Toastmasters helps improve public speaking skills

May 21, 2007

An American survey shows that people fear public speaking more than they worry about dying. According to Dale Carnegie literature, public speaking topped the list of the 14 worst human fears, followed by heights, insects and bugs, financial problems, deep water, sickness and death.

“That means if you’re the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy,” Jerry Seinfeld said in 1998, in “I’m Telling You for the Last Time.”

I can believe it. Two years ago, I received a call from the powers-that-be in the Association of Personal Historians asking if I would organize its 2006 international conference in Portland. I hesitated—not because I worried about planning the conference, which I knew I could do, but because I trembled at the thought of speaking in front of hundreds of people.

After agreeing to organize the event, I attended the 2005 conference at Grand Rapids, Mich., where I was scheduled to briefly mention our plans. Terrified, I stood before 160-plus people and rapidly babbled about speakers, the city, and who knows what else. Afterward, our APH operations manager told me, “Julie, you’re supposed to take a breath at the periods.”

Back in the mid-1980s, as a Chronicle reporter, I had been invited to White Pass High School’s career day to talk about life in journalism. I prepared my remarks, which were supposed to last for a half-hour, and rushed through everything within 10 minutes. Feeling like a failure, I joined Toastmasters for a short time, which met at the Back Door Restaurant in Chehalis, I believe. But I never stuck with it. How I wish I had!

In the late 1980s, I remember sitting in a room with fellow reporters at the Daily News in Longview, where we were supposed to share some of our favorite writing. I started reading the lyrics to a powerful Irish song but my voice shook, my stomach churned, my heart beat quickly and my voice trailed off …

So, in February 2006, I persuaded my friend, Edna Fund, to accompany me to a gathering of the Chehalis-Centralia Toastmasters, which meets at noon Mondays in the Hanson Building at Centralia College. We both joined.

The first Toastmasters club met Oct. 22, 1924, in the YMCA at Santa Ana, Calif., with the aim of helping others to speak more effectively. Since then, Toastmasters International has helped nearly four million men and women learn and practice public speaking, and now has 211,000 members in 10,500 clubs in 90 countries, according to its press release.

A typical Toastmasters club meets weekly or biweekly to learn and practice public speaking skills. The Chehalis-Centralia Toastmasters Club No. 1290, which members like to refer to as The Mighty 1290, usually has 20-plus members who gather in a semi-circle with a lectern front and center where each week people give prepared speeches and others take on roles as toastmaster, joke teller, leader of the invocation and flag salute, timer, grammarian and general evaluator.

Crucial to the meetings are the evaluators—club members who volunteer to offer positive feedback and constructive criticism of the prepared speeches. From the evaluations, speakers learn what worked in their speeches and how they can improve their public speaking skills.

One of the Mighty 1290’s master evaluators is Harry Green, who won the club, area and division speech evaluation contests this spring and competed Saturday at the district level, where he performed well but didn't place among the top three contestants out of 60 clubs in Western Washington.

Newcomers also learn from the more seasoned public speakers in the club, such as Green, John Panesko, Bob Killillay, Cindie Jackson, Dave Clark, Roland Jones and Lois Lockhart, among others.

Joining a Toastmasters club is easy. It’s also affordable, with dues of less than $100 a year. The group offers a supportive environment to learn how to speak in public without fear and trembling, improving with each speech. Members also enhance their impromptu speaking skills by answering a question posed by that day’s topicmaster. Each member usually must answer the question in 45 seconds to one minute 15 seconds.

As 2006 progressed, I received a couple of invitations to speak before the Northwest Independent Editors Guild and the Chehalis Rotary. In the past, I would have answered such requests with an emphatic, “No.” But, because of Toastmasters training, I agreed to speak.

By the time October rolled around, I felt ready to speak at the international conference. I practiced the speech at Toastmasters the Monday before I had to give it before 260-plus people on Thursday.

I spoke slowly and enunciated clearly. I involved the audience. I still trembled a bit but few people noticed.

Afterward, in the hallway prior to our keynote speaker’s session, the former APH president—a woman from Houston who now lives in New York—stopped me. “Julie,” she said, “I just have to ask—Did you join Toastmasters?”

If Toastmasters helped me improve my public speaking skills, it can do wonders for anyone. Visit a meeting to see what it’s like, and then decide whether to join.

May 14 column
East county towns may be lost, but their history is never forgotten

Water skiers skimming over the glassy blue surface of Riffe Lake may never realize that beneath the deep waters once resided the citizens of Kosmos, Fulton, Nesika and Riffe.

An exhibit that opened Saturday and runs until October at the Lewis County Historical Museum focuses on stories from the east end of the county. Since the museum is in Chehalis, sometimes people in the outlying areas of the county may feel their history is ignored or forgotten. That’s one reason the museum is hosting the exhibit, called “If Towns and Dams Could Talk.”

It’s admirable to reach out to the smaller communities and display their histories in the museum, which bears the name “Lewis County” Historical Museum. History is worth preserving, whether it’s an individual’s, a community’s, a city’s or that of a metropolis. Is Seattle’s history more important to preserve than that of Centralia or Chehalis, just because more people live there? The display on the East End stories is likely to be followed by exhibits highlighting the southern part of the county, the western part and other small communities.

Put together by volunteer curator and museum board member Margie Koher-Lloyd, the exhibit features a display board noting the location of many small communities east of Cinebar and Salkum that were started by early settlers in the late 1800s.

Visitors to the museum will see the wood-framed front door of Joseph and Alice Chilcoat, the first family to settle in the Big Bottom. They’ll see old boxes that once held letters delivered to the Glenoma Post Office; a telephone switchboard discarded as trash by the Eatonville Telephone Co. and retrieved by Van McDaniel’s father, who refurbished it for use in the McDaniel Telephone Co.; and one of the first automatic answering machines—a laptop-sized thee-inch-high Code-A-Phone that debuted in 1957 and weighs nearly 50 pounds.

Artist Sylvia Livermore of Cinebar painted a beautiful winter mountain scene of White Pass as a backdrop for a mannequin on snowshoes with old-fashioned skis and antique sled beside him.

Center stage is an official soap box derby car driven by Harry Richard Hall of Morton in the 1957 Tacoma Soap Box Derby. The green car, which promotes the Morton Loggers Jubilee in red lettering highlighted with yellow shadows, weighed 249½ pounds with Harry at the wheel, while the limit for derby entries was 250 pounds. Behind the car sits the “Fast Time” trophy won by the 14-year-old boy.

Tacoma Power loaned the museum its six-by-six-foot octagon replica of the Mossyrock Dam, which was built in 1968 and backed up the Cowlitz River to create Riffe Lake above the former communities. The utility company purchased the land from property owners and Koher-Lloyd said most of the homes were moved, burned or destroyed. From a boat launch at Riffe Lake, she said, you can still see a cement slab or two and one of the streets of Kosmos (pronounced Koz-mus).

But the highlight for me sat behind glass, a beautiful pink friendship quilt painstakingly pieced together in 1930 by 20 members of the Ladies Aid of the Randle Methodist Church. In April 1930, the society decided to create the friendship quilt to raise money for needy children and families as well as the minister’s $10 monthly fee.

Each of the 20 blue, gray, orange and other colorful squares bears the embroidered name of the person who created it. Looking at the names, I could envision the women—and one man, Forest Service worker John Kirkpatrick—gathered together stitching the fabric and friendships as they worked. One of the women was Koher-Lloyd’s grandmother, Bertha Machill Koher, a German immigrant who married another German immigrant in North Dakota and settled in the Big Bottom Valley in 1890. Working beside her on the quilt were two daughters, Mae Koher Moore and Ella Koher Green, and a daughter-in-law, Ola Jordan Koher.

The ladies sold tickets for the raffle, raising two dollars, but then Max Ogen bought the hand-tied quilt outright for $25. It remained in his family for years, until his daughter, Dorothy Ogen Chubbuck, who lived in California at the time, gave it to a friend who might appreciate it—June Gerwig. After examining it, Gerwig recognized the names of Koher-Lloyd’s relatives, so she gave the quilt to her.

Now Koher-Lloyd, a native of Glenoma who graduated from the White Pass High School in 1964 but now lives in Chehalis, said she plans to donate the friendship quilt to the White Pass Country Historical Society’s museum when it opens, hopefully this summer in the old Packwood Grade School.

The beautiful old quilt, which has been displayed at the State Capitol Museum in Olympia as well as in Spokane, will remain in the Packwood museum permanently as testimony to a friendship knitted together in a small rural community.

Julie McDonald Zander is a personal historian and former journalist who lives in Toledo. She owns Chapters of Life, a company dedicated to preserving the past, one family’s story at a time. Her Web site is www.chaptersoflife.com She can be reached at memorybooks@chaptersoflife.com
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