My paternal grandmother, Virginia Brann Adams, was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Tremonton, Utah during the 1940s and 1950s.  Since I had shown "promise" in oration and public speaking, I became involved in the WCTU Speech Contests during the mid 1950s at about the age of ten or eleven years old.

The speech contests consisted of memorization of a story that carried the message of W.C.T.U. -- which purpose was to combat the influence of alcohol on families and society.  I participated in several of these oratories over a period of perhaps two or three years as I was growing up.

I remember that WCTU had a Saturday broadcast originating from KBUH, the local radio station in Brigham City, Utah located about eighteen miles south of Tremonton and each of us orators taped the speech that we had memoirzed.  It was usually somewhat of a dramatic speech that told of a situation that sent the message that the use of alcohol should be abolished and total abstinence was to be encouraged.  The message was how alcohol adversely affected individuals and those with whom they associated in private or public.  The WCTU perceived alcoholism as a consequence of larger social problems rather than as a personal weakness or failing.

WCTU Participants at KBUH Radio Station -- (back left to right) Station manager, owner, Mrs. Fredericksen, (middle left to right) myself, three other orators, and (front) accordian player from a WCTU Speech Contest broadcast, about 1955.

On one occasion Mrs. Fredericksen, our WCTU sponsor, had several of us come to the radio station where we gave our speeches and they were somehow judged.  The influence this had on me was to abstain from alcohol use throughout my life.  Because I never took the first drink, I have never been tempted to use it, but I have seen what it did in the life of one of my father's brothers and how it affected our family when my own father drank after I left home.  It has also had an effect on the lives of other members of my family, as well as on society.

I was actually in high school when it was brought to my attention that my own father drank, and as I look back, this may have also accounted for some of the times he had an uncontrollable temper in situations we experienced growing up.