Who We Are

The Thalia Lions Club was chartered on April 20 1966, and since then we have served the Virginia Beach Community continuously helping people with loss of sight and hearing and with diabetes.  But that’s not all. Our club’s recent history is rich in community projects.  I’ll start with Lion Eli Chertoff, our sixteenth 1981 president who passed away in 2010 at the age of 96.  As a son of Russian immigrants Lion Eli set up our scholarship account which has grown to over $50,000 and is now used for Princess Anne High School and Adult Learning Center scholarships.

Our club has been packed with notable Lions and a wealth of service projects. No one represented these folks more than Lion Dallas Divelbiss, President in 1992 and again in 2000.  Door-to-door broom sales started out of Lion Dallas’ garage, followed by a picnic at his home.  He attended meetings even after his hearing completely failed as a result of service in Vietnam.  His daughter took care of him as his Alzheimer’s disease progresses. He died on March 9, 2019 at the John F. Keever Solace Center in Ashville, N.C.

Then there’s Lion Ed DeLong who died at the age of 87 three years ago after serving Thalia Lions for 23 years. There is a long list of his service to Thalia, and there are few people who loved the Lions organization as much as Lion Ed did.
For dozens of years Lion Ed handed out scholarships for a selected Adult Learning Center student going to Tidewater Community College.
Since 2021, in addition to our regular Scholarship, we award an Ed Delong Memorial Scholarship to an Adult Learning Center graduate headed to Tidewater Community College student.

Thalia Lions has grown in service projects such as collecting clothing and children’s books, music contests, blood drives, tree planting, parking cars for Homearama, a foodbank pantry for victims of domestic violence, the National Education Association’s yearly Read Across America Day helping to make reading fun for young school children, Smiles Across the Miles making cards for service members who will not be home for the Holidays, the Beach Bag Project packing food bags for needy children to take home over the weekend, and a yearly 500-mile trip to Southwest Virginia to help people in desperate need of medical attention. In 2009 Lion Vickie Kennedy solicited the club to provide a dinner meal at the Ronald McDonald House for families visiting their hospitalized children. The club responded and provided supplies and donations, with similar follow-ups.

Lion Vickie has just finished several years as the District’s Bland Contest Chair -- the Bland Contest is a youth vocal and instrumental music contest.

We’ve had some wonderful guest speakers, some of whom have become Lions.  In October 2009 Irene Conlin from the Virginia Association for Parents of Children with Visual Impairments related her perspective as a parent of a blind child. Her causes immediately became ours and the following April Thalia Lions were volunteering at the Audible Blind Easter Egg Hunt.

In April 2011, guest speaker Debra Laughlin, presented “A Look into Low Vision.” She related that she was forced to resign from her nursing career when she began losing her eyesight.  As soon as she joined she got Thalia behind the first VA Beach Foundation Fighting Blindness 2011 VisionWalk initiative which has grown exponentially each year in donations and walkers with Thalia’s continued support.

Then there’s an activity our club took on with enthusiasm and personal funds. In Dec 2013 Head Start asked Thalia Lions to help one of five families whose children would be going without holiday gifts, warm clothing and enough food. Not only did our club help just the one family, but we jumped at the chance to cover the needs of all five families. We’ve been doing this every Christmas since.

In closing, I’d like to say a word about Lion John Waters and his wife Lion Nancy. They continue to be the heart and soul of Thalia, initiating and participating in just about all of Thalia’s programs.  Their most notable initiative has been introducing an automated vision tester for children.  They worked hard to get this $10,000 machine, not only for Thalia, but now 13 more for other district clubs.  Our district has now screened hundreds of thousand of young children for eye problems. Now what could to top that? Well, Lion John recently served as a Guiding Lion for the first ever Filipino-American Lions Club.

For this unmatched history of a truly giving service organization, Thalia Lions Club just must be one of the finest among the 45,000 Lion clubs in over 200 countries. In a nutshell that’s our continuous history since 1966, and that’s why I’m proud to be a Thalia Lion and so proud to take our motto to heart; just two words say it all – “WE SERVE.”