High school debate reordered my life. Upended the way I looked at the world. Challenged my perceptions. But what was it that I found or discarded? What was the epiphany? Mostly I haven’t spent the energy to parse the question—to understand the gift of that experience. I’ll try.
First the basics.
For reasons I can’t summon now, I signed up for debate my McPherson High School junior year. I can’t have known much of what to expect. I was a predictable, straight-A, straight-laced, brown-nosing student. The only relevant experience I brought to the team came from 4-H competitive cooking demonstrations. Complete with cloth-covered card table, dainty apron, and an easel holding handmade signs. I made my mark in those demonstrations as the mistress of fancy biscuit making: basic dough–an orange-juice soaked sugar cube punched down in the middle. Voila sweet orange biscuits. Butter and cinnamon sugar rolled into the mix–almost a cinnamon roll. Shredded Velveeta stirred in—cheesy biscuits. In hindsight, every kind of cheesy.
We were a tiny squad. A motley bunch with wide-ranging interests. Certainly different temperaments and differing locations on the school’s popularity scale. Ordinary high school social life would never have brought us together.
The district had just hired Merle Ulery as the speech, drama, and debate teacher. A kind, dapper Southeastern Kansas man. Dazzlingly well-read. Comfortable in his own skin and story with a sharp eye for irony and humor. He respected high school kids and expected hard work and investment from us. We responded in kind. I would have sworn that he came from New York—so sophisticated and worldly he seemed—compared with our homegrown teachers.
The national high school debate topic that year seems to have been one of these three topics. For the life of me I can’t remember which one we actually used. RESOLVED: That the United States should promote a Common Market for the western hemisphere. Or RESOLVED: That the foreign aid program of the United States should be limited to non-military assistance. Or RESOLVED: That the non-communist nations of the world should establish an economic community. You get the idea. Something that sounded important, was vaguely plausible, and related enough to current issues that the topic could be researched in available material.
By the time we attended our first meet, we’d spent hours in the library with Time Magazine, U. S. News and World Report, Vital Speeches—really any current policy journal we could find; materials provided by the National Speech and Debate Association; old history books and international politics texts. With all that research, we each assembled a list of primary arguments for and against the resolution. We created divided notecard file boxes, stuffed on one side with footnoted quotations and presentation themes for the resolution and stuffed on the other, against the resolution. We had a similarly organized accordion file full of articles or longer quotations. Everything pasted in or handwritten or typed on a manual typewriter. Today, students walk into debate matches with laptops. We struggled in with armloads of paper.
Debate competitions in Kansas were day and half affairs—arranged in tournaments at schools that could accommodate many participants. Five or six elimination rounds preceded Saturday afternoon final rounds. Competitors were required to present either affirmative or negative positions on a moment’s notice. We didn’t know which we would be assigned until we walked into each room.
Mr. Ulery taught us the magic of a large sheet of paper, readied for each match—divided into two big columns and several smaller columns – used to track the flow of the debate. We began by recording the main affirmative and negative arguments, each sides’ rebuttals, and then issues we wanted to remember in the future. The format allowed us to SEE the way the arguments were unfolding – and be more certain of responding to positions that our opponents offered.
Mr. Ulery partnered me with Anita—a wry, beautiful, thoughtful, and more popular girl. Our differences became advantages. Mr. Ulery would walk us to matches, glance at the judges, and then decide which of us should sit on the outside edge of our table up on the stage: Anita with her shorter suit skirt if the judges included a young man or me with my longer wool jumper if the judges looked to be staid old English teachers. Valuable lesson there – just in and of itself! (Note the first photo.)
Our whole team did well, but Anita and I wowed. We won most of our tournament rounds and were state novice champions. We each now have a trophy awarded that year, although the squad mascot—a big plastic Bullwinkle soap bubble dispenser—has vanished.
I would debate my senior year as well, but without the electricity and encouragement of Mr. Ulery who had left for another position. We tried NOT to answer, instead, to a morose, greasy-haired man, with whom we didn’t even want to share the school car.
So how and why was I a different person on the far side of that first year? I enjoyed the camaraderie of classmates on overnight trips and in huddled strategy sessions. We came to know each other well. Regardless of gender, we could joke and commiserate without the typical boy/girl high school tension. I learned to think on my feet and to order words well and grammatically. I could track the flaws in another team’s presentation. We were taught poise—to stand up straight at podiums and look the judges in the eye. Anita and I enjoyed success—measured by others’ yardsticks. Mr. Ulery encouraged us to celebrate our victories and that stoked our creativity, our investment in the effort, and our egos. Ordinary routines and responsibilities took second place in our attentions.
But the sum of my change seems much larger and more essential than speaking skill or social ease. I came from a home and a growing up where modesty and self-effacement too often morphed into insecurity. Where humility became self-doubt. But from that debate year, I walked away with . . . agency. With a strength and confidence that’s hung around in the years since. With confidence in myself that others’ opinions can’t vanquish. An “I can.” And “I will.” That strength and trust falters occasionally—sometimes a lot. The first semester of graduate school comes to mind. And some fearful spells here in this eighth decade when my body’s unreliable. But I seem to return mostly to optimism and fortitude, even as I trim the sails of my activities. Somehow the elixir of that year, those people, that teacher, those experiences cast a permanent spell. I am forever grateful for that magic.
As he left McPherson, Mr. Ulery gave me the classic recording of Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body” with Raymond Massey, Judith Anderson, Tyrone Power. A measure of encouragement and caring far beyond any teacher’s ordinary responsibility or salary.
And while this quotation is not from that record, it is vintage Benet and evocative of that debate year:
Something begins, begins;
Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroad, in flesh and spirit and fire. Something is loosed to change the shaken world. ©
