This afternoon, the dozen members of Tyrone High’s Speech Team will uphold the school’s 90-year old tradition of speech competition as they perform a diverse range of poetry at the spring convocation of the Pennsylvania speech league, held at Southern Huntingdon High School, near Orbisonia.
According to speech coach Richard Merryman, speech competition at Tyrone High extends back 90 years to the era of World War I. In 1913 and 1914, when the new brown brick high school had just appeared on Lincoln Avenue, the Tyrone High School Speech Team held hugely popular debates with the speech team from Huntingdon High School. In his book, A Short History of Tyrone Borough, the late history teacher Ralph Wolfgang recalled that in 1913, students from Tyrone and Huntingdon packed the Tyrone High School auditorium to hear their respective speech teams debate the issue: Should the United States Strengthen The Panama Canal? The Tyrone team won that debate.
In 1914, when World War I opened, nearly the entire student body traveled by train to the Grand Theatre in Huntingdon to hear Huntingdon and Tyrone debate for a second year in a row. Sadly for Tyrone, Huntingdon came away victorious in that rhetorical rivalry. In those days around World War I, Tyrone High also sponsored the Junior Oratorical Contest at the close of each school term. The evening before graduation, seniors would choose the finest students from the academic and the commercial departments to speak in a public forum at the YMCA auditorium. Prizes ranged from $2.50 to $10 – always awarded in pure gold. Reverend Wolfgang recalled that in those bygone years, speech debates contained much of the drama of an athletic contest with enthusiastic fans, cheerleading and rousing songs.
According to Coach Merryman, more than 90 years later in 2005, the Tyrone Area High School Speech Team continues the school’s long tradition of public speaking as the present 12 member team performs a diverse range of poetry throughout the smaller schools of Central PA at autumn, winter and spring speech convocations.
Continued Merryman, “Though certainly not required to, many times our speech team members choose to present poetry, since preparing to perform a poem requires less practice time than other types of presentations. Many of our team members lead hectic lives, with commitments to academic work, sports, after-school jobs and family chores. Consequently, poetry performance as a speech activity readily fits their busy schedules.”
At the Southern Huntingdon Speech Convocation being held today, Tyrone students will present poetry from a diverse range of traditional and non-traditional literary resources.
Junior Todd Boytim will perform Jabberwocky, the hilarious poem about slaying a monster from Lewis Carroll’s Victorian Masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland. By contrast, junior Trey Brockett will present a modern poem called To Help the Monkey Cross the River. In that poem, a narrator with sympathy for monkeys uses his rifle to assist a primate in eluding crocodile and snake predators.
Junior Dustin Brown will draw on his own short story titled Love: Beatrice Style. With much humor, Brown’s short story recounts the escapades of a guy who courted a notoriously homely woman. Using a poetic introduction to a Japanese video game, junior Christopher Clark will present his personal interpretation of those colorful words extracted from the cover of a video game. Junior Sean Dickson will utilize a relatively new poem called Love Poem with Toast, wherein a couple married for many years strives to maintain the emotional intensity of their relationship.
Junior track athlete Aaron Houck will recall the intensity of a World Series Game in a piece entitled Forgiving Buckner. This selection explores the emotions Boston Red Sox player Bill Buckner experienced when his error in a World Series Game cost his team the championship. Junior football player Matthew Lauder will present the humorous poem It Took All My Energy. In that comic poem, a narrator reviews the energy he exerted chasing a woman and then compares courting women to going fishing. Tyrone wrestler Samuel McCloskey will perform a modern poem called Immortality. Following a flashback to The Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, this poem reflects that even if Sleeping Beauty slumbered for a century, sadly she would return to find anger and fear very much present in the world.
Sophomore Francesca Lambert will perform Wilfred Owen’s celebrated World War I poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, a troubling poem that underscores the hypocrisy of glorifying war, but not fighting in it. Sophomore Alexis Pazmino, who scored 50 out of 50 in the winter speech convocation, will present a piece entitled Curiosity, encouraging people to live life to the fullest even when that entails huge risks.
Freshman Amber Stonebraker will read Lady Lazarus, the painful account of poet Sylvia Plath’s troubling return from the brink of suicide. Freshman Casey Janiello will perform a poem called A Letter from God, wherein the creator offers a rationale for fashioning women from men.
Merryman indicated that Southern Huntingdon’s spring speech competition will last from 2:30 until about 7:30 p.m. Students will perform before two different judges, enjoy a dinner intermission and then conclude with an informal oratorical awards ceremony.
Finished Merryman, “To prepare for the Southern Huntingdon Speech Competition, Tyrone students diligently have practiced nearly every Wednesday since early spring. Like any other team, this oratorical team hopes to garner some awards. Yet beyond any awards, we hope the upcoming speech competition will help students appreciate what the late President John F. Kennedy spoke about poetry: When power leads people toward arrogance, poetry reminds them of their limitations. When power narrows the area of human concern, poetry reminds them of the richness and diversity of their existence. When power corrupts, poetry can cleanse.”
President Kennedy laid out “great expectations” for poetry, but the 12 members of Tyrone’s speech team believe their poems will rise to the challenge at today’s spring speech competition.
