At Age 89, Dr. Peale Is Still a Positively Inspiring Speaker

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who holds the key to the power of positive thinking, still has the ability, at 89, to regale, inspire, delight and generally capture an audience. And he did just that Sunday in a sermon before 5,000 faithful in Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral.

It has been nearly 36 years since Peale penned the book that would prove a worldwide best seller, assuring his fame and fortune. And while today’s best-seller lists are loaded with how-to’s, his message of “positive thinking” still commands a vast audience, as he showed Sunday.

His oratorical skill turns not so much on a commanding presence--although he still can bellow in a strong baritone--but on his talent for spinning an anecdote, usually humorous yet telling. And all the while, he flashes his winning and knowing smile.

The message is simple: “Think, believe in yourself and try, try, try!” But the results, Peale said, can be truly amazing.

“Have you ever in your life actually astonished yourself?” he asked. He then recounted the success story of baseball pitching great Cy Young--”just a farm boy (from) southern Ohio”--whom Peale met once as a young man.

There also was the admonition to “figure out what you can do best and then do it well,” which wound into the tale of Mary, a Florida woman who could bake pretty good pies and then turned her skill into an enterprise that has attracted people from across the state.

“She produced an amazing result of positive thinking,” said Peale.

It seemed almost inevitable that the same phrase should cause the congregation to turn and gaze in wonder at their surroundings when Peale told of how, in 1957, he came to preach at the Drive-In Church at the Orange Drive-In Theater, at the urging of an upstart young pastor named Robert Schuller.

Schuller, who has since built the $15-million Crystal Cathedral, shared the pulpit with Peale on Sunday.

“When he started, he had $500 and a parish of two families,” Peale said. “He came to see me where I was staying in Los Angeles and said one day he would build a cathedral. And I said, ‘With what?’ But he described it in specific detail, and I said to him, ‘Bob, the church is already built, because you’ve done it in your mind.’ ”

Peale, like Schuller a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, has been retired for several years from his own pulpit at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York. But he still writes for magazines and newspapers and broadcasts on radio.

After the sermon, parishioners left the church murmuring about the still-spry author and lecturer.

“I think it’s just amazing and wonderful,” said 19-year-old Danine Lewis, who was visiting with her family from Pullman, Wash. “He’s still up there booming away, and he’s 89 years old. He is the best proof of what he says: ‘Just get out there and do it.’ ”