event. He served in all areas of club leaders and as club president from 1991 to 1992.

Lauer also has received the Frank Turk Spirit of Rotary Award, and he was a Paul Harris Fellow seven times. According to the Rotary, the Paul Harris Fellow recognition “acknowledges individuals who contribute or who have contributions made in their name of $1,000 to the Rotary Foundation.”

Benefits of the YMCA

Before Lauer served the YMCA, he was a happy YMCA member. He recalled the times as a child when his father drove him to the YMCA on Saturdays to spend time in the gym and then eat lunch.

“And then I took the bus home,” Lauer said.

Lauer especially enjoyed swimming and basketball as a boy, programs the YMCA still offers. The YMCA also is where Bill met his wife, Sharon, a former YMCA employee, and made lifelong friends.

Lauer recalled how he and several other Joliet professionals, including the late Drs. Peter Nichols and Paul Morimoto, ran each morning at the YMCA.

[ Dr. Paul Morimoto left a legacy of caring for patients ]

“The Y had a track above the gym,” Lauer said. “We’d run around it 25 times to make a mile. And you’d get so dizzy because it was so small. We’d run eight laps and then turn and go in another direction.”

In a 2013 Herald-News story, Nichols recalled how proud the group felt for consistently running around that short track.

“We’d outline our feet in the dust,” Nichols said, “and used that size to order our running shoes.”

In addition to serving the community, Lauer said, his parents wanted three outcomes for their three children: to be able to swim, to graduate from high school and “earn an honorable living,” and to learn to drive since their mother had a heart condition.

Neverthless, Lauer said, his parents considered driving a privilege, much in the same way he feels serving nonprofits in person as a volunteer.

My father was a very civic-minded person. And he said to me, ‘Son, if you’re going to earn your living in the community, you’ve got to give back in some way.”

—  Bill Lauer, Joliet native and longtime community volunteer

He said that “working with people, communicating with people, getting along with people” are different in person than virtually.

And he stressed that service is “not always successful and a bunch of roses.”

But the benefits of service outweigh the challenges, he said, especially in the people one meets while serving.

“There are huge numbers of good people in this community that are working for many of these organizations,” Lauer said.