He was the main person. I'll tell you where I got this idea. While I was
still working for McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, I was in Chattanooga
covering a national convention of purchasing agents. I was sitting there
half asleep. These people were blah, blah, blah, blah, blahing about;
mostly, it was they were bragging about what their company was doing in
the purchasing area. They introduced this man from American Can Company.
I thought, "Well, he's going to try to sell us some cans. Why else would
he be here?" Well, the man got up and he could barely walk. He was
severely crippled. I couldn't tell that as long as he was sitting at the
head table. But he got up on this platform. He took his time getting
there and he would've fallen down if he hadn't grabbed the backs of
chairs as he moved along. By the time he got to the podium, everybody
was sitting on the edge of their seats, wondering whether he was going
to make it. So, he had everybody's attention.
He was a magnificent speaker. He didn't try to sell anything. He didn't
talk about anything but patriotism and the United States and how great
it is to be an American. But he had those people absolutely on the edge
of their seats. He talked about thirty minutes. When he got through, it
would've been very difficult to write a story about what he said, but he
was such a good speaker. The fact that the American Can Company paid
this man to go around the country making speeches that didn't even
mention cans just impressed the heck out of me. I never had heard of it.
I talked to him later. I still got his card. I talked to him later about
his profession. He said, "Yeah, all I do is make speeches. I go from
place to place to place making speeches." He said, "I don't have any
administrative job. I don't have an office at American Can Company. All
I have is a card and this speech that I make."
Page 10
With that in the back of my mind, when I realized that I had a lot of
money to spend—. When the economic opportunity money started rolling in,
our budgets from the Ford and Reynolds Foundation monies suddenly became
a lot more flexible. The Fund didn't need them for its own
administrative [purposes] or even grants because there was so much
federal money coming in, being almost foisted on us, because we were the
only ones in the business in North Carolina and really the only ones who
had any experience—and ours was only six months — in the South in
community action. So, I'm thinking, "I want to think outside the box
here." [Interruption] .
We did the usual things. We put out lots of news releases. Some of the
top fund people went around and made speeches. We did a quarterly
magazine—really, I guess, it was more a bi-monthly magazine — that went
out to lots of government officials all over the state and to anybody
who was in any way involved with community action in the state. Verna
Shmavonian, whom we were talking about earlier, did a lot of work with
that. We had a radio series that was playing at one time on 42 radio
stations every week. It was a three-minute tape that was an interview
with a low-income person to get their point of view. The one that sticks
in my mind is: There was this remote part of the mountains where one of
the community action agencies we were supporting had started an adult
education program for adults who had never learned to read or write.
This fellow found a lady who had been in the program and had learned to
read for the first time in her life. I think she was in her 80s; she was
real old. This fellow who was on my staff and had a lot of radio
experience said, "Well, Miss So and So, now that you can enjoy reading,
what do you read?" She said, "Well, I have read the Bible three times
lid to lid. I just love to read the Bible so I read it three times lid
to lid." I had never heard
Page 11 anybody use that saying
before. He came back with all kinds of stuff which was solid gold. He
would edit it into a three-minute story. So, we had tried that. That was
slightly innovative but it was something that actually I copied from
something a friend of mine was doing for Duke University. And we started
making films. I think I produced something like thirty or forty slide
shows during that time and six films I guess it was.
But I kept thinking, "What else can we do?" I thought about the guy from
American Can Company. I thought, "I ought to send speakers around to
talk to community leaders." Now, where do we find community leaders?
Well, you find them in the Kiwanis Club and the Lions Club and church
groups but especially in civic groups. So, I hired two people. I hired
an older man who was perfect for the office work, the logistical work.
He stayed on the phone all day, every day, soliciting engagements for
the preacher. I found a retired Presbyterian preacher who was a splendid
speaker, a man who understood from the start what we were trying to do.
I and my whole staff put together a list of the thirty or forty most
often asked questions, friendly or unfriendly questions, about the War
on Poverty and the North Carolina Fund. I had John Murray, the preacher,
memorize the answers to these questions, and he did. So, he stayed on
road at least six days a week.
Oh, and also, our guy back in the office— a man named Jim McMillen, the
older guy — he would start off with an appointment [for John] with the
Rotary Club in Wilson. He'd have a luncheon appointment for the Rotary
Club. Then, he would call the Lion's Club, and, if there was another
Rotary Club in town, he would call them and try for a dinner
appointment. In between he would set up interviews with radio and
television stations. So that John was going from place to place all day.
We provided John with a
Page 12 car. He would literally be
either speaking or on his way to or from or doing a radio or television
interview all day if we could possibly arrange it. Boy, it was a tiring
job but he loved it. He absolutely loved it. We paid him well. It was a
job where he felt like he was really doing something. We provided him
with some slides, if the situation seemed appropriate, of what we were
doing—health programs, education programs, etcetera.
So, I think he probably — little by little, person by person, answering
people's questions, talking with them before and after these
appearances, being on radio — was the best investment we ever made. I
think he probably did more for understanding than all of the news
releases. [Barnes points out a bundle of news releases in a stack of
materials on the North Carolina Fund]. I ran across this news release
log the other day; theoretically it's every new release we put out. It's
in this stack somewhere. Here. That's the size of it. It's fine to have
newspaper stories but most people don't read them. But if you've got a
captive audience, there's nothing like a captive audience. That's what
John E. Murray had. I don't think anybody ever got up and walked out on
him. So, you had him there for thirty, forty minutes, to talk to them
and answer their questions. I'm sure the question and answer period was
more exciting and more convincing than the canned speech. He tailored
his speech a little bit for the size community he was in. I'm sure he
didn't make the same speech in Charlotte that he made in Choanoke. He
traveled all over the state for years doing that. That sort of thing is
impossible to measure. Well, the whole public relations is impossible to
measure. But, if we did anything worth doing, I think that was it. I bet
you there are still people who remember John and what he had to say and
maybe had a moment of revelation about the problems of people who didn't
Page 13 manage to make themselves economically
comfortable in our society. So, that's story of the itinerant preacher
and his speechmaking.