The Aurora Civitan Club just passed its 50 th anniversary milestone and it looking to spread its reach and the message of community service.

Chuck Callahan does public relations for the club and his wife, Cheryl, became the new president in October.

The club meets at Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital, 900 Potomac St., each Thursday at 7 a.m., and are looking at holding some evening meetings. Membership stands at about 22 members focused on multiple ongoing community service projects.

The West Middle School Junior Honor Society partnered with Civitan Dec. 8 to stuff stockings for developmentally disabled children for Praying Hands Ranch east of Parker to be distributed at a Christmas party Saturday (the 13th) at the Parker Joint Services facility

Other club projects include the Mile High Down Syndrome Association, for which they are assisting at the annual holiday dinner, also Dec. 13, helping distribute presents and arranging photographs with Santa for the children.

Each Thursday, the Aurora Club partners with the Mile High Civitan Club to serve dinner to families staying at the Ronald McDonald House across the street from Spalding Rehab Hospital, where the dinners are prepared.

Callahan says the efforts have really touched he and Cheryl's especially working with developmentally disabled children.

The developmentally disabled have widely varying levels of severity, and Callahan said that was difficult to deal with at first. But after one day-long session, he says, it became clear to the couple.

'We'd never been around the kids personally for long of a period of time and we did a full day - that's when it really opened our eyes to what good we are doing, and how it makes us feel," he said.

Getting close to the children and their parents revealed the unconditional love you get from that community, Callahan notes.

"We sat and looked at this and having the kids hugging you all day long and just feeling that unconditional love and the compassion the kids have - it broke our hearts," he added.

"We'll probably never get away from it - it's just taken us to heart so much... If any club or organization would come to us and say we need your help, if it involved the developmentally disabled, we would probably never turn it down - I don't think we could."

"Even our kids don't know how we can do it, " he said. "In December, it's every weekend we have something going."

Cheryl, he says is on the computer almost every night, he does Web sites for the club and donates Web sites and e-mails, just to help.

Cheryl agrees the involvement is very satisfying.

"To me, it's like an extended family," she said. "I feel just like a daughter to some of the older members."

"You meet the families," Chuck adds, "and you can tell by the look on their faces that they've had a rough time. And it's just nice to know you can take their child for four hours of the day and give them a break, and just see the look on their face that someone else's is making their child happy and not being afraid of them and thinking that they're stupid or dumb or retarded."

"I'm come to the belief now that they're not the ones who are developmentally disabled ... we are," he adds."We're all stressed out and we're all seeing psychiatrists and doctors for all these problems that we're stressed out for, but they don't. They're leading this life of just wanting to be able to fit in with the normal society, as they call it."

Because the group recently celebrated 50 years as a civic club, Cheryl got in touch with former President George H. W. Bush about member Lou Cohn's long service since the club formed. Bush responded with a personal congratulatory letter to Cohn.

With a focus on service and helping those with developmental disabilities, Civitan has three principal goals: fellowship with one another, knowledge about the community at large, and service to humanity through the local Civitan club.

For the future, the Callahans would like to see Civitan as the number one volunteer organization, with clubs in every city, junior Civitan Clubs being developed and the open-minded attitude towards the developmentally disabled widely accepted.

For more information on these and other projects of Aurora Civitan, go to http://civitan.net/auroracivitan or call 720-851-9392