In July Allen took on the role of district governor of Rotary district 5170, which is bounded by Oakland, San Juan Bautista, Livermore and Palo Alto—a demanding job that involves providing leadership skills to members of the district and furthering the common goals of Rotary International.

Rotary is a service organization for people active in the community. Aside from networking, members take on local and international projects such as taking wheelchairs to places they are needed around the world, including Mexico and India. Another project, Adult Gift of Life, brings recipients from around the globe to the United States for heart surgery. On the local level, Rotary clubs provide financing for low-income housing and give money to nonprofit agencies so they can carry out their goals. They take youngsters from low-income areas and teach them how to fish, and there are high school programs that show how businesses are run and international exchange programs for students and business people.

What makes Allen's role in the Rotary movement interesting this year is the unique juxtaposition of time and events. One of Rotary's global objectives is to eradicate polio by next year, when it celebrates its 100th anniversary. As Rotarians across continents work feverishly on the "Polio Plus" program, Allen is its unspoken poster boy.

Allen's cherubic face always carries a hint of a smile and his eyes twinkle with wit. His calm demeanor and confident poise reflect a self-made man. But beyond all that, Don Allen also sports a limp that has shaped the course of his life.

In 1947 when Allen was 13 years old, he contracted polio. This was long before the polio vaccine was discovered. This was also the time when there were as many people in the United States being affected by the disease as anywhere else in the world.

With the polio diagnosis, Allen's life irrevocably changed. "At school I was on the track team and was a very good baseball player. But now there was no way I could play. My whole body felt weak; I felt dizzy and I couldn't get out of bed," he says, recounting the initial horrors and disappointments of the debilitating disease.

Doctors told the Allens that their only son would never walk again. He had been in the hospital for six months when his parents found a very special physical therapist. "I though she was a therapist from hell. She drove me to it for two years, putting me through an exercise regimen every day, but within six months she had me out of the wheelchair. Six months after that I got rid of the crutches," says Allen.

The teenager, who had dreamed of being a baseball player, instead became a voracious reader and decided to pursue law.

And his banking career was supposed to be a summer job.

When Allen was 22, he'd just finished his bachelor's degree in history from UC-Berkeley and had been accepted to the law school on campus. That summer he took a job with the automotive finance department at Crocker National Bank, which was later acquired by Wells Fargo. The idea was to make some money before heading back to school in the fall.

But love intervened when Allen met his first wife at the bank. The couple soon married and with their first child on the way, going back to full-time school became difficult. And so Allen began pursuing a serious career in the banking industry.

One of the most influential figures in Allen's life has been his father, who worked as a sales manager for a packaging firm in Oakland. "He was probably the best salesperson I've ever met. He was very detail-minded and always saw the big picture. He taught me to take care of the little things too, which is probably a good thing for a banker," he says.

Allen continued his steady climb in the banking world, serving at First Western Bank and later at Pacific Valley Bank in very senior positions. And as part of doing business in the community, he decided to join the Rotary. Years later, through his involvement with the Rotary, Allen would find another level of recovery from his childhood bout with polio.

Dr. Martha Kanter, chancellor of the Foothill­De Anza College District, has known Allen for close to a decade now. "Don takes action to accomplish great things. He is also one of the most articulate people I know. He must have been a storyteller in a former life, and what's more amazing, he never tells a story twice."

But the one story Allen could not tell was the story of the hurt and embarrassment that never quite healed after his polio. But even this story found its telling when it was least expected.

In 1999, Allen was attending a Rotary district conference at the Santa Clara Marriott Hotel. He was seated with hundreds of other Rotarians, watching video footage of Rotary's efforts to eradicate polio in Africa. As the lights dimmed and the scenes from Ghana flashed on the big screen, Allen saw a 12-year-old native African boy, a victim of the country's severe polio epidemic. The boy was clinging to a stick and swaying back and forth.

"His knees were twice or three times larger than his legs, and even with a stick to hold onto, the boy didn't have the strength in his leg to give him balance," Allen says. "And just watching that footage, something inside me turned over. Till that point I was ashamed of the fact that I had polio. One leg was thinner than the other. It probably did not bother anybody else. But it bothered me. I guess that I was carrying a lot more than I realized. And so I decided, to heck with it and I decided to go to Ghana and wear short pants and be like everybody else and give polio drops to children there," says Allen.

His trip to Ghana the next year was the therapy he had needed. On National Immunization Day, as hundreds of locals brought their little ones to the camp, Allen sat with the other members of his team administering oral drops to the babies. "At the end of the day, there I was wearing my short pants and walking across to the bus station, and I swear, here is this kid—the one I saw in the video, rocking back and forth on his stick— and he's got this big smile on his face and he's pointing at my leg. And I had a big smile and I pointed at his leg, and then we were sitting in the dirt in the bus station and giggling at each other, and, with a translator, talking about what had happened to each other. At that point I was emotionally cured," recalls Allen.

Since his trip to Africa, Allen has traveled with the Rotary to Texcoco, a little shantytown in Mexico, where he delivered wheelchairs to the disabled. "When you fly in to places like these, you feel good about yourself and think you are a very good person. You pat yourself on your back and think you are doing a noble thing. But it is only when you are coming back that it suddenly occurs to you: It's never about what you do for them. It's always about what they do for you. It changes your life," he says.

Rotary has meant growth for Allen in other ways, too.

"I've now been in the Rotary for almost 30 years. But way back when I started, I was a very shy person and was very uncomfortable talking in front of a group of people. Rotary develops your leadership skills and was also a great place to network. These days, I can't pass up a microphone," he says.

In 1984 Allen was one of the founders of Cupertino National Bank. "Over time, Cupertino had become my hometown. I knew the community well and it seemed to be the best place to start a bank." The bank grew very successful and evolved into Greater Bay Corps, which now includes a group of many banks around the Bay Area.

As his banking career flourished, Allen's involvement with the Rotary and community also increased. He has served as the foreman of the Santa Clara Grand Jury and president of the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce, was on the board of several educational and nonprofit organizations and has been actively involved with the Citizens of Cupertino Cross Cultural Consortium. In 1998, the Chamber named him the citizen of the year for his contributions to the community.

"Don is a community leader and a visionary who has applied his leadership skills to Cupertino. He is passionate about issues and is a consummate fund-raiser," says Jim Walker, past Rotary district governor.

Allen has raised close to 1.8 million dollars for Cupertino Community Services, a nonprofit organization that provides food and 24-hour shelter to the homeless.

Jaclyn Fabre, executive director at community services, says Allen is called the "godfather" at the center. "He literally took us under his wing, and he's such a down-to-earth and approachable person. Don is the kind of person who would rather talk about his meatloaf than the money he's raised. He's so proud of his meatloaf that he can't stop talking about it," she says.

Apparently Allen is so proud of his culinary concoction that he prepares several batches of the meatloaf and brings them over to the shelter, where he serves them to the homeless himself.

Early this year when Allen had his regular colonoscopy, doctors found some colorectal polyps. Fortunately the polyps were not cancerous. So these days Allen, as the Rotary governor, has made it his mission to create more awareness about colorectal cancer.

Allen is not the kind of person who likes to spend time talking about his contributions and achievements. "I think his polio gave him a much better understanding of people who have disabilities or some kind of reversal in life. But I've often wondered what kind of person he would have been if he did not have polio," says his wife, Sally. "Oh! A first baseman for the Oakland A's," says Allen. The two have been married for 14 years and with their six children—Allen's three boys and Sally's three daughters—they are a regular Brady Bunch.

In August of this year, when Rotary had its day at the Oakland Athletics Stadium, Allen had the unique distinction of throwing the first ball as the Rotary district governor. "It was awesome. It was really neat," he says with a grin. For the boy who could not play baseball, dreams did have a way of coming true.