Touching Lives

I’ve been spending many hours looking at old video tapes of my performances in a wide variety of areas. There are tapes of my working with teachers, with children, in schools and with parents.  A parade of tapes with safety people and corporate employees, with sales people, an audience involving my book Love Is The Target and the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. I have tapes from International Toastmaster meetings where I spoke to large audiences, tapes where I took time in the rain forest of Hawaii talking about speaking, and I did a session with a great audience of seniors where we did a series of shorter tapes.  I traveled to fifty of the United States and most of the Canadian Provinces. From coast to coast all the way up to the Arctic Sea in Alaska. I spent over an hour yesterday watching my performance in front of an awesome church congregation in Detroit  Some tapes are over forty years old and there is some deterioration and lets face it, some were not of very good quality with bad lighting and even bad photography. I watched one that PBS did and was really happy with the quality. The United States Air Force did some great work in Wyoming.  Some of the Power companies had their own video departments and some of there work is excellent.

Terry Pochert the gent who helps me distribute this newsletter and had worked with me for several decades has traveled with me to Hawaii and Newfoundland and the State of Washington and many other locations is the best photographer I have ever met. The best editor too. When he shoots the reactions of audiences and then works them into the tapes I feel he is working miracles.  He retired from a top job in TV production in Detroit several years ago and his background in TV is evident in his wonderful work. We’ve made a lot of videos for corporate clients over the years and we went over to Pearl Harbor and did some videos for the U.S. Navy together.  My goal is to find the best stuff we have and create a sort of “Classics” series covering the various topics. My mass of audio tapes is staggering. At one time I recorded every talk and then forced myself to listen to them to find some way to make it better the next time. This is the stuff that I figured I’d look at when I got the time.

Well, I will have celebrated my 84th birthday when this issue is distributed so I guess I finally found the time to begin this chore.

What have I discovered after hours of watching?  I’m convinced that I am the luckiest many in the world to have experienced the joy of sharing my meager knowledge and experience with so many thousands of people all over this world.  My goal for every performance was to touch just one life in that audience. Now as I look back and remember the faces in those many, many audiences, with a lot of help and luck too  I figure I just might have succeeded.