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LOREN REID
I
In the beginning only a few people wanted a-what did they call it? "Federation of Central States Speech Associations"
Every other region had an association, but the Upper Mississippi Valley was unorganized, unstructured. Its block of thirteen unclaimed states looked like a huge bird with no feet; the broad rear was shaped by the Great Plains states of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas; the head with its sharp beak was Ohio. This strange bird included the rich, populous, industrial, agricultural, cultural, inland area loosely called the Central States.
Why were we the last to launch a learned society, instead of the first?
A major reason was that we had such close kinship with the national organization, then called the National Association of Teachers of Speech (NATS). We had supplied fifteen of its seventeen founding fathers. Of the three most distinguished founders, James M. O'Neill, Charles M. Woolbert, and James A. Winans, the first two were from Central States' institutions. Six of its first ten presidents and three of its first five editors came from our area. We practically owned the national association. Most of its conventions were in our front yard: Chicago, Cleveland.
Those who thought about a new regional group frankly said: "We don't need a regional. We can meet so easily at the time of the national convention." Or: "If we do form a regional, we don't need a special convention except during those rare years when the national doesn't meet in our area."
As it is time to mention a date, here it is: 1930.
Even then, however, forces were shaping that pointed to the founding of an organization for the Central States.
One came from the region's existing state associations, now behaving like colonies looking for a central government. These state groups were driven by pressing needs to deal with professional problems confronting elementary and secondary teachers as well as college and university staffs. Why shouldn't elementary school pupils get attention to their speech needs and abilities? Why were high school speech and drama classes and extracurricular activities so often assigned to teachers of English or social studies who had had little or no speech education? Why shouldn't the rapidly growing junior college segment offer competent instruction in...