FS Toastmasters

This blog will provide a brief glimpse of the top three speakers  chosen in the International Speech Contest at North Carolina's Toastmaster Conference on May 5, 2018. First-place Winner Kevin Johnson was not a paid professional speaker.  He was trained to give counseling to those with a troubled past like himself.  He opened in wearing a boxing glove and called audience members "fellow combatants."   He told of having a learning disability in reading, being put in a special class, having others handing out insults, and of his being bullied.  He'd gone to drugs and alcohol to alleviate the pain, been taught by a friend to go sober, taken up boxing, and gone two rounds with a four-time toughman contest-winner.  Hiding behind his two gloves had defined his whole life of being guarded and being beaten.  Then in a defining moment he dropped his guard to try to risk everything to deliver a haymaker in the third round.  It'd caused the champion t...

We were called the Four Seasons Votemasters by Nathan Garnett as he took charge as Toastmaster of the May 2nd meeting.  Taking on the theme of elections, he told us a bit of his campaign strategy as he ran in the fall elections in Mills River.  He said he ran a $35 campaign in his bid to make personal contacts and not spending money his priority.  Probity was Hoyt Griffith's  word of the day, a word meaning integrity, a high moral standard.  Hoyt was also grammarian, Don Groff was ah-counter, and Don Glovan was timer. Carol Walters was the first speaker, optimizing on her project from the Entertaining Speech manual with interesting stories submitted by other Delta Kappa Gamma members.  These included an escape by baby snakes in the classroom and kindergartener questions about pregnancy and death. Melinda Lowrance gave her speech as a revised version of her last speech that highlighted quotes from Sojourner Truth.  In Pathways the assignment is to g...