Appendix 8: Junior/Senior Prom Speech:

Mr. Leslie, Mr. Dimit, Mr. Hadsall, students, teachers, guests: As president of the junior class, welcome to the Junior-Senior Banquet for 1964. We of the junior class salute the seniors and wish them the best of luck in the future.

In working in close cooperation with other people one becomes aware of what people are really like. In school we greet each other casually in the hall, and we all form certain opinions of each other. These snap decisions are ridiculous and can often lead to a misunderstanding between students and students or students and teachers.

However, in putting together this prom and banquet, we, or maybe just I have, learned to appreciate each other’s talents and grow to depend on those talents. Also, in putting on a program such as this, on can clearly discern the personalities and capabilities of each other.

It is kind of ironic that we have gone to school together all these years, yet we just have known each other on the surface. Only in an instance such as this is the mask of deception torn away and the reality of the situation made known.

It happens too often in life that we as individuals only take each other at face value without stopping to seek the answers as to why a person did something. We do not care for the aforethought that caused the act, but rather just the after effect.

Yet before we can ever venture forth to understand others, we must first of all know ourselves, our capabilities, talents, and personalities. You are as you make yourself, no one else can make you what you really are. Have you looked in the mirror lately, what are you really like? Can you look yourself in the eye and say, “I like me the way I am”? If you can you have certainly accomplished what most have failed at.

Before turning our attention to the other speakers, I would like to leave you with this challenge: that you may know others as well as you think you know yourself.

[Author’s note: I do not recall giving this speech or why I wrote what I did. It makes little sense in the context of the event. It sounds like a minister’s sermon more than it does as appreciation of the senior class. I am a little embarrassed about what I wrote fifty-three years ago.]