The Levittown Chamber would like you to meet Les Rumel, a longtime member and a Past President who served the chamber in 2007.
Rumel has had a varied career from working as a regional manager for a shirt company to retiring from Bank of America as a reverse mortgage officer. Although retired, Rumel is an active member of the Levittown Lions Club.
As a Lion, Rumel was able to raise the funds from the community to purchase a Welch Allen vision Screener for the Lions Club. He held a fundraiser celebrating his 80th birthday to purchase a five year warranty for the devise. Rumel does vision screening for children mostly in nursery schools. In the past two years he have screened 407 children and found that 53 were in need of professional attention. In his younger days, he delivered corneas for the Lions Eye bank. In addition to all this he collects eyeglasses from the collection boxes in the local libraries and businesses.
Rumel is passionate about the Lions Eye Screening saying, “I do it for the children because it’s important that any eye issues are discovered early in life so they can be corrected before things get worse”.
Rumel was recently honored at the Levittown School Recognition Dinner for his work with the Levittown Lions Club.
In 1951 Rumel moved to Levittown. He played on Levittown’s first little league team and was a member of the Levittown Teen Canteen located in the North Village Green in the mid 1950’s. He married his childhood sweetheart, Lillian, and they recently celebrated their 63rd anniversary. Rumel purchased his home in Levittown in 1963 and has two children, Laura and Michael and four grandchildren,
In 2007, as President of the Levittown Chamber of Commerce he became the third officer of a corporation formed due to a grant from the state thru Senator Kemp to improve parts of Levittown. With money still in the corporation in 2019 and the two other officers having passed away, Rumel reached out to local officials that he wanted to replace the gazebo in Veterans Memorial Park that was knocked down by vandals a few years earlier. The new Veterans Memorial Gazebo was erected in February 2019, which was the beginning of the Gazebo Gang. The Gazebo Gang had added many displays in the Veterans Park in Levittown.
Les Rumel may be reached at [email protected] for information regarding the Lions Club or about the children’s vision screening.