The First Optimist Oratorical Contest

By 1928, Optimists were getting down to business in the matter of boys work. Junior Optimist Clubs were sprouting up all over and the organization had set aside 25 cents of every Optimist’s dues to fund boys work exclusively on the International level.

In the May 1928 issue of The Optimist magazine, the newly appointed Boys Work Council announced that they had come up with “an innovation of unprecedented interest,” an oratorical contest open to all Junior Optimists 16 and younger. Each boy could choose his own subject, so long as it pertained to Optimism and boys work, prepare his own oration and limit it to ten minutes. All Optimist Clubs that wanted to have their Junior Optimist Clubs represented at the International Convention that summer of 1928 were invited to file their intention. All entrants were to be given the opportunity to address and compete for one of three prizes and certificates to be presented. The announcement stated that the nature of the prizes had not been determined.

Records of the convention do not indicate how many boys took to the speaker’s platform that June day in 1928 in Asheville, North Carolina. They do state, however, that the first Oratorical Contest winner was 12-year-old Carlo Purpero from Milwaukee. His prize turned out to be a book, The Americanization of Edward Bok. Three runners-up, each of whom received a certificate, a loving cup and a book, were Ramson Park of Nashville, James Cherry of Asheville and Elbert Parish of Oklahoma City.

Carlo had selected for his oration, “What Junior Optimism Means to Me.” He told delegates he was proud of his state, his home city and his nation, but he was even more proud to be a member of Junior Optimist Club No. 12 of Milwaukee.

“The club to which I belong,” he said, “is composed exclusively of Italian boys living in a district which is known as Milwaukee’s ‘Little Italy.’ The ward is surrounded by the local gas works, garbage plant, railroad yards, numerous warehouses and the commission row. Some call it the slum district. For years our only playgrounds were the streets or alleys of the neighborhood where we mingled with the pushcarts of banana peddlers and played with the goats which infested our district.

“Some of the bolder of us, for diversion, hitched rides on freight cars while we explored the nearby freight yards for fuel and provisions. That state of affairs has undergone a complete change since the inception of our Junior Optimist Club.”

Young Carlo went on to tell them that this gang of kids, many of them on probation to Juvenile Court and none of them candidates for National Honor Society at school, had within the past two years become a club complete with a constitution, bylaws, officers and meetings. Their year-long program of contests in oratory and athletics was climaxed by a two-week camping trip.

He concluded his oration by thanking the Optimists for the change they had made in the lives of himself and his contemporaries and added, “We want to grow up so that in the years to come we may be a credit to our benefactors and make them realize they have done something for the benefit of American boyhood.”

Delegates to the convention were inspired by this new program and directed that rules for future contests be drawn up. Foreseeing that the next year would bring too many boy orators to be heard, they ordered contests set up within Districts with the winner of each representing his District at the 11th annual convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1929.

And true to his words that he wanted to grow up and “be a credit to his benefactors,” Carlo Purpero completed high school and was three years into a pre-law course at Milwaukee State Teachers College when his mother died, forcing him to forego his plans to be a lawyer. Shortly afterward, however, an elderly couple sold Carlo their little restaurant and he was off on a new career as a restaurateur, eventually opening a popular chain of drive-in restaurants in California.

An Optimistic Beginning

From 11 Clubs at its founding just a decade earlier, the number of Optimist Clubs grew tenfold by the end of the 1920s. The 1,300 men who belonged to the few founding Clubs in 1919 had become over 8,000 late in the decade.

In 1926, the presidents of Optimist International and Civitan International began serious discussions about merging the two organizations. A special conference between the two chief executives and the two executive secretaries was held in Columbus, Ohio, where five resolutions were adopted calling for the consolidation of the two organizations and outlining how such a merger would be handled. International Convention delegates from both organizations were to vote on the proposal during their meetings in the summer of 1926. No records exist of how the votes went, whether one or both conventions rejected the proposal, but obviously the merger never took place.

At the 1929 International Convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Optimist International did merge with Canopus International, a struggling organization of fewer than a dozen clubs but with the same general purpose.