College Mentors (3)

Fred Barton – speech teacher

The third person who influenced me during my freshman year was Dr. Fred Barton.  I probably ended up taking more courses under Dr. Barton than I did any single instructor during my college days.   He taught public speaking and homiletics.  Homiletics is a fancy word for preaching. It was an advanced course, so I didn’t get there until I was a junior.

As a freshman, I studied general public speaking.  I’m greatly indebted to Dr. Barton.  He taught me how to organize my presentation, introduce my topic, present the main thoughts and wind it up in an acceptable fashion.  Along the way he offered suggestions about pronunciation and style. Most of us didn’t know a thing about public speaking.

He could offer encouragement when you needed it, and blunt force criticism when you thought you were hot stuff.  I never thought Dr. Barton was a great public speaker himself, but he sure knew how to recognize it in others.

During freshman speech classes, we didn’t preach sermons.  That would come later in homiletics.  Among other things he asked us to present a persuasive speech on some controversial topic.   At that point in time, Ezra Taft Benson was the Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower.  Having grown up on a farm and resenting acreage allotments, I attempted to persuade my audience that Secretary Benson should be fired.   Dr. Barton had a totally different view.   He literally trashed my speech, but then he ended up giving me a B, so I guess he thought I made my case fairly well even though he didn’t agree with it.

I heard about a student in another class, who announced that his speech would be centered around the evils of the Republican Party.   That should have been safe ground.  In Texas winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election, but when the student announced his topic, Dr. Barton said, “As chairman of the Taylor County Republican Party, I’ll be qualified to evaluate your presentation.”   I never heard how the poor guy fared with his talk.

Of course we didn’t do politics in Homiletics.  He worked to rid me of two bad habits.  The first was my pronunciation.  He once said that I had the worst case of a West Texas dialect he had ever heard.  Actually, I’ve never lost my Texas twang, but now I sound more like a resident of Dallas than a boy from Clyde.  Of course I can slip back into West Texas good ole boy talk anytime I want to.  The other was what he called preacher tone. Until I was grown I rarely heard a preacher use a microphone.   They had to shout to make themselves heard. With the shouting they developed a certain cadence.   My friend Dale Smith says they sounded like a quarterback calling signals.  I pretty well had that down when I started to college.  It’s taken me a life time to try to unlearn it.  He may not have liked those things, but he did like my enthusiasm.

In the seventies, I was asked to teach homiletics at the Kansas City School of Preaching.  I wrote Dr. Barton and made the mistake of asking him for advice on how to approach the subject of homoletics.   He said, “Norman, the first thing I would advise is to learn how to spell the word.  Talk about feeling put in your place.