The Dixon Noon Lions is a decade away from turning a century old, but its age isn’t slowing down its impact.

The nonprofit, a member of Lions International, aims to help children and adults with hearing and visual impairments. It started in 1936 as a group of downtown Dixon businessmen who got together for lunch. Similarly, the 2026 group meets for lunch, but instead of businessmen, they’re better described as community members lending a helping hand to others through their involvement with the Lions and several other local organizations.

“We together are a small community of Lions, but we live in a much larger community, and we do what we can to improve the lives of those who can benefit from any of our volunteer activities,” Dixon Noon Lions member Larry Prindaville told Shaw Local.

One of the main things all Lions International clubs do is collect eyeglasses for donation. The glasses are sent to an official Lions recycling center where they’re sorted, processed if deemed usable, and prescribed to those in need around the world. In 2025, the Dixon Noon Lions collected 977 pairs.

“In a country where someone is making $1 a week, to be able to see clearly, that’s a big deal,” Dixon Noon Lions President Thomas Halla told Shaw Local.

The organization does a variety of other work around Dixon, including its sight and sound raffle; sponsoring an Al Morrison baseball team, which is a volunteer-based youth league; creating and maintaining signs with flowers welcoming people to Dixon on all the major roads in town; and awarding scholarships to Dixon High School seniors on graduation day.

Members also do service projects with the Eagle Scouts. For example, in 2023, members worked with an Eagle Scout candidate from Scout Troop 85 to renovate the Welcome to Dixon sign on North Galena Avenue. Together, they built a new brick facade around the existing structure and buried a time capsule at the site.

“We were much more active in manual labor types of volunteerism. We outgrew that along the way, and so sometimes the best we can do is to pull our wallets out and help when we can’t ourselves do what we used to be able to do,” Prindaville said.

In 2025, the organization also made several donations to the Lions of Illinois and the International Foundation, the Illinois Lions 2025 Candy Day, the Center for Sight and Hearing, the Dixon Community Food Pantry, and awarded $500 scholarships to two DHS seniors.

Evidence of the organization’s work from its early years can still be seen in various places around Dixon.

Lions members have planted trees all around town and built many of the shelters found in Dixon parks. Finding a plaque with the club’s name is a common occurrence.

One that Halla said he noticed recently was a plaque at Dixon High School’s Lancaster Gym for something the Lions donated. He said he wasn’t sure what it was for, but it could have been tied to former President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit to his hometown, when he spoke at that gym.

While Reagan wasn’t an active member of the Lions, the organization made him an honorary member.

One big event the Lions used to hold was Dixon’s annual Halloween parade.

In the early 1940s, the city had a problem with vandalism around Halloween and started an annual parade, hoping that giving young people something to do that night would solve the problem. Around 1944, the Lions took over the parade, which they held every year until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.

During the pandemic, the Lions Club held a drive-thru trick-or-treat event instead, which followed the social distancing guidelines of the time. In the past few years, Discover Dixon took over those events, but the Lions still help run them.

Also, during that time, the Lions continued to host meetings over Zoom.

“We were one of the few clubs during the pandemic [that] actually met by Zoom. It was fun,” Halla said.

Before that, they’d always met in the dining room at what used to be KSB Hospital, and the club had a couple of plaques that used to hang on the wall there. Two of the plaques list all the Lions presidents from its founding to now, including Halla, who’s going on his third year in that role.

“There are some names in there that I’m sure are familiar within the community, and then there are some that were probably never heard of, but every one of them was dedicated to the Lions,” Halla said.

The current members are or have been dedicated to other organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, Dixon’s Knights of Columbus Council 690, various churches, 4-H, Boy Scout Troop 85 and others.

“It’s good for the heart to see the results that you get, a smile on someone’s face, and that we’re bettering their life somehow,” Halla said.