Merchants

Lions Club Reaches a Milestone

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Downtown Long Grove Merchants Ryan Messner (L) and John Kopecky(R) preview a Lion's fundraising idea.

Downtown Long Grove Merchants Ryan Messner (L) and John Kopecky(R) preview a Lions fundraising idea.

Congratulations are in order to the Lions Club of Long Grove for recently reaching a significant milestone. Since they were first organized in 1983, the club has donated a cumulative total of over $800,000 to local and international charitable causes. That’s fantastic! During a recent chat with local Lion John Kopecky, who is a Past-President of the club, I learned that the organization was started in 1913 by Helen Keller. She is the inspiration behind the Lions long-standing support of charitable causes benefitting sight and sound. As far as local charities, the Long Grove club supports many area food pantries including those in Waukegan, Lake Zurich, Buffalo Grove, and Vernon Township. They are an annual contributor to the Long Grove Arts & Music Council, helping bring free local concerts to our community. Other agencies they have helped include: Omni House, Center on Deafness, Misericordia, and many, many other worthy causes. The Lions Club does all this with the help of 47 members, headed up this past year by Jeff Taylor as President, and Craig Cosik taking the lead as the new incoming President. To do all these good works, the Lions must continually raise funds, and they have done this in the past by sponsoring the “Lion’s Den” concession tent near the covered bridge at the Long Grove festivals. Candy Days in September and the annual Golf Outing in October help bring in needed funds as well. New this coming year is a plan to sell Long Grove T-shirts. I am very impressed by the generosity this group has shown both to our community, and the international community at large. Well done, Lions Club of Long Grove, and best wishes as you work to reach your next charitable goal!

Chocolate Fest 2015

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Our local Lord of Chocolate, Craig Leva, Owner of the Long Grove Confectionary.

Our local Lord of Chocolate, Craig Leva, Owner of the Long Grove Confectionary.

For a chocolate lover like me, having a Chocolate Fest in our downtown every May is a real treat! This past weekend, Long Grove hosted over 15,ooo fellow chocoholics for a three day celebration of the confection. It was possible to enjoy chocolate in many traditional and inventive ways such as chocolate beer, chocolate covered grapes, chocolate martinis…the list seemed endless. I personally sampled and gave a thumbs up to:  chocolate wine, a stuffed poblano pepper with chocolate mole sauce, and chocolate dipped strawberries from the Long Grove Confectionary. This gave me a chance to chat with my friend Craig Leva, owner of the confectionary for the past two years. His business is growing and has recently expanded to include featuring our namesake chocolates in area Jewel grocery stores. The weather really cooperated this year, and helped add to the turnout as did some new changes with the festival. With the help of a new special events firm, the downtown merchants arranged booths primarily up and down Robert Parker Coffin Road, with the main stage at the covered bridge. Popular bands were featured each night and took the celebration into the evening hours, attracting additional attendees. This year efforts were made to work with our favorite local restaurants to offer their specialties in booths as well. And it looks as if the new ideas had a positive effect overall. We will have to wait another year for the next appearance of the Chocolate Fest–thankfully that gives us all plenty of time to work off the excess calories!