In the summer of 1957 I was on vacation in Morell, PEI, and was chatting with my former teacher and school principal, Mabel O’Brien, who was always interested in what her former students were doing. At that time I was thinking about becoming a radio announcer, but I had a problem: I stuttered. It was a very mild, intermittent stutter, but because I never knew when it might hit it would keep me off the air. Mabel suggested the Dale Carnegie Course might help overcome this problem.
When I got back to Toronto I consulted the telephone book’s Yellow Pages (the 50s equivalent to the internet). The course was being offered by an organization called Leadership Training Services located at 1290 Bay Street, which was just north of Bloor. As I was living at Yonge and St. Clair and working for the CPR at 62 Simcoe Street (where Roy Thomson Hall is now) the location was very convenient. I phoned and learned there was a class starting the following Tuesday evening, so I enrolled.
Dale Carnegie began teaching his course at a YMCA in New York City in 1912. Although he promoted it as a course in public speaking, he was really the first motivational coach, using public speaking as a platform to help people enhance both their personal lives and careers by boosting their self-confidence.
I showed up at 1290 Bay the following Tuesday evening and met the two charming people who ran the operation, Lillian Ward and Fred Lightfoot, (both would become my lifelong friends). Although I thought the course was starting that night, the session was actually a “demonstration” put on by Fred and two other certified Dale Carnegie instructors, Jack Johnston and Ted Hopkins. By the end of the evening I knew I had stumbled upon the pathway to happiness and success.
There were two coffee breaks during both of which I happened to be chatting with the same man, a well-dressed, sophisticated, soft-spoken person whom I instantly liked. Like me, he too had signed up thinking this was the first session, and also like me he thought the evening was magical. We chatted about why we were taking the course: I to try to beat my stutter, and he to overcome what he described to me as “paralyzing shyness.” It turned out that he would pass near my place on his way home so he offered me a lift, and I had my first ride in a Cadillac. He picked me up and dropped me off for all fourteen weeks of the course, and we too became lifelong friends. Who was he? He was Ed Mirvish, owner of the iconic Toronto discount store Honest Ed’s, and later a restauranteur (Ed’s Warehouse) and Canada’s most important theatre impresario, owning both the Royal Alex and Princess of Wales theatres.
Every class member had to give at least two talks each night, ranging from thirty seconds to two minutes and it quickly became clear that I had a flair for public speaking.
I had two life-changing experiences during the fourteen weeks of the course. First, my stutter disappeared during week five and has never returned. Second, the self-confidence I gained by winning six out of a possible six class awards permeated every aspect of my life, convincing me I was perfectly capable of controlling my own destiny.
Ar the last session of the course the class cast secret ballots, voting for two members who would be given the opportunity to be trained as graduate assistants. At that time graduate assistants taught the first half of each session and had important roles to play when the class was taken over by the instructors during the second half. I was lucky enough to be one of the two top vote getters. During the next nine years I was a GA for eleven classes and in the fall of 1966 I spent three weekends in Albany, New York, being trained to become a certified instructor.
As much as I enjoyed teaching Carnegie, by the late 60s I no longer had the time to devote two nights a week during the fourteen weeks of a course (one to prepare and one teaching) so I resigned. I remain proud that, according to Fred Lightfoot, I was the youngest-ever GA in North America, which he learned when he had me approved by the Carnegie head office in New York. The minimum age for a GA was 25; I was 18.
One of the prizes I won while taking the course was a copy of Dale Carnegie’s book Lincoln the Unknown. Reading this book spurred a keen interest in Abraham Lincoln, who became one of my three idols. My other two are Winston Churchill and, of course, Dale Carnegie.