polished and ready, “I would say, ‘All right, let’s get to work,’ and we would have what I called distraction exercises, where people listening to them would do something to distract them and they had to stay focused or in character. Quite honestly, it was just something I tried and it worked.” At the national tournament in Los Angeles in 1976, an
Eastern competitor was going to use a slide projector for visual aids, but it blew up when she plugged it in. Trained to be unflappable, “She just went ahead,” he says. That same tournament furnished another serendipitous
lesson. Beagen had to find a way to get 20 students and five coaches from Ypsilanti to Los Angeles without busting the budget, so “Ray Quiel and I, in the winter months of that year, went around and looked at used motor homes that could be rented. We found two, one in pretty good condition, one not very good. I remember the father of one of my best students kicking the tires. “The only reason I did that was we didn’t have any money,”
he says, “but I told the students these would be moving classrooms, and we rehearsed the entire way. That was one of the best team-building things we ever did.”
J
ust as some parts of the country are fertile recruiting territory for basketball or wrestling, others are hot pockets
of forensics. One of them is the Dallas area, where Stephanie Patterson Alderdice grew up. She eventually competed for West Texas A&M, served as a graduate assistant at Eastern, became a highly successful oral interp coach at national powerhouse Western Kentucky, and now runs
Speechgeek.com, a news and sales website that’s sort of the
Amazon.com of forensics. Nothing like the above was on her radar when she started.
“My first public speaking competition in junior high was a Rotary contest,” she says, “and I did it because you had the option of going to that or doing another paper.” The bug didn’t take long to bite, however, and (points off for mixing metaphors?) it seems to be securely lodged in her system. “It made me a more confident person,” says Alderdice. “It made me think about social and philosophical issues that I hadn’t tackled before, and I was surrounded by other people who loved that same challenge. Once you find that niche of people who share your ideas and your passions, it’s hard to leave.” But it’s easy, she says, to “spot a speech kid.”
1) The 1979 national championship team at their motel near the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
2) The 1973 national championship team
3) Ray Quiel (MA89), Dan Bernard (BS79) and Eric Moore (BS82); in the background is Janice Apsey (BS80)
4) Michelle Mueller (BS74) 5) Dennis Beagen
4 5 Eastern | SPRING 2014 19
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