Voices of Hope : Students Strive for Confidence, Growth by Way of Public Speaking

The microphone died in Jason Hernandez’s hand, and he froze mid-speech in the steamy high school auditorium under the withering glare of stadium lights, this tuxedoed 12-year-old boy who has been suspended from school more times than he can count.

Oh man, he thought in panic. Why me? Why always me?

His heart was racing, his palms sweaty; 250 audience members shifted in folding chairs or in bleachers. A creaky electric fan rattled, a baby wailed; Jason’s mother, a supermarket checker, held her breath. Two Alhambra councilmen and a congressman’s representative waited.

For a moment, Jason’s mind went blank. He wanted to flee and shed the tux for his everyday cholos- inspired clothes: baggy pants and a T-shirt past his hips. The tight tuxedo collar felt like a rope around his neck.

The untimely sound glitch came during Jason’s final speech as a closet junior Toastmaster. On May 1, he and 12 other young people graduated from a Toastmasters class of troublemakers or kids struggling to stay out of trouble. The youths, ages 10-17, want to pull themselves up to a higher plane, to rise above the madness of the streets.

For 10 weeks they sacrificed their Monday nights for the Toastmasters class sponsored by the Alhambra Youth Boxing Club, finding hope through public speaking. The class was part public speaking, part encounter group, part summer camp, in a drafty warehouse with grimy windows and a roll-up sheet-metal door.

When the class started on a dark, cold night in February, it had 22 would-be orators. By the last class on a warm spring evening in April, there were 13.

On graduation day, the kids were different people than the ones who had started out making eye contact with their shoelaces and dying slow, silent deaths behind a podium. For the most part, they spoke clearly and confidently, which was what Jason was doing when his microphone died.

Jason is 4 feet 10 inches of attitude, a smart-alecky kid with a buzz cut who can’t sit in a chair without tipping it back. He is too embarrassed to tell his friends he is in Toastmasters.

No, thank you, he doesn’t want his friends to see him in a monkey suit talking like some big shot when he’s really just Jason, who sometimes hears gunshots outside his El Monte home and worries his single mother so much that she keeps him inside.

*

Former boxing coach Rudy Tellez, 44, and his wife, Antonia Tellez, 47, a member of Downey Toastmasters, opened the nonprofit Alhambra Youth Boxing Club in July, 1991, with $3,000 in their own money and donations. The club offers free boxing and speech classes.

This batch of students met weekly for 1 1/2 hours in a small, doorless room, lit by a single bare bulb. Faded wrestling posters languished on the peeling white walls. The Davila vs. Martinez poster doubled as the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance because the club can’t afford a real one.

During week one, all eyes looked down when Antonia Tellez made impromptu speech assignments. The kids slouched and fidgeted in white wooden folding chairs.

“Harmonie,” Tellez said to the slight girl in the first row.

Harmonie Noriega, 11, grimaced when she heard her name called. The topic: If you could be someone else, who would you be?

In the back row, someone said in a stage whisper: “Superman.”

Harmonie giggled and looked at the concrete floor. In blue Keds, she stood on tiptoe to see over the podium. She had butterflies in her stomach, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. But everyone was looking at her.

“I would want to be myself,” she said.

With her long brown hair and delicate cheekbones, Harmonie often hears people say she looks like Julia Roberts.

She wants to be an actress or a model, so she thinks the speech class will help. Her mother is a secretary, her dad a printer. She sees a lot of gang members near her La Puente home.

“If I do the wrong thing,” Harmonie said, “I might get killed.”

In a later class, her assigned topic was good things and bad things that happened to her. The bad thing was easy: Once, she almost drowned.

“Good things?” she said flatly. “I don’t know of any good things that happened to me.” Her sentence hung there awkwardly, so she forced a laugh. “I don’t.”

*

Toastmasters International has 1,698 youth chapters worldwide, an all-time high. Membership boomed in the late 1970s, after the “Book of Lists” said America’s No. 1 fear is public speaking, by a wide margin over heights, death and other unpleasantries.

Steven Magallanes, 14, already was a remarkably fluid speaker. He joined Tellez’s speech class for something else.

“It really taught me more than just the speech, you know,” Steven said after the first class.

Steven, who likes to wear Guns N’ Roses or Metallica T-shirts, is wise beyond his years. He wants to be an actor, a singer or a video-game maker. And go hang-gliding and parachuting. And, oh, yeah--fly a jet.

But life scares him. One day, he came to class shaken because a 27-year-old woman was fatally shot for her car on West Valley Boulevard, a spot he passes each day. He has watched former friends sink into an abyss of gangs, violence and drugs.

“I’m just looking for that edge, desperately hoping it’ll help me out,” he said. “I want to survive, without having to retreat into the slumps. Try to keep my life above that line.”

Steven’s older brother, 15-year-old David, was in the class too. Their mother, Marlene Magallanes, worries that the boys will join gangs. Magallanes, 42, is a single mother raising four teen-agers, a 20-year-old son and an 18-month grandchild, all in a three-bedroom Alhambra apartment.

“If I’m very, very lucky,” said Marlene Magallanes, a part-time elementary school aide, “these kids will be survivors.”

*

Week five, it was Jason’s turn to think of impromptu speech topics. He slouched at the podium, took off his UNLV baseball cap and put it between his legs. His topic was for Teresa Venegas, 12, a painfully shy girl who gave one- or two-sentence speeches.

Jason’s words tumbled out so quickly that he was incomprehensible. He could not frame a simple question.

“How often would you say, like, you know how you make mistakes and stuff like, like you like, you might do something bad, like, how often would you say that you would, like, make those, like, mistakes. . . .”

The class laughed, and Jason laughed with them.

By week 10, the kids were counting down the days to graduation.

The last class began late because Antonia Tellez had to go pick up one of the kids in San Gabriel. Someone had stolen his bike.

Nervously, the kids rehearsed their two-minute speeches for the last time, with graduation five days away.

Harmonie walked swiftly up to the podium and jiggled her legs. She gave a quick tense squeal and then began her speech on pollution.

“Many cities . . .” she began. She cleared her throat and put a hand up to her forehead. “ . . . dump pollution . . .”

Along the way, she stumbled again.

“Oh my goodness,” she gasped, her chest heaving.

Jason was solemn during his 1 1/2-minute practice speech, tripping over words, and leaving 10-second gaps between some sentences. There was no inflection in his voice as he spoke about the homeless.

“I think that someone, that someone, I think that someone would, I think if someone would give these people a chance, they could show themselves they could be successful.”

Guiltily, he looked at Tellez. “That’s all I have right now. I’m not done.”

“You’ve got, what, four days,” Tellez said sharply. “And you’ve got to memorize it too.”

The words echoed through Jason’s head all week. His mother and 3-year-old brother would be in the audience.

At home, he practiced in front of the mirror, over and over again.

*

On graduation day, the temperature hits the mid-90s. Brothers David and Steven walk from home to the boxing club in their tuxedos, practicing their speeches along the one-mile route.

At the boxing club, Teresa, in borrowed dangly earrings and choker necklace, is looking for a safety pin to hold up the strap on her tight black dress. Jason is putting away four mini-doughnuts, two chocolate chip cookies and a sweet roll, washing it all down with orange juice.

At 11 a.m., a white limousine donated for the day by a local company arrives to take the kids in two shifts to graduation at San Gabriel High School. On stage, the kids squirm in folding chairs, as their scheduled 12:10 p.m. start time comes and goes.

Harmonie’s mother approaches the stage to fiddle with her daughter’s drooping carnation corsage. Harmonie shoos her away. During the national anthem, Teresa’s lips move silently, but not to the recorded music. She is rehearsing her speech.

*

Finally. Show time.

Harmonie, in a flowery dress with her hair up, looks at the audience and speaks for one minute without notes, clearly and conversationally. She has trouble with only one or two words.

“Suppose you were walking along a stream or a lake and became very thirsty. Do you think you’d be safe to drink the water? In most cases, it wouldn’t.”

The audience applauds her one-minute speech warmly, and she sits down, glowing.

Jason’s turn. He starts off strongly, smoothly, making eye contact.

“Have you ever walked down a street or an alley and seen someone sleeping? These people don’t have a home like me and you. They have boxes and sleep in trash cans. . . .” He is speaking without notes and with feeling; only once does he use “like” as a filler word.

“Sometimes, like, when I’m walking down the street I’ll see someone just . . . saying, ‘Oh, look at that wino. . . .’ ”

It’s here that the microphone fails. Jason taps it a few times, but nothing happens.

Behind him, a sound man fiddles with the audio system. There is a 30-second delay until the microphone kicks back on.

Immediately, Jason picks up where he left off. He doesn’t look rattled. “I remember when I was little, and it may sound funny, but I used to talk to bums and stuff. . . . They were nice to talk to and everything. . . . I used to go to Lucky’s with my mom. I’d see these people hanging out there and I’d say hi, and they’d say hi back. . . . Just because they don’t have a home doesn’t mean we have to treat them like trash. That’s it.”