“He didn’t recruit you. He conscripted you.”
— Former youth member, now a 34-year-old HVAC technician

On the surface, the Junction City Lions Club is an innocuous slice of small-town Americana. A civic organization best known for pancake breakfasts, parade floats, and a half-hearted commitment to “sight and hearing awareness.” But for nearly twelve years, under the iron-fisted leadership of President Lynn Coone, the club operated more like a tiny, polyester-vested paramilitary force.

I spent six months interviewing former members, combing through meeting minutes, and attending public events in an effort to understand how a septuagenarian with no formal authority beyond a laminated title card could command such a bizarre degree of loyalty and fear. What emerged was a portrait of a man whose concept of “mentorship” blurred the lines between grooming and indoctrination, whose fundraising schemes were as elaborate as they were unprofitable, and whose shadow still lingers over the civic life of Junction City.

To the untrained eye, Lynn Coone looked like a man who’d been left out in the sun too long and resented everyone for it. He was a beer-bellied seventy-three, with a permanent squint from years of glaring at other people’s incompetence and a wardrobe consisting exclusively of faded Lions Club polo shirts and khaki trousers, freshly ironed by his wife.

In the Junction City social hierarchy, Lynn occupied a position that was somehow both exalted and ridiculous: President-for-Life of the Junction City Lions Club. His power base wasn’t large, but it was stubborn – thirty-five dues-paying members, most of them retirees who didn’t particularly like him, but liked the alternative (having to run the club themselves) even less.

In taped interviews, Lynn’s surviving “protégés” describe a system of youth cultivation that was both absurd and strangely effective.

Recruitment often began in public spaces. Little League games, the town fair, the post office, where Lynn would approach children with a handshake so firm it verged on a chiropractic adjustment.

“He’d start talking about community stewardship like it was a multi-level marketing opportunity,” recalled a former recruit, now a paralegal. “Next thing you know, you’re in the basement of the Moose Lodge on a Saturday morning being ‘fitted’ for a Lions Club jumpsuit while learning the official Lion Cubs Anthem.”

This anthem, I learned, was not an official Lions Club standard but an original composition by Lynn, set to the tune of “Camptown Races” and containing inexplicable verses about “Daddy love” and “Obedience to your elders.”

It is impossible to understand Lynn’s reign without acknowledging the Lions’ bitter, decades-long rivalry with the local Moose Lodge. The Mooses (Meese?) had better facilities, a beer license, and the town’s most coveted parade position.

In an internal Lions memo dated August 2018, Lynn accused the Moose of “blatant youth recruitment interference” after an incident at the Function for Junction Parade where, according to eyewitnesses, a promising Lions recruit was lured away with the promise of free root beer and unlimited dart practice.

“He took it personally,” says Geraldine Pike, the Lions Club treasurer during most of Lynn’s tenure. “We had to start background-checking bake sale customers because he was convinced the Mooses were buying cookies just to return them stale.”

The Moose Lodge was the only other civic organization in town with any real clout and the relationship between them and the Lions Club was less “friendly competition” and more “petty Cold War.” Lynn despised them.

It was said that he’d once canceled the Lions’ participation in the Holiday Parade because the Moose Lodge had secured a better float position.

Retaliations were always minor but vicious. The Moose Lodge would “accidentally” schedule events on the same day as the Lions’ fundraisers. Lynn would “mistakenly” reserve the public gazebo for Lions events on weekends he knew the Moose had already planned something.

Perhaps the most telling feature of Lynn’s leadership was the so-called “Junior Leadership Intensive,” a three-day youth training camp held each summer. Advertised as a skills-building retreat, the Intensive consisted mainly of unpaid manual labor disguised as “team-building exercises.”

Day One: Posing for dubious polaroids in Lynn’s basement. For “Logistical Readiness”.
Day Two: Cold-calling elderly residents to sell them “Vision Awareness Gala” tickets at $45 a head. There was also “public relations training,” in which children learned to corner strangers at the farmers’ market and sell them overpriced caramel corn in the name of eye health awareness.
Day Three: Endurance training. Remaining upright and alert through Lynn’s marathon lecture, “The History and Significance of Pederasty in Western Culture,” accompanied by a slide show of every vest he’d worn since 1978.

Attendees were awarded merit pins for feats like “Longest Without a Bathroom Break” and “Most Convincing Smile While Sitting on Santa’s Lap.”

In other towns, this sort of retreat meant mentoring young people, encouraging leadership skills, and promoting community service. In Lynn’s Junction City version, it meant identifying children who could be molded into docile, vest-wearing foot soldiers for the Lions Club cause.

He would attend Little League games, 4-H fairs, and school spelling bees with a legal pad, making cryptic notes:

“#12 — strong raffle ticket voice, potential ‘good’ girl”
“Girl in pig competition — stoic under pressure, beauty pageant material”
“Butterface girl in marching band — will fit mascot suit without complaint”

Parents rarely questioned his motives because Lynn cloaked his recruiting under the vague but reassuring term “mentorship.” By the time they realized their kid was spending three hours every Saturday in the Lions Club storage unit, it was too late – the child had already been fitted for their ceremonial vest, which had a psychological hold rivaling that of a military uniform.

Those who survived multiple summers emerged as fully indoctrinated junior members, their loyalty to Lynn second only to their loyalty to the concept of laminated name tags.

Under Lynn’s guidance, the Lions Club became known for its bewildering array of hyper-specific fundraisers.

• Optical Awareness Gala — A $50 spaghetti dinner followed by a slideshow of famous historical eyeglasses, narrated by Lynn in a tone that one attendee described as “half lecture, half hostage situation.”
• Dunk Tank for Vision — A summer event in which local schoolteachers volunteered to be dunked in 50°F water. Several participants later claimed hypothermia.
• Golden Bingo Bonanza — In which every bingo card was “blessed” by Lynn himself (meaning he held it in one hand while glaring at the purchaser) and prizes ranged from $5 gift cards to the town’s hardware store to a dusty taxidermy squirrel someone had donated “for the cause.”

When asked about the financial returns on these events, former treasurer Pike sighed. “Let’s just say the dunk tank cost more than we raised. But Lynn wasn’t interested in money, he was interested in dominance.”

Lynn’s fundraisers were legendary. Not for their success, but for their bizarre overcomplication.

On the night of March 14, 2026, during the annual Junior Patriots Fundraiser, Lynn Coone died mid-sentence, collapsing face-first into a tray of deviled eggs. According to witnesses, the microphone remained live for several seconds, capturing a single gurgling noise before cutting out.

The club mourned him with public solemnity but private relief. “It was like a dictator dying in his sleep,” one member told me. “We weren’t sad; we could finally rearrange the meeting chairs without his permission.”

In Junction City, children still learned early that no one truly escaped the gravitational pull of the Lions Club.

Today, Lynn’s protégés still run the youth wing, though in a slightly less creepy – and less authoritarian – fashion. But in the storage closet of the Junction City Lions Club headquarters, the vests remain, neatly pressed, sorted by size, and ready for the next generation. And somewhere, Lynn’s ghost is surely taking attendance.