Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

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Q: Was this black and white?
A: No, just black.
Q: Where did they usually hold these?
A: Normally at Oceola which is about eighteen miles south of my town, because
it was a little more central. My town is up in one end of the county,
Normally at Cteola.
Q: You say they had a track meet also?
A: A track meet was a part of it also.
Q: Were you involved in that?
A: I used to run the hurdles. Low hurdles.
Q: Were you any good at it?
A: Pretty good. Pretty good. Won some prizes.
Q: So, this would be a daily affair, I guess. You would go down in the
morning once or twice a year?
A: Go down in the morning and come back late that evening, yes. And they had
some really interesting kinds of things like you would have speed calculation.
Put a group of figures on the board and the kids would walk up and they would
say, "Go!" and they would have to do them with speed, totaling them up.
Q: &, I see, mathematics, huh?
A: Yes, for mathematics. You would have spelling contests, first grade,
second grade, third grade, right through the whole sphere. Then they would
have what they called either declamation contests, that would be people saying
poems in the lower grades, and then for the high school, it would be oratorical
contests. I remember one of the ones I had was a poem called the
"New South." William--oh, what was his name? It's something--William O'Grady,
O'Grady is the last name, who wrote a beautiful kind of speech after the Civil
War. You know, what does he find? He finds his house in ruins, his farms
decimated. It's a story of what a Southerner found when he came back from the
war after the war was over. I just remember that was one of the orations that
we did. It was all on a competitive basis with people judging you on memory,
articulation, the whole thing, you know.
Q: Was there any debate involved in it?
A: Well, we did not have any debates as a part of that "rally," but we used to
have debates in our high school and they would give us some subject that,
really, there was no answer to it. For example, I remember once when we had