This Month

THERE seems to be no diminution in after-dinner speaking. It’s a folkway so powerful that no more than a dozen Americans can sit down to a meal together anywhere without arranging for someone to make them a speech. The quest is naturally for a speaker of great prominence, a world figure, the head man, but any speaker will do indeed any speaker has to do: there are countless luncheon clubs and they use up speakers at a terrific clip.

Einstein must get a good many invitations from luncheon clubs. So do the leaders and innovators in every field. The Griggsville Fellowship would like to hear Einstein tell about relativity, it decides, or Hutchins on the University of Chicago, Williston on Contracts, or Hattie Carnegie on women’s wear. But the odd thing about dining-room oratory is that every one of these speakers would be a ghastly flop if he hewed faithfully to the line of the assigned subject.

“Dullest stuff I ever heard,”would be the finding. “Couldn’t understand a word of it.”

Take the case of the eminent psychologist, Dr. Seabury Rataplan, whose latest best-seller, Sex Can Be Fun, has just swept the country. He’s on the radio, on television urbane, pithy, handsome, an admirable example of an expert who can talk to the public in language that it can understand. Yet it would be a gross error for Dr. Rataplan to accept the call to Griggsville and deliver even the most brilliant harangue on his subject of psychology.

No one realizes this better than Dr. Rataplan. Once the speech booking is firm, his first act of preparation for the Griggsville occasion is to reach for the encyclopedia. He reads:—

“GRIGGSVILLE . . . Brash County seat; alt. 1045 feet Drv Creck and on thage and Ligonier S. of Samarkand, region. A large number of baby chicks are shipped from here annually. The chief manufactures include wooden shoes, furnace appliances, cosmetics, and sand and gravel. The parks are Monument, downtown, with a monument; and Windswept, near the Creek branch. A Sand and Gravel Festival has been held in mid-July since 1927. Pop. 2785.

Rataplan tells his secretary to get going on Griggsville research. She puts into the mail a mass of inquiries to trade associations, state officials, and a newspaperman whom Rataplan knows in Joplin. The Doctor bones up on baby chicks and the sand and gravel game. He is soon loaded with figures and a thumbnail sketch of the town’s leading citizens. Psychology as a subject is out, but the Doctor is going to use it on Griggsville to the imit.

Thus we see Dr. Rataplan beaming at the Fellowship audience in the Persian Room of the Griggsville Arms wo months later. Luncheon clubs use up jokes as quickly as they use up speakers, and Ralaplan has just scored heavily with a few switches on he absent-minded professor theme. Any speaker not beginning his remarks with a comic anecdote runs the risk of being thought unbearably stuck-up; the more impressive his credentials, the cornier should be his Tories. Rataplan knows ibis, too. No need to worry about Rataplan.

“I came down here with every intention of delivering a prepared speech,” Rataplan tells them. It was to be a speech on Psy-chol-o-gy.”

Rataplan makes the word sound ludicrously awesome. The Fellowship is relieved to hear that it may not be an all-highbrow speech. That was what they thought they were buying, but they didn’t really want one. They join Rataplan in a manly guffaw at Psy-chol-o-gy.

“Yes, I came down here with a prepared speech,” Dr. Rataplan goes on. “I was going to tell you about Tendencies Towards Traumatic Narcolepsy in Preschool-Age Siblings of a Second Generation Out-Group in an Industrial Society.” He waits with mock severity for the laugh, gets it. “But when I got off the train last night,” he continues, “ I was so struck by the wonderful quality of this community of yours that I tore up my prepared speech and threw it in the wastebasket. This is an extraordinary town you have here. I wonder if some of you realize how lucky you are. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to give you my impressions of Griggsville — just an informal talk. If it had a title, I suppose you could call it ‘My Kind of Town.’ ”

Mind? The Fellowship eats it up. Mind hearing the great Dr. Rataplan’s thoughts about the fastestgrowing division point on the JC&L? Mind not hearing instead a speech on Psy-chol-o-gy?

With the Fellowship snugly in tow, Dr. Rataplan sails into the extemporaneous text which he has so carefully memorized. It would be impossible to live in a town like Griggsville without knowing every crack in its sidewalks, but the audience follows raptly the Doctor’s account. It had never seen Griggsville before in quite this perspective, nor realized how famous the sand and gravel business, for instance, had become. Yet here was Rataplan with the figures — 2345 carloads last year. Why, the fellow even knew the name of “Miss Sand and Gravel of 1949.”

The Doctor ticks off the furnace appliances as a major part of the American war effort, passes up the wooden shoes, and works himself into a frenzy over Griggsville as the future world center of baby chicks. It will be by the time he returns, he assures the audience, and he hopes that this is only the first of many such gettogethers with the Fellowship.

“Best speaker we’ve had,”was the opinion expressed afterwards by the chairman, whose daughter was Miss Sand and Gravel of 1949, and everyone else agreed that Dr. Rataplan had been a crashing success. They want him back next year.

CHARLES W. MORTON