Rotary Art & Speech Contests

Since the program time was going to be full with the speech contest, we were each given a piece of paper during the luncheon time, but before the program started, and asked to look at the paintings, drawings, oils, water colors, acrylics, charcoals, you get the idea, and choose the ONE, just one, we each liked best.

Difficult, but not impossible.  As Club members know, we are not just a knife and fork club.  We get actively involved in our programs.  So we Rotarians strolled around the tables exhibiting the art pieces, and made our choices.  We await Lorraine Neal’s tallying at our next meeting.

For the program period, we heard seven orators from Mrs. Linns’ English class at Calvary Chapel School in Downey.  Their assignment: make a speech, but be sure to tie in all four of the Rotary Four-Way Tests.  This turned out to be a good way to teach young people about the Test, which we know as every Rotarian’s moral criteria in personal and business relationship.

Using the Test was a challenge that each speaker met in different ways.  For example, to decide a case such as the Affordable Health Act, on its merits, you have to know if the facts you are using are true.   The next tests for any proposition are, is it fair and beneficial to all concerned. “Obama Care” can be intelligently discussed by keeping those concerns in mind, as can proposals for World Peace, which another speaker chose to discuss. 

Then, will it promote friendship, became an important step when the subject was, for example, dealing with grief when faced with cancer in the immediate family. Two of the orators chose to discuss that subject, both in reference to their fathers.  From the point of view of using personal emotion in successful oratory, we could see how these young people channeled their feelings of loss.  They both made a passionate plea for better education in teaching the steps in detecting and preventing cancer.

Promoting friendship as a healing tool was used again, this time as a theme in correcting child abuse in the world, and is it fair and beneficial pertained to a speech on animal abuse.

To judge the speeches, we were each thoughtfully given a copy of each speech, plus a scoring sheet which listed the qualities for which to listen, from physical presentation and eye contact, to the development of the ideas within the speech.  This written speech was helpful, when some of the contestants were so small as to disappear when standing behind the podium.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  This reporter remembers more than sixty years ago when she was in a high school oratory contest, which was sponsored by the American Legion.  Amazingly, the same subjects were featured.  The winning speech was in favor of World Federalism, which was a student and citizen movement for world peace, started at the same time as the United Nations. And this reporter won the bronze medal for speaking in favor of what was then called “socialized medicine.”  It’s good to know that young people still care deeply about the spiritual, as well as the physical, health of the world’s population.