001foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] we're not ready yet keep chatting [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] this is our uh what about our 15th event here at Greensburg High School my 25th overall um I've hosted 207 speakers Coast to Coast
002eight different countries and our first guest this morning is the one that I've been waiting to introduce since I first started this thing so needless to say um uh you are in for a special treat okay now before I introduce her let me just tell you uh a couple particularly for the freshmen if you're new to the world of Chautauqua as a courtesy to Our Guest and these guests come from far and wide and they don't charge us so we want to make sure we treat them in that great pirate Pride that we're known for which means right now make sure everybody put all of your cell phones away no music no talking no sleeping and for the good students no homework and no reading okay now let me introduce you to Carrie Kennedy president
003of Robert F Kennedy human rights [Applause] for more than 30 years Miss Kennedy has devoted herself to the pursuit of equal justice the promotion and protection of basic rights and the preservation of the rule of law she has worked on a range of issues including children's rights child labor disappearances indigenous land rights judicial Independence freedom of expression ethnic violence impunity and the environment she has concentrated specifically on women's rights exposing injustices and educating audiences about women's issues particularly honor killings sexual slavery domestic violence workplace discrimination sexual assault abuse of prisoners and more she has led hundreds of Human Rights delegations she has written multi best-selling books she has won numerous Awards a couple of my favorites which includes president Lech valessa of Poland the special high honor for aiding the solidarity movement and that kind
004of led into my first introduction of Carrie Kennedy she also is the recipient of the humanitarian award from the Congress of Nobel Peace Prize laureates now very quickly what I will tell you is this 51 years ago the last major presidential candidate to visit Greensburg Indiana was her dad Robert Francis Kennedy he was on he thought Greensburg Indiana population 11 000 was worthy enough of his time and energy and everyone who was there that day will never forget that unique experience Robert F Kennedy is my favorite politician and I never had the honor to meet him 51 years later we have the great privilege to have his daughter on the stage who is carried on his incredible Legacy he won the Indiana primary the night he won the California primary he was sadly assassinated She
005carries on that Legacy through his human rights organization I first got to be introduced to what she does when I was fortunate enough to host a group of students to the Nobel Peace Laureate Summit nine years ago in Chicago because of her my students were exposed to people like the Dalai Lama President Carter Mikhail Gorbachev so many of these amazing people that she has made possible for people all over the world please give a nice round of applause for Miss Carey Kennedy [Applause] oh great thank you well I'm thank you so much Mr Pratt and thank you all for coming this morning I know you didn't have much of a choice but I'm still grateful um so I just thought I'd talk to you a little bit about my work in human rights does that
006sound good and how I became involved and um sort of some of the issues that we're facing today both in this country and around the world is that all right okay good so um I uh I as you heard from Mr Pratt I grew up in um in a family in Washington DC that was involved in politics but I you know people ask me why I became interested in human rights well I have seven brothers and three sisters and that makes you appreciate human rights at a very young age and um so I uh uh Mr Pat mentioned talked about my dad a little bit Bobby Kennedy who's ever heard of Bobby Kennedy okay good so so you have an idea about him um when people ask sort of what's the most important thing to
007remember about Bobby Kennedy let me ask you that because a bunch of you said you knew you knew something about him what do you think is important about him excuse me okay he was killed but but a lot of people are killed a lot of people die so it's not his death that is the reason you remember him it's his life so what did he do in his life that made his death so dramatic any ideas thoughts do I see a hand yeah okay he cared about everyone for who they were that's exactly right he had a sense of compassion um anyone else well you know when I'm going to start there because I think you really put your finger on what was most important about Bobby Kennedy it was his moral imagination it was
008his ability to understand issues from the other person's perspective so I'll give you an example of that do has anyone here heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis okay and you know what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis the we found out that the Russians who were our big enemy had put nuclear weapons into Cuba and that those nuclear weapons could at the push of a button hit Miami and hit and maybe hit Washington and hit a lot of other American cities and so um at that time my uncle John Kennedy you've heard of President Kennedy right yeah okay so president he was president in the white house and he was trying to figure out what to do my father was attorney general so they were brothers my dad was attorney general and they worked very
009very closely together and the Pentagon and the military industrial complex was saying to President Kennedy to my uncle jack you should go to war you should drop a bomb you should drop a nuclear bomb on Cuba and wipe them out that's the only way to keep our country safe and my uncle didn't want to go to war he didn't want to kill innocent people in Cuba and he didn't want innocent people to be killed here and he was also afraid that if we sent bombs there they would send the nuclear arms here so he um uh so he was in touch with with Khrushchev who was the premier of Russia of the Soviet Union and Khrushchev was giving all these speeches about going to war and but my father understood that Khrushchev even though he
010was giving those speeches he just like Uncle Jack had this the Pentagon and the U.S um military industrial complex pushing Jack to war also Khrushchev had his own military-industrial complex pushing him to war but that's not really what Khrushchev wanted so through back channels they opened up a line of communication and they understood that both of those leaders wanted peace and that is what saved us from nuclear war and so that is that's because of this moral imagination understanding what the other person wants and the what the other person needs and I'll tell you one more story about that my dad which happened here in Indiana Daddy was campaigning for president places like like this one and he flew into Indianapolis and when he was getting onto the plane he was told that Martin Luther
011King had been shot and when he arrived in Indianapolis he was told that Martin Luther King had died now at that time he was going to speak at a rally in the largest African-American neighborhood in Indianapolis and he got a call from the mayor of Indianapolis Richard Luger and Richard Luger said to him you who is white you cannot go to that part of this city it's too dangerous and if you go there I will not allow my police to go with you because I don't want my police to get hurt and my father said well Mr Mayor it might be too dangerous for you but I could go there tonight with my pregnant wife and my 10 children and spend the night on the street and nothing would happen to us because we've spent
012so much time in that neighborhood and with uh with with people who are struggling across this country and he went to that rally and there were about 3 000 people there in the park in Indianapolis and people in the front this is before cell phones so people in the front of the park hadn't heard the news they had been there for hours waiting for him but people in the back of the park had heard the news and they came with bicycle chains and Molotov cocktails and the end uh table legs and they were ready to Ryan and my father got up there in front of this crowd and he said I have some very bad news for you Martin Luther King has been killed and you can hear there's video there's film of it and
013you can hear that Rippling through the crowd and he said um he talked about its own brother who had also been killed shot and killed and he said I understand how that feels and I understand for those of you who are anchored um by the outrage of this act and turn towards hatred I I can tell you I can understand that feeling and then he um quoted the ancient Greeks and he said well we should strive to do is tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world and he urged people to go home and say a pray a prayer for the king family and a prayer for our country and that night 125 cities across the United States started to burn imagine that 125 cities in our country riots everywhere
014but Indianapolis remained peaceful and um Dover dealer where was under martial law for the next nine months so when people have you heard that the United States is so divided today and it's never been like this and it's so difficult right at this moment who's heard that you heard that yeah so it was a lot worse then a lot worse and um he the next day uh all the sort of the white fathers of cities across this country and they were all men and they were all white said there's nothing we owe to the black community now because they've burned down our cities and so we can abandon them and go off on with our lives and my father wanted to address that issue so he gave this speech in um in where was it
015Maybe Cleveland he gave the speech at the Cleveland City Club and I think we have a video of that can we can we turn that on it's called the Mindless Menace of violence as different colors but when you teach a man hate and to fear his brother when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but his enemies to be met not with cooperation but with Conquest to be subjugated and to be mastered this much is clear violence breeds violence repression reads retaliation and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls we must admit the vanity of our false distinctions and learn to find our own advancement search for the advancement of all [Music]
016yeah so um one time he uh he wrote me a letter and I was about three or four years old at the time and it was he wrote me a letter and he said dear Carrie today is a uh a historic day not just because you came to visit my office but because um two African-Americans were allowed to register at the University of Alabama over the objections of the governor Governor Wallace do you remember that story when Governor Wallace was standing in the schoolhouse door who knows that story about Governor Wallace yeah okay at that time African Americans were not allowed to go to public universities do you guys know that yeah is your hand so some of you yeah so um uh because of the the leadership of my dad and some and many
017many very brave civil rights activists um these two people were able to register and he said in this letter to me um I hope these events passed by the time you get your pretty little head to college love and kisses Daddy and so it was maybe uh about 16 or 17 years later that I got to college 16 years later I guess um and a lot happened in those intervening years so um about six weeks after he made that speech my father was also killed he was running per President as as you heard earlier um I had a really extraordinarily wonderful childhood but these events were crushing and so confusing to me and difficult that they made even that extraordinarily loving beautiful childhood full of Chaos so first was the death of my uncle then
018the death of Martin Luther King and then the death of my father that's when I was eight years old and then when I was about uh in fifth grade one of my best friends came to me whose family was at our house every weekend and told me that her um her father was beating up her mother and I didn't know what to do with that I never heard of that I didn't know if it was a secret I didn't know if I should tell my mom I didn't know how to think about this man who I loved who was at our house playing football with us every weekend I didn't know how to protect the mother and I didn't know what to say to this child who was my friend and then a few years
019later when I was in high school two of my best friends were raped and again I didn't know how to take care of them I didn't know how to tell a grown them we didn't tell any grown-ups it was Beyond imagination how painful that was for for two of my best best best closest friends and to have it all cloaked in secrecy and no chance of confronting those those not and then um one of my best friends was gay and he was so this is 1977. he was one of the first Americans who died of HIV AIDS and he was never out of the closet and he didn't come out of a closet because sexual minorities were so repressed in our country and so all of these crazy things were happening in my life and
020um I didn't know what to do with them and then I spent a summer working at Amnesty International do you guys know about amnesty raise your hand you know about the Amnesty International so NSD is an amazing organization which I really highly recommend that gets students involved in human rights and I spent that summer documenting abuses committed by U.S immigration officials against refugees from El Salvador and somebody handed me this incredible document called the universal Declaration of Human Rights and in that document are 27 articles that say all of us every human being has certain rights and and governments and people are not allowed to violate them and every crazy thing that had ever happened in my childhood could be found in one of those 27 articles and I understood that there was a way
021of holding governments responsible and getting them to hold violate or it's responsible for these horrible atrocities that were going on and that changed my life and that's why I became involved in human rights now a few years later I am I I would be like going to uh yeah I went to law school and then I started working on human rights and I would be you know going to a cocktail party or something and somebody would say what do you do and I would say I'm a human rights lawyer and they'd say oh that's so nice and then they'd walk across the room because nobody wanted to hear about it so tough I mean torture and death and destruction and all of these things violence against women so but for me that was my experience
022of it at all my experience was working with the bravest most courageous people on earth and so I wanted to tell their stories so that other people would be inspired by them so like one of them is about one of the people I I spent two and a half years traveling around the world interviewing the bravest people on Earth people who pays imprisonment and torture and death for basic rights most of us take for granted so there are people like Elie Wiesel do you know Elie Wiesel he was he was a survivor of the Holocaust and he said my dream for the future is that your children won't have my past and there were people like Archbishop tutu who is the great anti-apartheid leader in South Africa partner with Nelson Mandela and he said we
023don't have a God who says ah gotcha we have a God who lifts us up and dusts us off and tells us to try it again and to me those are sort of the bookends of human rights on the one hand trying to stop the atrocities and on the other hand having this faith in the capacity of the human Spirit to Triumph even under the worst of circumstances and one of the people I'd met well well writing what became a book is was a woman called digno Ochoa digna Ochoa was a a woman an indigenous person and a a nun and a lawyer and she was one of the leading human rights defenders in Mexico and I said to her how did you get involved in this work and she said that she came from
024a very small town near Veracruz Mexico and she said you know my father was a union organizer and we only had one Factory in our entire town and he was working in that factory and every so often he would organize the workers and they would go out on strike and then the owner of the factory instead of dealing with the workers would call in the police and the police would come and arrest all the union organizers and beat them up and throw them in jail and he said you know she said we never had a lawyer we could go to there was no lawyer in our town we couldn't afford one even if there was one so I want to be a lawyer for people like us and I said okay well tell me a
025typical case what's a typical human rights case for you and she said well a few weeks ago a woman called and said that or her husband had been disappeared so he had been picked up by the Federal Judicial police and kidnapped by them and they refused to tell her whether they he was alive or dead or if she had if they had him were holding him at all and I said so what'd you do she said well we did some research and we heard that he was being held at a military Hospital not far away from Mexico City so what'd you do I went to the military hospital but they wouldn't let me in but next well I just stood outside until there was a ship change and I walked past the guards and she
026said I walked up to the second floor and I looked around and there was one room with a nurse standing outside the door so I walked up to that room and the nurse said you can't go in there I can't even go in there the disappearicito is in there the Disappeared guy is in there so she said I knew where my client was and I but I also knew that inside the room was not only my client but two of the the uh the guards who had beaten him up so badly had to be hospitalized what'd you do she said I opened the door and with all the authority I could muster I said you get out of here right now this is my client and I'm his lawyer and I got five minutes alone
027and they left and so she she took those five minutes she explained who she was and she asked uh and he signed her up as a lawyer now she could go get oh habeas corpus decree from a judge to release him and she said she was walking back down the hall and around the corner came the two guards who had been obviously reprimanded for leaving their post and she said they approached me in a furious way and I said what'd you do she said I assume the attack position height and they said you're going to attack us and I said take it any way you please and they were so confused to see this woman and an indigenous person you know uh dignus stood in in in three inch heels she was about four foot
028six so um and and there's none assuming the attack position again they left and she said she was able to pull herself together and and run down to her car and um and and go back to her office and I said to her what is it at that moment when you were walking into the room or confronting those guards that gives you the courage to do what you did and you know I don't know what I expected her to say something about love or Jesus or faith but what she said really surprised me she said I'm just so angry I'm so angry when I think about what they've done to my family to my community to our country and I muster up all of that outrage and it gave me this just incredible sense of
029calm with which I can confront anyone and I think you know what digna is saying to us is we have to be angry at Injustice we have to be angry when we hear about the Border policy in this in the United States we have to be angry when we see these impeachment hearings we have to be angry about the way people are treated in our mass incarceration system we've got to be angry at Injustice but anger can be a source of Destruction so we don't want to use it to lash out aimlessly we want to Muster that anger and that outrage that every single one of us feels when we see Injustice or when we feel it ourselves and use it to create positive change and that's what human rights is all about it's creating
030positive change out of difficult circumstances and that's really what I've spent my life doing working with people in this country and around the world who are the bravest people and trying seeking that kind of positive change so um I'd love to ask you a few questions is that okay are you guys still awake everybody wave okay with to him except for you you guys veteran not perfect but getting there um okay so I talked about a few human rights Defenders who um can you tell me the names of Human Rights Defenders that that you admire anybody anyone one human rights Defender okay Hillary Clinton all right good anyone else anyone else human rights Defender oh come on you guys okay I'm gonna start calling on you randomly somebody doesn't wave their hand okay okay Lima
031from from Liberia did she come here oh isn't she great yeah she is so fantastic okay who else great human rights lawyer okay the grown-ups are winning come on you guys I want to hear we have one right here okay does Barack Obama count as an answer Barack Obama fantastic really wonderful okay who else Kennedy we have another one right here yeah Donald Trump Donald Trump Trump's got 20 20. oh all right who else anyone else okay now there's a there's a a difference of opinion on politics in America yeah who Franklin Graham okay you know it's interesting does do you want to say something up there yeah yeah Abe Lincoln Abraham Lincoln very good um yeah sister Helen Prejean fantastic wonderful woman on the death penalty yeah Maha Gandhi good Ashton Kutcher Ashton kutchner
032okay great okay so you know it's really interesting because I have asked that question to audiences around the United States and um and across the world and uh there are some standard people who who are usually mentioned who we're not mentioned today which I think is kind of interesting so do you want to know who some of them are like Martin Luther King that's that's one um Malala people talk about Malala um yeah so uh uh Nelson Mandela sometimes people talk about him but anyway you get the idea now here's here's the next question what is it that all these people have in common what's the qualities that they have in common thoughts about that what is it that draws them together yeah yeah they care about other people right they care about other people
033that's number one what else yeah they they push for what they believe in so they care about others they push for what they believe in what else they're involved in politics and in some way or in in trying to create change yeah although not necessarily running for office but but involved in the life of their country yeah go ahead equal rights for the entire for everyone in their in their area okay they're they're they're fighting for equal rights exactly they're willing who said that great really important they're willing to stand up against prevailing opinion public opinion prevailing opinion yeah they put others for themselves they put others before themselves good so um so one thing they have one quality that they have is courage right courage would you agree with that courage yeah so um
034so courage is made up of two things um the first thing is bravery so bravery is being willing to overcome a fear for something more important than what you're fearful of okay who here has been brave all right let me give you an example who here has ever had a test that you didn't study hard enough for okay all of you and all of you grown up stopped up not too okay now who here has actually taken that test even though you didn't study hard enough for it okay everybody so so what was that you had to be brave right you were fearful of something but you did it anyway because taking the test was more important than just saying you are sick or going home okay so that was great but courage it's not
035just bravery courage is bravery on behalf of other people on behalf of your community so who here has done something courageous oh good right here tell us stand up I said have you done something courageous yeah okay what that's okay that's good standing up was courageous in and of itself so that was a great thing oh well wait we still want to hear from you okay that is so great so you're working on behalf of others that's a very important humanitarian thing to do okay good yeah signing up for okay now that is really very very courageous thank you and thank you for your service appreciate can we give her a round of applause okay okay all righty okay who else something courageous guys okay so I think all of you if you think about
036okay who here has brothers and sisters all right who here has ever been blamed for something your brother or sister did yeah all of you okay so now who here has actually taken the blame for something your brother or sister did in order to protect your brother or sister there you go wasn't that courageous of you so this is something all human beings we all have inside us everybody is courageous all of you if you think about it at some point in your life you've done that and this is something all of us can muster on behalf of others so that's really what we do at RFK human rights and we um we work in schools all over the world and we give students and teachers lesson plans that are integrated into their school curriculum
037that help them understand all of these Concepts about empathy for other people about um creating a difference identifying things in your local community or in your school or in our country that you think need to be changed on a societal basis and then creating change on those things that's that's the that's one of the core things we do at RFK human rights and I'll tell you two other things we do and then maybe take any questions if there are any um so one of the one of the things we do is hold governments accountable for human rights abuses so um we have about 35 cases at any given time so I give you an example of a case okay so in Uganda a few years ago Uganda passed a law which made homosexuality punishable by
038life in prison without parole so we partnered with lawyers on the ground in Uganda and we sued them and we overturned that law so we do we take cases like that all over Latin America and Africa we have about 35 cases at any given time and we've never lost a case in the United States we work on mass incarceration immigration issues and Farm Workers issues and then we also hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses through the investors in those corporations so I'd be happy to talk to you more about it any of those things somebody okay somebody coughing everybody all right okay good good um so that's it that's the type of work we do I was supposed to speak here uh last spring and I I wasn't able to come at the last
039minute and I wasn't able to come because I was on the border with Venezuela um and we were we were investigating twin massacres that were perpetrated by the government of Venezuela against indigenous people so we have one more film shall I show that film to you of that and then we'll uh take any questions so Venezuela is a country that used to be about 15 years ago was the wealthiest country in Latin America and now it's the poorest and it's had a a series of of two basically dictators who have taken control of the country and um and this is one piece of it so you'll see thanks it was a massacre of innocent indigenous people from one of the world's most repressive regimes and you almost definitely didn't hear about it on February 22nd
040in 2019 at least 50 Soldiers with the Venezuelan military approached the community of kumarakapai on the Venezuela Brazil border where many indigenous people live without warning the soldiers soon opened fire on unarmed men and women [Music] Venezuelan Armed Forces violently repress any aid from entering the country and punish those who protest most ports of Entry have been blocked by the Venezuelan government Nicolas maduro's authoritarian regime has destroyed all Democratic institutions in Venezuela photopina in NGO in the country that works against arbitrary detentions and in favor of human rights has registered more than 15 000 politically motivated arrests since 2014. they're working alongside Robert F Kennedy human rights an organization that has also been working in the region and drawing attention to the abuses that have occurred in the crisis people there are suffering from malnutrition
041and lack of medical attention and what was once the richest country in South America nearly 4 million have fled to neighboring countries when members of the International Community announced that they would bring food and medical supplies to desperate communities Maduro sent the military to block the aid one of the communities near the border was kumarakapai a peaceful Village of ethnic permanent indigenous people [Music] on February 23rd more attacks were made against the population in the nearby town of Santa Elena a total of seven civilians were killed 57 were wounded and 62 were arrested a violent repression alongside the border of Brazil has forced over 900 indigenous people across this is the latest in a long history of government oppression neglect and brutality and on March 31st Kerry Kennedy and Robert F Kennedy human rights led
042a joint delegation with photo penal to the border between Brazil and Venezuela during the visit the delegation interview survivors of the kumara kapai and Santa Elena massacres [Music] community [Music] currently none of the soldiers are facing any criminal charges or disciplinary action kumarakapai Santa Elena and other communities along the border continue to be militarized in the survivors fear returning home help Robert F Kennedy human rights and photo penal hold the perpetrators accountable and stand for human rights in Venezuela support us and find more information at rfkhumanrights.org and photos.com [Applause] well thank you so um I think you get a sense of the type of work we do um any questions yeah what were some things you and your father like to do together when he had free time from his work well thank you um
043well you know uh we you he he was very active and had a great sense of humor and um and he liked to play a lot of sports so we went swimming and sailing and skiing and mountain climbing and rafting and if there was you know there was a free moment we were playing a game mostly but I remember um with all those brothers and sisters we had a lot of battles when when oh it's a kid and I remember one in particular I was with my brother Michael who was 18 months older than me and really fantastic athlete and we were playing World War II in our magnolia tree which is an amazing amazing type of tree for a tree house and for climbing and we had um we had two tree houses in
044this in this tree and he climbed up to the top one and he we had collected all these Magnolia pods which look exactly like hand grenades but feel like rocks when they hit your head and um so Michael is up in the top tree house and he was the Americans and I was the doomed Germans and I was supposed to take over the tree house and he was lobbing these um these Magnolia pods down on me and I took you know one hit too many I was probably about five years old six years old at the time and so I scrambled out of the tree house and I ran up to my father's office in our house and uh tears streaming down my face and my my bow Askew and I climbed into his arms
045and I said Michael beat me up and uh he said he sort of dried my tears and gave me a hug and said tell me what happened and I told him you know this terrible tale of Michael pummeling me uh and uh he said will you go get Michael and bring him here so I I am going to get Michael and Justice will be done and the Attorney General of the United States wants to see you right now in his office and um and in came Michael and then Daddy said now Michael you be quiet don't interrupt Carrie tell us everything that happened and I told in gory detail each one of those Magnolia pods hitting my head and then uh my father said okay now Carrie you don't interrupt and Michael you tell what
046happened and he had a different side of the story and I realized in that moment that neither I wasn't all right Michael wasn't all wrong and then he made us kiss and make up and go to our rooms and read for an hour and and um and I think that the the lessons he was giving us were the last Hans he wanted for our country which is that um that you need to get along with your brothers and sisters and um and you have to stop thinking of them as enemies and realizing that they are your brothers and sisters and that peace is not something just to be prayed for at night it's something that each of us has a responsibility to create in our lives every day and then you have to go and
047read um gotta learn something so uh yeah so that's one of my memories my dad thanks for that question others if you could go back in time what would you change huh I mean I think that if if I could change one thing in the in the United States I would stop slavery I would just make sure we'd never had any slavery because I think that um that is the most that's the one the most of this of issue that continues to haunt our country today and um I I would stop that if if I could stop uh if I could go back further in time I'd just stop violence against women altogether because I think if we never had violence against women that it would um uh it um dramatically change the way our
048our history was I think we've had fewer or no Wars um and I think that we would live in a more loving and peaceful Society altogether if people knew how to resolve their conflicts without turning to violence that starts usually in the home people beating up girls yeah anything else been working against these dangerous people how scared do you get even though they could easily like kill you with their power and their weapons um well that that's a fair question I you know I um I don't know I've never been to a war zone I have no interest in in getting harmed I have I had three daughters um I know what it's like to lose a parent I'm not going to put myself In Harm's Way so even though we are doing work which
049is confronting governments or um uh people who have been violent we I always do it in a context where we're going to be safe and I won't go someplace that's not safe so it's um it is it's often very dangerous for the people who we're meeting with in those countries um but it's not really unsafe for those of us who are doing our investigations and our in our work what's the most impactful thing that you saw on the border in Venezuela I mean it was so tough just meeting all that we were I was there for about four days and um we were talking to I'm uh a I think we interviewed 35 different survivors of that Massacre um and one after the other they it was an incredible situation because this is an indigenous
050Community where nobody has guns and so and they'd been working with the military bird decades and one of the things that was really impactful to me was um was one of the people who we met in the hospital whose legs had been blown off said you know the military came into our town and as soon as they got there in their Convoy our whole town flooded into their town is I mean it's a few hundred people right so it's not a big town it's just a about 200 families to I mean 200 people 250 people small and he said we all ran into the street to see the military Convoy and then they just they knew it was they know we don't have guns they know we have no way of Defending ourselves or any
051and they just started opening fire and you know you saw a little bit of the video of it was really remarkable about that those interviews with people is virtually everybody had a video or a cell phone pictures of the massacre happening because they had all brought their cell phones to take pictures of the military Convoy in their town so it was completely documented and Not only was it documented on film and then all of the survivors we were there within a month which never happens um so we got just endless testimonies completely consistent one of the guys who we interviewed had been in the same military unit for a year and he had just gotten released like he had just gotten released about six months early so we were showing him the pictures and he
052was naming every single person in that Convoy who was who had who had perpetrated that Massacre so you know we're gonna those guys are all gonna be held accountable and they're all going to go to jail it might not happen in the next six months or in the next year but eventually they're all going to be brought to trial for war crimes and we have all the evidence against them and we're going to hold them accountable um how do you handle criticism um really well no uh you know well I I try and um I I I try and listen carefully and and hear it when uh when people are critical but it doesn't I don't hang around it doesn't I don't hold on to it very long um I'll tell you a story about
053this that's that was meaningful to me which is there's um there are these two monks an old Monk and a young Monk and they're walking down the street and a carriage pulls up and uh it's it's kind of it would rain the day before and there are all these puddles in the street and the carriage pulls up and it's too far from the curb and there's a puddle there and there's a woman gets out of the carriage and so the older monk goes and takes his cape and he puts it on top of the puddle and the woman gets out of takes his hand gets out of the carriage steps on the on the cape steps on the sidewalk and walks away she never looks at him she never says thank you nothing and the
054old mountain pokes pulls picks up his cape and sort of you know drains the water out of it and then puts it on his shoulders and starts walking down the street and the younger Monk turns to him as they're walking along out of town and says I cannot believe that that woman was outrageous this is the problem with Society people don't care about each other it's the rich against the poor this is and you're a person of God and he she doesn't even acknowledge you and he's going on and on and on and on and on and about an hour later the older monk turns to the younger Monk and says you know what the difference between you and me is and the young monk says why and the old man says I put that
055woman down an hour ago and you're still carrying her and I think you know that didn't happen has that ever happened to you when somebody says something critical and it's just sitting in your mind and you're thinking about it a lot like you're trying to get to sleep or you're trying to study and you just keep coming back to the outrageous thing that that person did to you or said to you does that ever happened yeah it's happened to all of us so that um so I I keep that story in mind to to try and move that along okay that's kind of that's a lot um actually could we do something before we leave is that okay but but be fast okay so well um with our speak truth power human rights education program
056we ask students to uh to get engaged with some of our human rights Defenders so a lot of our human rights to vendors are women and do you know that 70 of the Farmers on Earth are women do you know that how about that 70 and so in a lot of the countries on Earth those women are in places where they only have rain for about eight weeks a year and when they don't have rain when it's a drought season when it's the dry season the women have to work for walk further and further and further to get water to drink and to um feed their families and to feed their crops so they pray for rain so what I would like to do is a call for rain in solidarity with all those women
057is that okay okay so it's going to take some practice so I'd like you to practice with me now the first thing we're going to do is this okay you guys are good at that you know it means be quiet but you have to keep being quiet once we start now the second thing is this the rain is going to start from this side of the fields and it's going to move across the plane like this now in order for this to work you have to have to have to do your part it's like singing around don't start singing somebody else's part you got to keep doing what you're supposed to do okay you guys got that don't forget that's the thing everybody forgets okay it's going to start here uh we're going to have
058three parts so it's going to start here and then we're going to move into here and we're going to move into there okay are you ready everybody stand up thank you okay here we go foreign okay Greensburg High School let's give it up Carrie Kennedy [Applause] okay we are down to just five minutes okay so we're going to maximize this so for all of our wonderful Community people I have Alexi in have a seat real quick Alexi I have her in the back and she is going to show you how to get to the choir room where Carrie will be there in just a few minutes we have a handful of minutes not much but if you want to come up to the stage and get your picture with to carry we'll do the best
059we can okay line up over here okay have your cameras ready camera is ready rapid fire yes yes quickly guys quickly yep come on up very good make sure your phones are ready make make sure your phones are ready okay exit over here guys bones out and ready guys phone's out and ready Go's gonna ring in a minute foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] it's the inclusion [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music]
060[Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] students here that have been participating in this program and we're very proud of what they have done and we are going to get a little acknowledgment here today and and Mr Lonzo and several other guests are going to tie it all together for you so without further Ado I'm going to introduce Mr Lee Lonzo thank you grant real privilege for me to be here today I am the director of something we call Champions together it's a program seven years ago is a partnership between the Indiana High School Athletic Association and Special Olympics Indiana how many of you out there are athletes right now okay great well glad to see all of you
061because this is sponsored by the ihsa but to all the rest of you are thinking oh then this doesn't apply to me you're wrong because we are here to get the entire School involved and that means anybody that has an open heart and an open mind see we got a group of kids here at Greensburg High School who've done some good things but it's time to take it to the next level last year was your first year of involvement and they did some really good things but there's all sorts of room for improvement so I'm here today not only to tell you about Champions together but also make a challenge to you to join what we call the inclusion Revolution it's the inclusion Revolution With Champions together is a partnership between the ihsaa and Special
062Olympics Indiana this is servant leadership changing lives to promote and create a culture of inclusion in schools through Unified sports there are four pillars of Champions together they are inclusive student leadership whole school engagement Unified sports and fundraising Champions together began officially December 17 2012 with a challenge from ihsaa commissioner Bobby Cox to 18 student leaders on the sac the student advisory committee so I challenged him I said I want you to think about finding some kind of group to support on an ongoing basis and we start building a legacy of leadership and and trying to teach kids about servant leadership about going back into your community and giving back and they picked Special Olympics it all starts with inclusive student leadership this is not just student leadership it's inclusive student leadership Champions together doesn't
063want to just work for students with special needs Champions together thrives to work with them honestly the funnest thing has been the relationships it's not even I I didn't join this team specifically to run you know I'm in the 4x1 relay and that's that's right that's right I I didn't do it just to you know do track I did it to build relationships and to get to know these absolutely beautiful people the second pillar is whole school engagement you know activities that promote awareness inclusion anti-bullying and changing your vocabulary to never ever use the r word whole school engagement includes inviting your students to sign the banners hanging in the lunchroom supporting your Unified sports teams like track and basketball by becoming fans in the stands encouraging the student body to help out at a
064Special Olympics event or engaging the whole school population with a school assembly pillar number three is Unified sports where student leaders and athletes of all abilities can get involved volunteer and demonstrate your student leadership that can and will change lives getting involved in volunteering through Unified sports can be applied to virtually any sport in your school football softball swimming baseball track there are so many ways to use these Sports and your talents and time and volunteerism to get the word out about Special Olympics and Unified sports like having a clinic a recreational game or even a competitive event like unified track the fourth pillar of Champions together is fundraising financial support is a Cornerstone of any initiative and With Champions together the fundraising opportunities are year round and entertaining fun events like track or treat
065zombie run playing pool and polar plunge are just the tip of the iceberg you can help your school secure the resources and funding to support Special Olympics Indiana and promote the inclusion Revolution in just a short amount of time with amazing people and student leaders working side by side Champions together has blossomed from an idea to a life-changing experience with the four pillars of Champions together inclusive student leadership whole school engagement Unified sports and fundraising the the future is very bright for Champions together servant leadership changing lives 18 students that started this movement now I'd like to welcome to the stage the commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association and my dear friend Mr Bobby Cox please give him a hand good morning my friend good morning how are you I'm great how about
066yourself just fine good I thought maybe since we've got so many athletes out there that we ought to start just by you introducing yourself a little bit tell them a little bit about your background where you're from where you went to school and maybe some of the things you did before you went to work for the ihsa well I was a student athlete just like many of you I went to Carmel High School in the early 70s that's a long time ago I'm older than your parents graduated from Carmel High School went to Butler University I participated in track and cross country I know that's hard to imagine today with this physique but back in the day I was a runner um my school corporation hired me as a teacher and a coach in 1979
067and I taught and coached for 11 years and taught physical education health and wellness driver education and I coached cross-country track and basketball in 1990 I became an athletic administrator worked at a junior high for seven years as an administrator and then went to Carmel High School as the athletic director for three years in 2000 I became an assistant commissioner at the ihsa and in 2011 became the commissioner and and here we are in 2019 and almost 2020 so I'm in my 41st year of education and have enjoyed every minute of it dang year old why don't you tell these folks what the ihsa is who I exists what it does well The Story Goes Like This back in the day about 19 or so there was a a baseball game being played by two
068high schools down in southern Indiana and the older brother of former commissioner Phil Eskew was the coach at this or he was on the team of this school that was going to go play baseball and when the coach got off the bus he looked at the battery of the other schools baseball team now how many of you guys know what the battery is raise your hand anybody know what that means it's a pitcher and a catcher so they get off the bus and they look at the picture and they catch her from the opposing high school team and it's the pitcher and the catcher from the Louisville Colonel Semi-Pro baseball team playing for a high school well the coach got so upset that he took the uniform away from the school shortstop and he put
069the uniform on and he played in the baseball game too well that can't happen so a group of principals got together and said you know we've got to stop this we can't have these kinds of things occurring in high school sports these are supposed to be games for students games for kids and so the association was formed to create some structure by which Greensburg high school and all the other 411 schools can participate together in interscholastic athletics and so from those meager Beginnings we now have advanced to the year 2019 we're in our 118th year of existence and we still administer High School sports in the state of Indiana so you started off as an assistant commissioner but now you are the commissioner why don't you tell them a little bit about what the commissioner's
070responsibilities are well I've always said that the assistant commissioner's jobs in our office are the best jobs and I had one of those jobs for almost 11 years and what they do is they administer the various Sports we have 22 sports 10 for boys 10 for girls and two co-ed Sports Unified sports that you just heard about those assistant Commissioners administer those Sports each of that we have five assistants each of them have sport responsibilities they oversee the conduct of that entire tournament Series in the regular season in each of their assigned Sports they also have duties that are non-sport related that they contribute to the association my position is to oversee all of that is to be a resource to our assistant Commissioners be a resource to our membership just like Greensburg high school
071and the other member schools I spend a lot of time out of the out of the building events like this speaking engagements supporting the association representing the association and ensuring that we have opportunities for young people to play Bobby I've heard you speak often about education-based sports and the importance of education-based sports why don't you explain to them what that exactly means and why it's so important to you well education-based Athletics is what happens in schools it's a unique period of time in the state of Indiana where a young person goes through their Scholastic career and they have an opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities specifically interscholastic Sports it is different than every other stanchion of Athletics in this country it's different than youth sports it's different than Collegiate Sports it's certainly different than professional
072sports or Recreational Sports it's a very unique window in this school grades 9 through 12 where you can represent your school and your community when you put on the Greensburg uniform it's got the name of your community on it that's special you get to represent your school and community that doesn't happen anywhere else you go to college you representing a university you may live in that Community you may not most of you won't you'll go away somewhere else but when you're here this is where you live this is where you represent and this is the opportunity for you to represent your community in your school it's part of your Scholastic experience a lot of people like to call it extracurricular activity I like to call it curricular it's part of school it's what you learn
073you learn lessons in sports and extracurricular activities whether you are a member of the band or the orchestra or the choir or the debate team or the chess club or whatever you do you learn lessons in those activities you will not learn in the traditional classroom things such as loyalty grit determination teamwork sacrifice all the things that are going to help you when you move on away from Greensburg High School to whatever you decide to do our job is to use education-based Athletics to prepare you for whatever you choose to do that might be a four-year Institution that might be a two-year college that might be a junior college that might be to go into the military to protect the freedoms we have to allow us to have this presentation today to allow us to
074have sports to allow us to have the freedom that we do you may choose to do that our jobs to prepare you you may choose to protect our community in law enforcement or fire protection or some other field but our job today and every day is to prepare you for those opportunities We Believe that education-based Athletics is maybe the best tool to prepare you for that next step and so that's why I'm so passionate about what we do in our schools because we're trying to prepare a better generation of citizens than we did the generation before that should always be our goal we all need to get better every day and that's what we try to do with our Sports programs falling rattle on that line you're talking about values and making all your athletes
075better people the video talked about a challenge that you made to the ihsa student advisory committee about servant leadership and I've heard you talk about this aha moment you had about that so why don't you tell them about your aha moment and then why you issued that challenge to him well I'm a member of the downtown Kiwanis Club in Indianapolis and I like to call myself a backsliding kawanian and what that means is I don't go to all the meetings it's kind of like going to church I don't go to all the church I don't go to service every Sunday but when I go I pay attention so I'm sitting in the Kiwanis meeting one day and we have the necology service the necrology report anybody know what that means raise your hand if you
076know what the necology report is you know what that is what is it it's all the dead people so I'm at the Kiwanis meeting downtown and we have the neurology report and it goes on for about 15 minutes Susie died Billy died Joe died Mike died and it was sad and then we get into the program we go a little bit more and then the membership chair stands up he's going to give his membership report it lasted 15 seconds one person well I'm not very smart I'm one of those guys that made the top half of the class possible but I'm driving back to the office and north side of Indianapolis and I'm doing a little math in my head I'm thinking we had four people die and we've gained one member pretty soon this
077service Club is going to die and you know what whose fault that is that's our fault that's adult's fault we are not teaching servant leadership to our young people we're not giving them a reason to give back to their Community why do you have service clubs why are there kuanians in this town why are there Lions why are those people what did they do well they make your community better you've been to the fish fry you've been to the Pumpkin Show you've been to those things well Community people do that what we're trying to do is issue a challenge to you I would issue that same challenge to you what do you give back to your community I told the athletes you heard it on the video I told these athletes I said you get
078uniforms coaching Transportation sometimes they feed you you've got great facilities look at the facility you have in this school and what are you giving back anything you just expect that to happen no people before you your parents your uncles and aunts your grandparents they have given back to this community it's about time for you it's going to be time for you someday to come back to Greensburg give to your community make your community the best community it can be and that's the challenge I issued our student advisory committee I said I don't really care what you do that's up to you but I want it to be an all 92 counties in the state of Indiana every County can participate Decatur County can participate Hamilton County can participate every County can participate and subsequently the
079Champions together partnership evolved from our work with Special Olympics Indiana you've got to be real proud of the student advisory committee and all that they've done in the past all they're doing now I'd like to show everybody a picture of our current student advisory committee and pick up on what they have to say [Music] leadership inclusion service opportunity the ihsaa student advisory committee promotes these values through their work and for the 160 000 student athletes who participate in ihsa sports the student advisory committee members represent their schools their teams and their communities in providing invoice to the ihsa executive board the student advisor committee is made up of nine Junior and nine senior student athletes who communicate the values of the ihsaa to Indiana high school athletes student advisory committee members conduct student meetings work
080ihsa State Championship events organize the student leadership conference and collaborate with Special Olympics Indiana in 2012 the ihsaa through Sac partnered with Special Olympics Indiana to create Champions together this partnership led to the addition of unified track and unified flag football as ihsaa sanctioned Sports now at 22 sports the ihsa focuses on creating an atmosphere that allows member schools and their student athletes to spread the word about the servant leadership Movement we need your talent we need your commitment we need you if you value leadership inclusion service and opportunity the student advisory committee can be for you you've proven yourself on the field now let's see what you can do in the community talk to your principal about becoming a member leaders inclusive and committed to equality we have different passions but one mission separately
081we are competitors but together [Music] so that's the Challenge from the commissioner That's The Challenge from the student advisory committee and that's the Challenge from me to get more involved in what you're already doing but we want to celebrate what has been done and I'm going to show you this slide right here and that is a banner program that the student advisory came up with to reward schools that do a great job in the four areas that they talked about being the pillars of Champions together I'm happy to report the Greensburg High School actually earned their banner last year but you see us a one year at a time award it's not one and done we want this to become a part of the culture of Greensburg high school that's why our challenge is for
082you to get involved to keep this going but they did win their first one last year you can see this is the group of students or group of schools who did win it there are 94 schools up there all of whom will were honored at the luncheon last year that was attended by more than 400 people and we're hoping there's going to be a delegation from Greensburg again this year and there's the date we're going to be doing it on at this time I'd like to bring out to the stage the director of unified Champion schools for Special Olympics Indiana and your very own Champions together Club please give them a hand this is my cash director of unified Champion schools and he and Bobby at this point are going to present this to your
083Champions together club and issue them and you the challenge to make sure you get involved with it again this year everybody get in there close so we can get a picture okay all right don't fall off the stage boy oh yeah we're gonna get you guys in the background let's give these guys a great hand congratulations to the Champions together from Greensburg High School [Applause] before we move on with the agenda I'd like to just take note of the activities that we've been participating here specifically at Greensburg High School our unified Track event happens during the countywide track meet and that's how that was our initial activity and I will say from a personal standpoint I have never been so emotionally moved in participating in an athletic event that I was at our initial unified
084Track event you see pure joy on the faces of kids and the the joy of inclusion of everyone is something very powerful so as you listen this presentation it is very moving is very gratifying as a human being just to spread the love and include everyone in what we do so thank you Mr Lonzo thank you and Grant while you're out here I'm going to issue you a challenge there's 94 high schools that take it beyond that one event and they actually have a team in an ihsa sport that's my challenge to you and the Pirates is to get involved in that tournament this year and drag north and south along let's get three more schools involved okay all right great great challenge well Bobby uh let's talk briefly about what Unified sports are and
085their role in the ihsa but I often refer to this phrase right here it's all about can I play two because we've gone through periods we know where girls for example could not play now we've got Title IX but now you brought something new to the ihsa with the inclusion Revolution why don't you talk about why that happened well I've always had I guess I would call it a soft spot in my heart for the opportunity for every young person to have an opportunity to participate in school you learn that when you get cut how many of you have been cut from a team raise your hand doesn't feel very good does it you want to be a part of the team you try out for the team and you don't make it well there's
086always been a group of young people in our schools particularly in our Public Schools that have been excluded from the opportunity to represent their school they're the students that are in that last classroom on the right hand side of the hallway that the students that sit at the last table in the lunchroom they're the students that ride the short bus we all know who those students are and they've never had an opportunity to represent their school so several years ago Lee and I went to Arizona to a conference and we learned about Unified sports I didn't know anything about it I didn't have a clue what that meant but when we left that conference I told Lee on the plane ride home we're going to do this because this is an opportunity for the ihsa
087and Special Olympics to now include those students that never get the chance to represent their school those students love their school just like all of us they just never had the chance so that was the reason why Unified sports was incorporated into the Champions together program it's an opportunity for students with and without intellectual disabilities to participate together in track and field you've got a partner you run the 100 meter dash one athlete runs in one race another one runs in another race we score it together we total up the team score we figure out who the team champion is unified flag football you got five people on a side three of them are student athletes two of them are partner athletes and they participate on a 60 by 25 football field regardless of the
088structure of the rules and how it works it's the opportunity it's the chance to represent your school to wear the Jersey to where the name of the community on your on your chest that's what this is about and so this is why I'm so passionate about how this program has evolved and where it's going and what Unified sports is all about Bobby this has not only changed the culture of buildings it's changed lives at this time I'd like to bring my cash back out here to introduce two students whose lives have been changed by this Mike thank you Lee thank you we appreciate you being here today there's two students that I would like to introduce who have a special place one in my heart but also are huge advocates for Special Olympics and the
089Champions together movement Liam is a senior at Center Grove High School and Elizabeth is a junior at Carmel High School these two are one of 12 students around the country that represent the U.S youth ambassadors so they're unified pairs so I would like to bring out Liam price and Elizabeth price welcome hi everyone I'm Liam price I have autism I also have Tourette's and I have an enormous level and of anxiety when my anxiety gets triggered certain things automatically happen to me that I can't control quirky behaviors inappropriate laughter squeaky noises and ticks that take over and my focus is crushed it really doesn't matter if it's an inconvenient time for it to happen it can be something as little as a light touch against my skin a word that triggers a fearful image or
090just too many sounds in one space that I can no longer filter out when I lose my focus my mind can become paralyzed by a Non-Stop Loop of obsessive compulsive behaviors and ticks that take over this leads me down a deep hole that I sometimes cannot climb out of without somebody's help sometimes I need a forced shutdown from everything and everyone in hopes that I could reset reboot my brain again it's embarrassing and I hate what it makes me feel about myself and what I think others think about me too when I was younger kids at school would enjoy a convocation or special activity well I would usually end up needing a sensory break and being away from all of them because the extra input was to just too much to sort out there have
091been times in my life when I could not make my brain stay engaged at all in school much less any kind of social Gathering no less but one of those times was when I was in fifth grade which resulted with me electing to being homeschooled this Arrangement did help me better focus on learning but now I had no network of friends a lot of time alone lousy eating habits and also lousy exercise habits it was a choice of lifestyle that eventually left me very overweight and very lonely but at a certain point in time my parents started taking me to Special Olympics for swimming and my Outlook began to change over time I expanded my activities to include basketball flag football and even ballroom dancing eventually I began feeling like I was ready to go
092back to public school so I returned it was my freshman year At first I felt like a little fish in a massive pond but I was dealing with it for the most part one day out of the blue everything changed a staff member saw me running in PE class and he invited me to join a new new unified track team that he was going to start coaching at first I was stunned how was I going to contribute anything in a team sport I wasn't a high school athlete heck I've never been any kind of athlete in school before but here was the opportunity for me to not only compete but to also represent my school unified track and field it's a real ihssa sport we had regular season meets sectionals and you get a trophy
093for winning state that is the same as all the other ihsaa state champions coach said I would also have peers helping me along the way this helped me develop confidence in my athletic abilities and over time my social skills that year our team made it to the unified track and field State finals at Indiana University we did well as a team I finished Sixth and shot put and third in the 100 meter dash the opportunity to compete on my high school unified track and field team has changed my life you fast forward to today I have many good friends who seek me out and include me in activities in and outside of school I've become much healthier however in Varsity letters from my school I've built on the confidence I gained from my peers to
094push forward making bigger goals for myself Beyond Sports and competition I now serve proudly as a manager for our boys basketball team I am bodybuilding I have served as a state Congressional page I serve as an officer in my best buddies chapter and I just was voted homecoming king of my senior class and attended my first school dance not to mention I am now giving speeches like this to school assemblies around Indiana to promote unified Champion schools programs and I'm very excited that I have been accepted to study math and Criminal Justice at the University of Indianapolis starting next fall I've been invited as an as a walk-on athlete to the UND swim and Diving team I was just awarded the U.S senator Richard G Luger sports scholarship for the academic recognition through it all
095I've grown myself grown up by putting myself out there making goals and working to achieve my goals and knowing that win or lose my effort counts and it makes me a stronger happier and better person and the unified Champion schools program whose efforts are creating a more inclusive School environment has played a significant role in motivating me to create a new outlook for my future and I would encourage each and every one of you to consider it for the possible life-altering path it can provide each of Youth through servant leadership I felt that having a unified Champion school where I live in this great state of Indiana has created inclusive Sports and Leadership opportunities that have now helped me to focus more on the things that are possible in my life I know that I
096have a disability but I've learned to not let my disability Define me or my limitations my unified partners my friends have shown me through their expressions and acceptance inclusion friendship and sportsmanship that this idea that I can make myself a valued asset to any team and over time that idea has brought itself into my mindset reminding me that I too have the ability to make an impactful contribution I hope that all of you will decide that Greensburg High School and for that matter every High School in Decatur County and the state of Indiana should start Unified sports and work towards becoming a unified champions School Banner winner thank you [Applause] hi everyone my name is Elizabeth and I'm a junior at Carmel High School I've been involved in Special Olympics and champions together for two
097years now and has genuinely changed my life before I started participating in Unified sports and champions together I felt lost and confused I couldn't find who my people were in a school of over 5 000 students I met tons of people but none of them seemed to be my people I then heard about unified track and field the winner of my freshman year and quite honestly I only applied so I didn't have to take Jim my sophomore year I then met an athlete named Kyle who changed everything for me when we first met people pointed out our differences but in reality I've never met someone who's so similar to me we both love country music spending time with family and friends going to concerts and of course Indy 500 Unified sports helped me find my
098people but more importantly I had found my best friend we do normal things best friends would do we'll go get food together talk about life and drive around singing country music at the top of our lungs he's also taught me a lot about life these past two years he taught me how to always find good and bad situations how to be nicer and how to better love and appreciate the people I have in my life he's also shown me that empowering those with and without intellectual disabilities is my passion in life after track season ended my freshman year I was nominated to be a part of my school's Champions together committee I joined and felt instantly more in love with Unified sports I joined all the Unified sports my school had to offer from unified
099flag football Bocce bowling and track I joined everything I love being able to do something with my friends and classmates with intellectual disabilities the joy of seeing others succeed is overwhelming and a feeling I will never forget I continue to participate in Unified sports for many reasons but my why is simple I want people of all abilities to feel that feel like their voices are being heard and that they add value to a team since joining Unified sports my life has taken many crazy turns last March on my school's fundraiser for Mr Carmel I met Jeff Muller the CEO of Special Olympics Indiana I told him how much I loved Unified sports and champions together and how I wish I could be more involved this conversation led to me becoming an internet Special Olympics Indiana
100over the summer with this internship I got to attend Summer Games in Terre Haute play on the national Federation of high school's unified experience in Plainfield and lastly Liam and I were paired together to be nominated and chosen to be U.S youth ambassadors for Special Olympics North America Liam and I are two of 12 high schoolers chosen from across across the country in this position we represent the Great Lakes region advocating for Special Olympics on a national level through social media and through telling our story in the story of our peers our goal is to help promote equality and respect for those with intellectual disabilities all across the U.S in October Liam and I traveled to Washington DC to meet the other youth ambassadors chosen we did a few days of leadership training activities and
101on the last few days we got to participate in Special Olympics North America's Generation unified event we spoke on a panel about how unified Champion schools has changed our lives in conclusion I hope you realize how Unified sports are so much more than just a sport Unified sports has puts a spotlight on a population of your school that might not have had it before and always remember that anyone can Champion a movement but it takes one person to step up one person to lead and one person to realize that we should be celebrating our differences and people of all abilities the movement to make this world a more inclusive place starts with you thank you [Applause] great job guys I um do you guys realize how hard that is talking the entire Auditorium full of
102people I I'm sure those of you who've ever had to give like a one-minute speech in front of a class no that was hard so let's give Liam and Elizabeth one last hand thank you Bobby we got uh two three minutes left I gotta think to myself that makes you really proud to hear how much impact you and the ihsa have had on those two and you know it's extended so you get the last crack here of the last word um what has it meant to you and the I just say that this will be part of your legacy that you brought Unified sports well I think the biggest thing for me is that it involves students um I think as adults we have a a duty to instruct and to lead young people in
103our schools this was an opportunity for us to provide an opportunity for students to lead and for us to watch it evolve and to watch it grow and to watch schools engage and ramp up their efforts has been extremely rewarding to me personally it's been rewarding to the association but it's really about people it's really about all of us and what we can do individually and collectively to build a better society and I think because of what we've been able to do in these last seven plus years we've been able to make Indiana a better state we've been able to make our high schools better environments and we've been able to include individuals in a in a an effort to demonstrate that while we are different we're a lot alike you saw that today so
104on behalf of the Indiana High School Athletic Association and Special Olympics thank you for what you do in your community and we challenge you to do more because we do want to make a better community and a better State thank you Lee Mike Liam Elizabeth come on back out here I want to thank Bobby my good friend I want to thank you for the honor of being the director of Champions together for these seven years on behalf of all five of us we want to thank you for the opportunity to be here and challenge you let's get that track event into a track team and let's win that Banner again thank you very much Greensburg High School we are going to transition to the next speaker got to set up a little audio and visual
105stuff and that will happen very quickly bear with us one last note our next speaker may go past the Bell that we're used to at 11 13 for lunch and we're going to go right on through it and we'll adjust the schedule as necessary once we get done with our next speaker just stand by for just a minute [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] and I do know that if you're attending the next Chautauqua guest there is a lunch and all of you are going to a lunch so just bear with us we'll we'll work it out it'll all be okay our next speaker here this
106morning is senior officer specialist Jim Albright he was the last prison guard to leave the island of Alcatraz and this is a very unique location the pictures here on your screen and Mr Albright is going to describe that to you and it's quite a unique and authentic experience so we're very fortunate to have him please welcome to the stage Mr Jim Albright thank you can you hear me okay as your principal said my name is Jim Albright this is my wife Kathy and uh I went to Alcatraz when I was 24 years old in 1959. in fact what you see me wearing right now was my original 1959 issue and and you've probably already noticed if you hang them in the closet for over 50 years they do shrink okay this is a a photo
107of Alcatraz and there's supposed to be a pointer on here and I can't see it oh there it comes okay in in the lower foreground you can see a barge there and that's how we got our water it held a million point three gallons of water and they would take it over to Fort Mason that's where we docked at the time and they would fill that up it took 24 hours to fill it then they would bring it over and tie it up there and they would had a diesel pumps on the dock and they would pump it up to the water tower in underground tanks up by the PowerHouse and it took 24 hours to Pump It Out and you could hear that over about half of the island the big building right behind
108it that is where we live when we first moved there and we would hear that thing pumped for 24 hours and while I'm talking about hearing things there was two fog horns on the island one on each end and when it got real foggy they went off every minute but they alternated so that meant every 30 seconds one or the other was going off and you could hear them all over the bay in the very first night that we moved over there Kathy and myself and our 19 month old son it was very foggy and they were working I never heard them both of them was up all night there on the left is what we called our parade ground and that was when the military had it they used to do the close order
109drill out there in in the background is a b and c building which were apartments and then in on the far left was the duplex for the associate Warden and the captain in the foreground was four lieutenants cottages and uh way to the far left you can see the little white Lighthouse or a fog horn there and then right in the middle of that was what we called our gymnasium we had a handball court in there and we used to lift weights in there and had a basketball court on one side and a sandbox on the other side way up top you can see the lighthouse and there was three Apartments built around that Lighthouse for the Coast Guard so we had coast guard on the on the island 24 or 24 hours a day
110365 days of the year there was three families that lived there to run the lighthouse and in the foreground where she's at now that was the wardens house and that was like a 28 room house that had been the common Dodd's house when the military had the island and right behind it was the Doctor's house and then the long big building was a the cell house and it had a Block B Block C block and d block in there at one time it was the biggest freestanding building in the United States um and way in the back behind that you can see the the water tower and then it goes back to the shops and the industries and and the buildings like that and there's where she's at now that was our social hall and
111that Social Hall had a place upstairs for dinners dances stage plays had a kitchen in it for for cooking dinners downstairs it had a a snack bar a library ping pong pool and two-lane bowling alley so we had things to do for the staff as you can see there well there there was the island in 1959 that was the first time that we saw it it was like that and we had never been any farther west than Denver and we was we was on the way out and we was going across the old Oakland Bay Bridge now they've got a new one there and you can look out and you could see the island out there in the water and like I say that day there was a big heavy circle of fog around it
112heavier than it is in this photo and we had everything we owned in our car we'd sold our house and our furniture and everything in Denver to move out there and it's ways of going across the bridge and seeing that Island out there with that fog I looked at Kathy and I looked at our baby our 19 month old son and I said what the hell did I do after we got there and got her feet on the ground we learned to enjoy it we didn't want to leave when it was time to leave the island there's there's a boat coming you can see the Wake behind it he just pulling up to bring people to the island now I told you in the other picture about a b and c buildings and lieutenants Cottages
113in a duplex there on the left in the island you can see that's all gone every bit of it part of it the Indians when they lived on it they they wanted to live in their teepees up by the lighthouse so they'd go in the buildings and they'd tear anything that would burn out of it and uh you light a fire in front of their teepees and then the government come in and they said there was asbestos in them buildings so they bulldozed them down the Indians had a party one night and invited anybody in San Francisco that wanted to come over well they had a lot of under undesirables and Hell's Angels and people like that and that night there was four or five buildings burnt in the Doctor's house the warden's house the
114Social Hall were some of them that burnt that night yeah okay this was my original uniform and my original ID card they've got a traveling Alcatraz Museum in my ID card is in there in the key of the main gates in there my service pins a bunch of knickknacks and everything and it the last that I knew it was at San Francisco in the Hilton Hotel out there yeah this is a warning sign it tells you to stay off so many yards off the island that this is government property and back in those days if a boat come inside the buoys inside the 200 yard marker you could fire a shot across their bow I'd hate to try that today but at that time it was okay for us to do okay these These are
115boats we had while we were there the one on the left was the warden Johnston and that was the boat when we started there in it was not very see worthy we were going across one time in rough water and when you hit the rough water it kind of went through it rather than floating on it and we hit it one time and you can see a little spot up there a red spot on the top and that was a Lifeboat and it actually works that Lifeboat off the top of the boat that took us over there on the on the right you can see people getting ready to get off the boat that was a floating dock that's why that ramp had wheels on it and we had two of those boats that we
116got in the last couple years I was there and they had been generals votes and they took them and reworked them and used them and they kept one in use and the other need work on and keep it spruced up and then it'd run for so many months then they'd change them and work on the other one um that no that floating dock as you come down in in Fort Mason you come to the dock you had to go down steps and then they had part of the steps to run a hinge and they floated up and down with the dock in when she had our first girl we brought her home when she was less from the hospital and she was less than four to eight hours old and it was real rough and
117that dock was floating and of course them stairs are going up and down and so myself and the boat operator we took the baby and we took her and handed her to a lady that was on the boat and she held her while we went back and we got on both sides of Kathy and almost carried her down and put her on the boat and so from then on if it was rough she didn't want to go to town she wanted to stay and go on a nice day this is on the island that's the dock Tower and that doc Tower is built right beside where we docked our boat where he could watch the boat when the boat come in it was locked up way in the foreground where you can't see there was
118a big white stripe on the dock in as the boat got ready to leave at 10 minutes of he'd sound his whistle and he'd get clearance from the control center before he could leave then they would the tower would lower a key and he'd unlock the boat and then put the key on the rope and they'd pull it back up in the tower and then they would unlock the gate from the apartment buildings and let the people go down to Dock and get on the boat the five inmates would stand on that line and the officer in the tower would stand out with the carbine trained on those inmates so if they left the line they're going to get shot and then once the boat was two three hundred yards away from the island they'd
119go back to work and same thing when the boat was coming he got so close he sounded his whistle they went and got on the line the guy come out with the car being and guarded him and then once they were off the boat and up into the apartment compound then the inmates would go back to work that little pickup there went a whole laundry to our laundry we did laundry for vets hospitals and then a couple of the military places out there which is your government at work we don't have water we got a barge water over all the time but we're doing laundry so okay this was our fire truck that is still there today it was there the day I started and that's a 31 uh Diamond tea fade them and you
120can see the hole in the front of the radiator and the way the bumper is dipped down and what that's for was a crank that's the way you started it you had to crank them and start them and we used to keep it parked uh behind where it's at in a tunnel that faced downhill so it protected it from the weather but that was so we could Coast start it and we didn't have to crank it in about every second week I would take that thing because everybody out there was a member of the fire crew and I'd run it all over the island to keep it limber and and make sure everything worked on it and I like I say I was only 24 when I started so I was still partly a kid
121so I hit the siren a couple times and I heard about that so I had to quit doing that and the reason it looked so good it looked good anyway but we had that and we had a 1946 Chevy ton and a half truck and a movie company come over and wanted to make a movie so they took both of them vehicles to town and we reworked them from bumper to bumper and then brought them back and used them in their movie and then just left them back on the island when they left okay uh there in the foreground that's the warden's house and you can see a little glass enclosure to the left of it and he had a little uh Garden in there and to the right is the Doctor's house and right
122behind it was the three apartment complex for the lighthouse and over to the right was a part of the administration building and the sellhouse here's what's left of the warden's house today after the Indians burn it there's what's left of the three apartment complex after the Indians burn it and there's your welcome Indians they had graffiti all over everywhere and right above it that little arrow the Little Black Arrow I put on there because that's pointing to our first apartment when we lived on the island thank you I'm kind of rushing through these so the Bell don't hit me there on the right that's myself on what they call Broadway the inmates had the aisles numbered or lettered and this one was Broadway and and way down to the end behind me was what they
123called Times Square and that's where everything had happened everything happened in that institution went through Times Square and there on the left that is up in the hospital that was Robert Stroud's cell does anybody know who Robert's child was probably not just because you guys are too young but he was with the one they called The Birdman of Alcatraz who had no birds on Alcatraz but Birdman of Alcatraz and Alcatraz name sold books were Birdman of Leavenworth didn't sell and he was he was a bad guy he was a bad guy he he had a girlfriend up in Juneau Alaska who was a lady of the night and the bartender took her out and used her did not pay her so he killed the bartender for it he got the death penalty and his mother
124went and tried on the president's this is back in the 30s he cried on the president's doorstep and the president changed it to life and after he got life he killed an inmate and he killed an officer he said what are you going to do to me I'm doing life anyway and that's when they said well then you'll do it in solitary confinement and he was in solitary for years and years and he started getting old and feeble and they moved him up to this solitary cell in the hospital so they could watch him and then he finally transferred to Springfield Missouri which was our mental slash Medical hospital and they put him in solitary there and he finally died with 54 years in prison okay this is part of the 46th riot and there
125on the left that's Holes in the Floor from hand grenades and on the rights where they chipped a hole the Marines did in the ceiling and dropped hanger Knights down and they'd have a string tied to the grenade and the string tied to the pin and they'd get it swinging to a where they thought this is where the inmates are hiding and then they'd hang on to this the pinstring and let go of the other and when this hand grenade went down it pulled a pin and then it explode there on the left that's part of the dark hole if they messed up that's where they went to jail in a jail and uh they were issued a pair of coveralls and that's it there was nothing in the cell about 8 39 o'clock at
126night and we'd go over there and we'd bring them out and take them to an open cell and they'd pick up a mattress and a blanket that had been searched and then they'd take it down and put it in their dark hole if they didn't mind their peas and fused they didn't get that sometimes they were in there naked on the right that's a typical cell and you can see there's a folding seat and a folding table and they played a lot of Chess I don't know how to play chess but each one had their boards numbered so they could play against the guy next to him because they could be quietly say Rook from c18 to D12 or something and they both made the move that way the boards were set up the same
127by the back you can see they had a few photographs there's a little sink back there and there's a hole where they dug out I'll show you in a minute where the hole is and they had to sleep with their pillow up by the bars that way when you went by counting you could see the movement of the blankets from them breathing and see their face and things like that uh you no you can't see the telephone in there but they each each room had a telephone in it I'll show you the telephone okay there on the left that's the telephone and you can see the hole where they dug out they had false covers that they put on it now that telephone the way they worked that is they flush their stool and they
128put their head in and talk and the sound would travel through the pipes to the cells near them above them or below them if they wanted a little more private conversation they'd flush it fold their blanket up put their head in the stool put the blanket over top their head and it would muffle the sound and make it more like a private call in fact those were the first cell phones when they got mad at you they would blow them up and they were porcelain in them days and they were flushed with the cold Bay water and the way they blew them up is they would flush them and then they'd take their drinking cup and they'd dip all the water and pour it down their sink when they couldn't get any more water they
129took their clothes off and stopped up the rest of the water and then they took whatever they get a hold of nine times out of ten it was their Bible and they'd tear it up and throw it in there and light it on fire then they'd get their mattress and duck down behind it put it in front of them duck Bay down behind it and light that fire and let it burn and then they'd hit the plunger in that cold Bay water would explode that like a hand grenade and a few of them got hurt at different times when the pieces of shrapnel went through the mattress and stabbed them but that was part of their risk okay on the right that's when the dummy heads that they had Clint Eastwood's movie Escape from Alcatraz
130I was there during that John the older brother used to work for me in the clothing room and that's when the dummy heads that they had that night put in the bed okay they're on the right that was our old Control Center and you can see the Hat just like I've got on there that who whoever was working at had their uniform head up there and then on the left that was our new Control Center and you can see the difference between the two when they built the new one and you'll notice that I have a gun on my hip and that was one of our rules we had to wear a pistol while we were in there and that is in case they tried to con and commandeer the warden their social Warden or
131somebody like that and bring them out through the main gate and that little hole behind my back opened up and you could shoot out through there and that shot right into the main gate that telephone you could put on automatic and it would answer itself and I had heard that I'm going to be going out on a chain of inmates now I started there when I 24 with no previous experience and we didn't even have a training officer after the first three weeks that I was there and so my training was on the job training I learned a lot of things the hard way and so when I learned that I was going on one of the chains which I ended up going on five chains I thought the inmates know more about the handcuffs
132than I knew I've never even had a pair on and behind my back there was a a drawer and that's where we threw a Contraband if you found a shiv or something like that you threw it in there well I found a little piece of a razor blade that had tape wrapped around it like a handle and so I I got the phone and put it on uh automatic answer I had my Council made up for the only thing I'm going to have going on is some watch calls and I can answer them without picking up the phone so I got a pair of handcuffs and I laid on the desk in front of me in the boat operator the radio was right below that desk and he wasn't due to go out so I
133wouldn't have to answer that and I took that lock pick from that that razor blade and I took my key out of my pocket and I laid it on the desk for the hand cut and it wasn't the smartest thing I ever did but I put them handcuffs on myself and in less than 30 seconds I was out of them and my heart just dropped now I'm going to get on an airplane with 32 of them Thugs and they know more about them than I do no I thought well Jim you weren't fair you didn't deadlock them so I put them back on and I deadlocked them that time and all I did was Bump my hands real hard on the desk and it knocked the deadlock off in that time in less than 20
134seconds I was out of so we we had a rule when we took them on the airplane that every so many minutes you had to go around and check them and make sure everything was okay and Jim took a lot of turns that discured the devil out of me okay there on the on the right that was our Armory that was in the control center this photo was taken after the other prisons in the area came and took a bunch of our weapons and and the gas guns and different paraphernalias that are really not much in there on the left that was up in the chapel and we had a screen that like you've got here that you could pull down in front of it and that's where they had their movies and they'd have
135the movie for half the institution on Saturday and half on Sunday and uh then down in our social hall we had in movie theater and I learned to run the projectors and then whatever movie the inmates seen Sunday afternoon I'd show it to the island residents on Sunday night and if we had a half a dozen guys go to church we had a crowd and I don't know if you can see there was candlesticks on the altar one on each side there and I don't know who got them but they did make nice little bedroom lamps I took where you put the candle in and pulled that off and turned it over and run a wire through and put a lamp switch in there and use them for the bedroom lamps and I got them
136fixed to put them right back into a candle that's the dining room and on the rights the very last menu the very last meal they had and when they went to the dining room the lieutenant would signal you and you would open your cells and they would step out and you give them about 15 seconds to step out and then you closed it and then you went down and see who left and who didn't they didn't leave why didn't they and when they stepped out they had their shoes shoes laced up and tied every button on their shirt button their shirt tucked in your pants up around their waist and their belt cinched if they didn't they went right to the hole if they come out and yelled they went right to the hole so
137then they marched to and from the job okay they're on the right that was in the kitchen that was their cutting tools to cut up meat and Etc and Etc and that Circle was a band saw and it folded up somehow into that Circle and the two things in the middle were potato peelers and the reason they was in there because they were sharp and they could stab with them and there on the left excuse me that was our metal detector inward uh opening is that was the door where you reached in and made adjustments now as they were coming safe from work they could carry their cigarettes to work and we kept two cells open at the end of the block to take them in and strip shake them if we had to and
138they had coming from work one day and here come a guy that had given me some lip so they hand you their cigarettes and you'd take them and you'd look in them for Contraband and then hand them back and what you was doing you was looking for something in it because they would ring the bell because they're tinfoil wrapped around them cigarettes and so this guy when he comes through I would lean over and look at it and ring the bell and I made him go again I made him go three times and then I took him over and I strip shook him and what I was doing I'd lean over and get my badge close enough and pick up my badge and make the bell ring and so he didn't give me any left
139from then on okay this was down in our shower room and they showered every Saturday afternoon every Tuesday morning and they would bring their clean clothes down her excuse me their dirty clothes down throw them in barrels and then they'd come over where I was working and they'd get clean clothes okay this was after it closed and that was our son coming down from the yard and then he's down in Industries and you can see a tower behind him and he said uh where can I go Dad and I said anywhere while you're inside the fence and it just so happens that anywhere he went we had a photo of him so he didn't get too far away um but where he's at the building on your right in the foreground that was the industries
140the new Industries the one in the back underneath the tower was the old Industries and it was just a warehouse where they'd get supplies and they had a couple three guys that was over there working getting supplies and the lieutenant had taken them over and and the guy in this building the little building the new one signaled them that the man in the tower sat down to use the toilet and so they hit the lieutenant in the head with the hammer and they picked up whatever they could get and they attacked and crawled out the window and attacked that Tower fortunately he sat down with the rifle on his lap and he killed one and he wounded one and the other one surrendered and about three or two three weeks later the officer died from
141a head wound okay there is the corner in the yard in the rock out there was a little rock out cropping called little Alcatraz and uh that's where they were trying to get to they were trying to get out there and get in the water and get on that rock and then get their bearings and see which way to go okay there's one of the yard wall Towers they had three of them on the corners of the yard in a tower on the other corner and they're all arrested away now all right and that was our daughter the Oscars Club had ice cream social for the kids every year and she had ice cream on her nose there but they could have all the ice cream they could eat and that was our son riding
142his bike on the parade ground and he was up in the inmate yard lifting their weights yeah and our daughter on the playground and then Kathy and our daughter in front of the tower which that Tower is Rusted away now there's nothing there at all and this is the very last day of Alcatraz that's myself with the last inmate coming right out the front door heading for the boat and there we are in the boat over town and that's myself in the light suit which is in the traveling Museum appointing the last inmate onto the bus to take them to the airport okay there we are going over town and like any good program it has to have a commercial there is a commercial that's that's the books we got for sale now I'd like
143to say my wife lived on the island too and so we're down to any questions that anybody has to help is that the movie that Clint Eastwood made Escape from Alcatraz and they're still saying that they don't know for sure whether they lived or died well as far as anybody actually getting off they haven't proved it I mean they've gotten off but live and I don't know and if it's a movie you're I'm thinking of that they made when the three escaped off the island that that night they found a body dressed in prison guard floating out underneath the Golden Gate Bay Bridge but they didn't pick it up so that if they would have they'd have known whether they got out or not they got out of prison but whether they're still alive I
144got no idea I might tell you of all yours We're stopped here uh we'll never know one way or the other where they escaped or not it's what do you want to believe it or not but that was uh June 12th of 62. December 16 62 we had another attempt that nobody knows about because there was no movie made about it and uh that was Scott and Parker and I was working the control center that night and at 5 47 PM an emergency phone rang and I picked it up and it was a lieutenant and he says Jim get me some help I got a couple missing in the kitchen basement so I put the Escape Plan in the fact and started getting people back up from the island to come to work and armed
145the towers and man man some of the other posts that weren't manned that night and called the boat operator had him get our boat out of the slip in case the Coast Guard didn't need to go in there and what it was is the two guys in two and three tower that Tower that's gone right now and then one that was halfway out towards the industries they've seen the one inmate crawl up on little Alcatraz and they both fired a warning shot at him and he decided to stay there so they yelled at me and told me that they had him and I sent our boat around and our boat picked him up and brought him back to Institution and the other one time went by and a couple hours later I got a call
146from the Presidio and it was MPS and they said I think we got one of your guys over here and it was Scott and he had worked in the hospital and he stole rubber gloves and he blew him up tied them together and used them for water wings he washed up at Fort Point he hit the rocks at Fort Point underneath the Golden Gate Bridge had he not hit them rocks he'd have been out to sea so he was very lucky but he was almost dead from exposure the only thing he had on was the water wings at worst every other Stitch of clothing off of him and he was laying there almost dead and a couple teenagers had been down there necking and they seen him wash up and they called the MPS in
147the Presidio police went down and got him and put him in Letterman Hospital and revived him and then after they got him revived they called me and I sent our boat over to get him and we put him over in our hospital and this was all like I say it started at 5 47 p.m by 9 30. everything was done and settled down and I would just write in reports I made it to the bill any other questions but as they were loading Scott on the boat they had him on a gurney and he looked at him and he said it had been okay if I could have made it I want to thank you guys appreciate it [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] to do his job and do his job well really I had I
148when I first started I picked about three officers that I thought were good officers in my opinion and I tried to model myself after them and I tried to exceed what they would have done and I got promoted twice in two in three years so I must have been doing something right Yeah question the back did you meet any famous criminals um yeah there was a bird man there was a when I first started there the low numbers 242 Clark and we had creepy Corpus there uh Whitey Bulger was there the one that got killed over in West Virginia prison here about a year ago uh well then I just seen him and talked to him daily you know so I didn't look at them as famous or anything okay let's give it up one
149last time for Mr Jim Albright [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank
150you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]
151foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] I heard that Jacob haven't okay you have a uh wonderful uh wonderful speaker coming up a true witness to one of the key events in United States history I'm going to bring up Kevin hermaning in just a second and when I was doing my research I found the citation that was uh given to him the prisoner of war medal and it um I don't want to steal his his show but I think it tells you the power of who you're about ready to meet Sergeant Kevin J hermaning United States Marine Corps was held hostage in Iran from November 4th 1979 to January 20th 1981 while serving with the Marine
152security guard Detachment United States Embassy Tehran Iran he was among the 65 Americans taken prisoner and held in captivity for 444 Days by armed Iranian terrorists who are directly supported by the government of Iran during this period of confinement the Marines and other hostages were subjected to abominable conditions and constant harassment from their captors the hostages were continuously use in several forms of propaganda such as being paraded in front of media cameras while blindfolded and hands-tied behind their backs throughout the duration of their captivity the hostages were held in conditions comparable to those under which persons have generally been held captive by enemy forces during periods of armed conflict despite the harsh conditions the Marines continuously provided an example for all other Americans to emulate through their adherence to the code of conduct and unfaltering
153a spirit Decor the motivation and positive attitude of the Marines throughout this ordeal provided many of the other hostages with the necessary leadership encouraged to endure the Captivity successfully in all 13 cases these marines exemplified the professional conduct devotion and dignity that was in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval service with that kind of a brown a background I think you know why I um I really would wish you to be on your absolute best behavior as I know you will be ladies and gentlemen Mr Kevin hermany good afternoon and uh what an honor and privilege Mr Pratt thank you for the invitation you and I have been communicating for about seven years trying to collaborate or coordinate our schedules and it's a real honor and privilege
154for me to be here so um we're going to uh spend the next hour or so not sharing a bunch of gory War Stories not putting you in a position of not wanting to travel abroad not wanting to make friends with Iranians or rather give you a history lesson and I don't remember it well but I remember sitting in your seats when I was in high school and thinking but that happened to that guy that happened to somebody else during historical times yet for me the event that I'm going to share with you today happened just two years after graduating from high school during my presentation I want you to put into the back of your minds the names of the following men major Richard Bakke major Hal Lewis Jr Captain Lynn McIntosh Captain Charles
155McMillan II Tech Sergeant Joel mile staff sergeant Dewey Johnson Sergeant John D Harvey Corporal George Holmes Jr I don't expect you to remember all of their names maybe you picked out one of them that you can probably remember during the duration of my remarks this afternoon the title my presentation is liberty and Leadership and it ends with freedom I've had the privilege of speaking in front of more than 3 800 audiences 1700 high schools in the last 40 years when I say it is a privilege to be here I mean it because one thing I would like to ask of you as students is to go home tonight and tell them that you heard a guy speak who wanted to say thank you for not forgetting about him or maybe your grandparents who prayed for
156us every day for 444 days this is the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shah of Iran President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan four of the principles in this event in which I found myself held prisoner for 14 months the Shah of Iran had been the leader of their country for 26 years in 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini came in and he created What's called the Islamic Republic the Shah of Iran was very ill he couldn't stay in fight he was put into Exile he eventually came to the United States for medical treatment after President Carter said he will honor the request of our former Ally to come to the U.S for medical treatment the Shah of Iran came to Philadelphia for a New York City for medical treatment a few days later we were captured and
157President Carter regretted his decision to this very day his aides were making the recommendation his inclination was to say no and he did for several days and he finally capitulated to the Secretary of State and the National Security adviser and he said okay but what about the Americans at our Embassy and they all told him we'll deal with that when it hap if something happens we were held for 444 days eight months into the crisis the Shah died of cancer and the Iranians had to shift their goal of what they wanted to happen because at first what they wanted was the shaw to be sent back to the uh the country of Iran the people the ayatollah's followers wanted to put him on trial for crimes against the Iranian people for the quarter Century he
158led their Nation and we were finally freed on inauguration day the day that President Reagan took office more on that later this will look at the main building at the embassy in Tehran the U.S embassy is not open anymore it was closed the day we were captured that was 40 years ago last week Monday November 4th 1979. 40 years ago I was a 20 year old Marine security guard at my very first Embassy I loved the service I loved the responsibility I thoroughly enjoyed being in Iran for the first three months I was there I traveled the country I met the people I engaged in the culture Marine security guards I had already been in the Marine Corps for two years Marine security guards are required when they're on Embassy Duty to take three hours
159of language training every week I was taking five just as I had done previously when I was stationed not an embassy duty but in the Marines in Japan I planned to stay there for a full year even though I was assigned for only six months here's my buddy United States Army Chief Warrant Officer Joseph Hall and myself the day before we were captured we enjoyed a baseball game against some of the British and Australian Embassy folks they're not as good as softball As Americans are we had a good time Joe and I were ultimately held not together but held for the entire 444 days what you're looking at now is the beginning and several photos to follow photographs of the protests and the demonstrations that took place once the Shah was admitted into the United
160States burning of the American flag and on November 4th 1979 they began scaling the walls and the gates of the embassy compound which was a 23-acre sprawling compound in the downtown of Tehran the third largest Embassy compound in the entire world back at that time this went on for hours until ultimately they broke into the buildings we Marine security guards we were given orders immediately those of us who were in the building I wasn't on duty but I was in the building that day along with Corporal Billy Gallegos and Sergeant Rocky sickman Sergeant Jimmy Lopez was over at the consulate across the entire compound in a different building and when they began scaling the walls and breaking through the gates thousands and thousands of Iranians on the embassy grounds our orders were very clear use
161your tear gas to delay the entry of the Iranians into the building as long as possible so that up on the second floor of the building is much classified and top-secret documents could be destroyed as possible and as much computer and satellite gear could be destroyed as well it was chaotic it was very difficult this is the crowd right outside the embassy Gates by 6 PM that night November 4th 1979 that Sunday a drizzly rainy day cold in Tehran at that time of year there were 1.6 million people surrounding the U.S embassy shouting death to America death to Carter calling for our heads the only weapons that the American Marines had the US Marines had were 38 caliber evolvers on our hips a 12 gauge shotgun and a big Satchel of tear gas and that's
162what we used to hold them off for a while But ultimately the decision was made to surrender the embassy to the Iranians you see under international law it is up to the host government to provide security when an event like this happens so let me give you an analogy if in Washington DC where all of the foreign embassies are located there was a large-scale assault like this to that took place and Americans went into the compound or the buildings of these foreign embassies the U.S government would send Security Forces to remove the American protesters that's what happens under international law but indeed what the Iranian government did they sent their forces to assist in the Takeover of the embassy to assist in the capture of the Americans and to be part of holding us hostage
163for 444 days and my friend Corporal Steve curtly there in the camouflage fatigues and Sergeant William Quarles were among the first Americans captured they weren't on duty they were in their bedrooms in their Apartments among the first Americans captured because they had no weapons in their Apartments they weren't in the compound they were outside the back gate and they were among the first people captured humiliating terrible I saw Sergeant kirtley Corporal curtly last week Monday in Washington D.C out of service commemorating the 40th anniversary of the day of our capture by the way a Corporal curtly stayed in the Marine Corps went on became a warrant officer then went on and became a major in the United States Marine Corps made a career of the service never went back on Embassy duty but loved the
164time that he served in the United States Marine Corps as I did as well some of the other American hostages blindfolded handcuffed behind our backs Communications officer Jerry Mealy who suffered mightily at the hands of the Iranians because they brought him out to the gate where the crowds were rabid shouting in Farsi he thought he heard them say death to melee his last name in Farsi they didn't they weren't saying that but he didn't understand just the degree to which that hatred was there and here's where I was during all of this well at the beginning I had my tear gas and was on the first floor but eventually made my way up to the communications Vault I was the second last American captured at the embassy I was in the communications Vault where you
165can see a lot of computer gear satellite equipment there were lots of documents that we had to destroy and this was me about an hour later I'm the one facing the wall remember I mentioned I wasn't on duty which meant I wasn't in uniform in the front left of that photo is our CIA station Chief Tom Ahern who spent 425 days pay attention to this 425 days in solitary confinement as did Bill Doherty these two guys never saw another American for 14 months more than 14 months I don't know how they did it because I tried to escape in January of obviously I didn't succeed because I was still held for the next year but I spent 43 days in solitary confinement in a small room that was just five feet by ten feet in
166size and the only thing in that room other than me and my handcuffs am I blindfold was the bottom part of a bed the box spring it's very difficult to sleep in a situation like that and the only time I ever got out of that room in 43 days which is more than six weeks was once a day on their schedule when they took me down the hall to use the bathroom on their schedule not mine and three times where they took me to a different building to take a shower I thought I was going to go crazy after 43 days how Tom and Bill survived 425 days in solitary is a Real Testament to their ability to survive and to be sane Captain Paul Needham is in that photograph Moore is in that photograph
167Charlie Jones is in that photograph he was the only African-American uh held hostage for the entire 444 days and a couple of other folks Moorhead Kennedy the 10 of us were kept separate from everybody else not together but separate from everybody else because we were the last ten who held out and over the course of the next four months here's what the Iranians found in the vault when they came in and they brought in school children who were learning English in Tehran schools to assemble all of that paper back into documents there they are second grade and third grade and fourth grade kids were brought in by the ayatollah's people to reassemble those documents so that they could find out what the different jobs of all of The Americans were at that Embassy Colonel Charles
168Scott a United States Army Colonel spoke fluent Farsi he had been in Iran for over a year and a half when we were captured he knew the Shaw's leaders he got to know the ayatollah's folks during his interrogations they beat him so severely with rubber hoses on his face and his his chin that he had three of his teeth broken off right at the gum lines the roots of which remained embedded up inside of his gums and Colonel Scott had no medical or dental treatment until we were freed 444 days later I became a roommate with a guy by the name of Bill keel Bill Keel was my dad's age Bill Keough had a couple of kids my age so it became that Father Figure son figure relationship for the six months that bill Keo
169and I were roommates Bill didn't even work for the government but he found himself still there at the embassy because he was in the country doing some business as a representative of his Education Agency Bill Keo was a high school principal and administrator he came to Iran the day before we were all captured including him because he was going to gather High School records and transcripts from the former Tehran American High School that had been shut down in haste about six or eight months earlier and bill came into the embassy he presented his passport he told the Marines behind post one I'm only going to be here in the country for a day and when he turned around to leave the building I know I was there that's when the Iranians came swarming in and
170he got captured and caught up in it with the rest of the government folks when Bill Kia was captured he was one of the biggest men size wise who I had ever seen in my life bill keil was six feet nine inches tall weighed 350 pounds at the age of 40. 444 Days Later by the time we were freed this great big six nine inch tall giant of a man his body weight had deteriorated so much that when he got off the airplane in the United States when we were finally freed he weighed just 150 pounds he lost more than half of his body weight in captivity and our other roommate and I we would ask the guards all the time please bring him to a doctor there's clearly something wrong with him he was
171much too proud of a man to ask himself so we advocated for him and they never did Bill Keough died less than two years after he got out of captivity from captivity related uh concerns complications I saw his daughter last week Sunday night first time in my life I ever met her we chat once in a while on Facebook she's called my wife and me a couple of times back in Wisconsin she lives up in Vermont but she was in Washington last week for that commemoration event over at the Department of State and she told me a story last week that just broke my heart she said Kevin my daughter came home last last week from high school from her history class where they are learning about the Iran hostage crisis and Morgan said to
172me Morgan's the daughter mom tell me about Grandpa tell me what it was like for him as a prisoner and my friend Kate Bill's daughter broke down in tears and she said I had to tell my daughter that I didn't know anything about my dad's situation because when he came home he never talked about it because he was too sick and all we did my sister and I and our mom all we did was care for him and give him the treatment and care he deserved and then he died and I told Kate I said you have Morgan's teacher call me I'd be happy to fly to Burlington Vermont and speak at her high school or maybe even just at her class so that's kind of on the plans for just after the first of
173the year Bill keel Colonel Scott Tom Ahern these guys sacrificed they definitely paid the price and represented you well at Christmas time and at Easter time some American clergyman came over and they held services for us and for us it was a chance to get in front of a TV camera because we wanted our families back home to see that we were okay different levels of okayness but that we were alive that if we could we would try to smile these are fit pictures taken obviously from an old style TV screen Don Homan a Navy corpsman assigned to the Embassy meeting with one of the ministers the two women hostages who were held in captivity for the entire 444 days on the left is our Catherine Kube of Iowa and on the right is Ann
174Swift who was the second senior person to the Ambassador at the embassy working for the Department of State they had women guards as you would expect women guards carried the guns just like the mengar mail guards did more of these photographs in the news conference on the embassy grounds and you young folks don't know who this is but your teachers do any parents of room certainly do you're old enough to know that Ted Koppel began his show called Nightline with a program called America held hostage and every single night on his show he would count down the number of days that we were held in captivity back in the United States our families were certainly engaged in trying to find out about how we were doing but also what was being done to get us
175out and in Hermitage Pennsylvania at a place called The Avenue of the flags every single day a new American flag was erected at that Memorial Park and my dad traveled from Wisconsin down to Hermitage three times and he put up a flagpole on one of the days remembering those of us while we were in captivity we wondered every day is anything being done to get us out because we really it didn't seem like it we didn't think anybody cared we had very little news we didn't know was there a plan to rescue us we didn't know that within days of when we were captured in November of 1979 thousands of American servicemen volunteered to come rescue us about 20 000 people volunteered the various branches of the military they created a training program for two
176thousand of them and in the deserts of of Arizona and New Mexico and Southern California they built mock replicas of the U.S embassy they hired professional actors from Hollywood to come in and act as guards and as hostages and this Rescue Team began training in groups of about 200. and in mid-april 1980 1 800 of those men who were training were told they're not good enough to go and these were the best of the best but the best of the best of the best were the 200 men who were selected to be part of operation Eagle Claw on April 25th the plan was that a C-130 transport plane filled with a great big rubber bladder full of aircraft fuel would fly only about a hundred feet off the uh the ground the surface of the
177Iranian Countryside and it would open up the back of their big transport plane and somehow this big bladder would be pushed out of it and it would bounce about a quarter of a mile and it would come to a place called desert one the plane would go around and it would land next to it eight helicopters eight helicopters left the USS Nimitz in the Persian Gulf enroute to Desert one this was 200 miles south of Tehran one helicopter had a mechanical failure and had to turn back another helicopter got lost in a sandstorm and had to turn back six helicopters showed up at Desert one at 12 30 at night one of the helicopters was deemed unfit to fly because of a uh of because of a water pump the decision was made to abort
178the mission maybe come and do it a different night while they were extracting themselves from Desert one to go back to the gulf and fly that C-130 back to the country of Oman from which it had originated at the base there the instructions being given by Colonel Charlie Beckwith the commander of that Delta Force the instructions were to the pilots of the helicopters we want you to take off and just hover above the scene on the ground until just before the next helicopter is ready to take off because we don't want any of the helicopters to the pilots to get lost so that first pilot took off and out of the window even though all the sand was being washed up because of the big rotor blade the pilot was focusing in on a little
179red light on the desert floor or so he thought it was on the desert floor so the pilot of this helicopter thinking that he was stationary was actually moving what ended up being about 70 yards off location because that red light that he thought was on the desert floor was actually the tail light of a motorcycle being driven by one of our troops on the ground very slowly to survey the whole area to make sure everybody was getting onto the helicopters so being about 70 yards off of where the pilot thought he was he thought he was here he was way over here suddenly a big Windstorm came up and the helicopter tilted just a little bit and that big rotor blade on top of the plane slashed I'm on top of the helicopter excuse
180me slashed through the fuel tank of the big big C-130 transport plane sitting on the desert floor and you could see the explosion for 20 miles away in the midnight sky Persian Gulf up to Desert one here's the team intact before they left this is the Air Force photo the red circles around those five men designate designate the men who died in that explosion here they're getting ready and here is the gruesome scene on the ground the next morning three Marines and five airmen perished that night you may have heard in movies or talking to a grandpa or a grandma or somebody in the service a parent that there's a motto in the military never leave your fellow man behind so it will come as a shock to you if that's what you believe that
181the bodies of all eight of those men were left behind on the desert floor burning while the rest of the team took off the Iranian Army showed up they collected The Remains they put them in body bags they brought them up to the city of Tehran and later that day at High Noon those body bags were opened at Central Square Tehran and Ayatollah tabatai who is known as the hanging judge because of all the people he has led to the to their executions he personally dismembered the bodies of our men ripping off their arms and their legs for worldwide television I want to tell you this is not how most Iranians behave this is not what most Iranians believe most Iranians were horrified at what was being done now in my garage at home in
182northern Wisconsin and in a storage locker that my wife and I rent every month I have eighty thousand postcards letters of welcome home thank you notes for service and thousands of newspaper articles and in every one of those newspaper articles and in almost every Written Letter of appreciation we the American hostages are viewed as Heroes for what we've endured that's hogwash we were survivors we were in the wrong place at that time and got caught up we're survivors but there were heroes in the hostage crisis remember those names I read off or recited those are the names of the real heroes in the hostage crisis those three Marines and five airmen who never again saw their loved ones back home men who came to the country of Iran trying to rescue their fellow countrymen and
183it ended up in tragedy and about three weeks ago I was at an event and I met six of the men who were on the rescue mission who survived some of them have medical issues one of the guys spent eight months in the San Antonio Burn Center recovering from his injuries that night during the fire I met a couple of their spouses who were accompanying them at this event and I heard these men get up and tell the audience how hard it's been for the last 40 years knowing that the seminal event in their life ended in failure for 40 years they have seen themselves as failures and I was standing off to the side because it was not yet my turn to speak and I heard them talk about how they've dealt with PTSD
184they've dealt with survivor's guilt they've dealt with the fact that they're because of course eight of their buddies lost their lives and they're still here I heard the wives talk about how their husbands wake up with nightmares every night and it was a story that I thought was a different story from the one that I know I had never met these men ever before till 40 years after this event and then it was my turn to speak and I grabbed the microphone and I looked at these six guys and their wives and I said I understand the perspective you're bringing to the event you're describing but I want you to consider it from the other side one of the guys said what do you mean I said we had already been in captivity for six
185months we didn't think anybody thought about us we didn't think anybody cared about us we didn't think that the government the president was even thinking about us ever during those six months we're behind a blindfold they take it off once in a while we're handcuffed behind our backs we're in rooms sometimes we can talk to our roommates other times we can't I only went outside in the fresh air and sunshine for two hours in 444 days two hours we had no news we couldn't communicate with our families we didn't have not have great food but I did know one thing when we learned that the government had made an attempt that they had put forth the effort and yes they didn't get us out that's true there is that element of failure attached to it
186but I looked at these men and I said when we learned you had tried that alone kept us going emotionally for the next eight of the next 10 months eight months that's what kept us going that's what kept us motivated that's what stopped us being demoralized and when I said that the two wives and one of the men they just started crying and after the event that we were at they came up to me and they said if only we had known that 40 years ago our lives would have been totally different but thank you for stating it now for the last chapter of our lives and I really believe those men left that event changed realizing there was an element of failure but you sometimes succeed in other ways and isn't that really think
187about your own lives every one of you is going through your own thing we all have issues your family members have issues your teachers have issues your friends and buddies have issues but I want you to think about being empathetic I want you to think about a different perspective I want you to go into your conversations and into your relationships trying to put yourselves in someone else's shoes I think that's the best way that we individually can grow as individuals and as friends and as children or parents or students or teachers after 444 days we were finally freed Jimmy Carter worked hard to try to get us out he put his own presidency at risk and lost the election had he gotten us out I believe he would have been re-elected but he didn't and
188then Ronald Reagan took office and you know because the moment we were freed was the moment that President Reagan put his hand on the Bible put his other hand up and swore to the best of his ability to defend the Constitution of the United States and those of you old enough to have been watching that on TV know that on the other half of the TV screen it was a split screen Washington DC on one half of the TV screen and on the other half of the TV screen the airplanes the Americans getting onto the airplane the Iranians did not want to give President Carter or President Reagan the ability to claim that they got us out because they released us during the swearing-in they kept us just long enough and released us just early
189enough so neither president could claim that credit they continued even to the last second to have that control the ordeal ends celebrated on the front page of magazines and newspapers and there was no online back then but certainly globally this became the biggest news story of January 1981. there's my friend Corporal Billy Gallegos and I on the airplane traveling from Algeria up to Germany so why Algeria because the United States and Iran did not have diplomatic relations after we were captured so the algerians became the intermediaries in the negotiation to finally get us out so we flew from Tehran to Algeria in Algeria we were exchanged for the money that was paid to get us out nine billion dollars it's crazy in US Dollars and in gold and the US government also apologized it's called
190the Algiers Accord and then we got onto American Air Force Hospital planes and we flew up to Wiesbaden Germany where we spent a couple of days finally my friends and I free in the far right the far right is my friend Bill Keel notice how gaunt he looks almost skeletal in nature here we were at the hospital in Germany at the Air Force Base and a bunch of the doctors and nurses and orderlies they put out a sign a bed sheet that they wrote on Welcome to the freedom hotel that was welcoming us to Freedom we came back to the United States I had a chance to meet President Carter and vice president Mondale 20 of the American hostages refused to meet with President Carter they blamed him for us being there all that time
191for me it was a great honor to meet a president of the United States there I am actually this is before we came back to the States this is at the hospital in Germany there I am in my uh my pajamas much more thinner than I am today but nonetheless it was a real honor to meet him along with the other Marines meeting him here we are coming out to get onto the bus to take us to the airport to fly us to the United States where finally we would see our families foreign there's the Ambassador Center Stage Bruce Langan Bruce Langan died in August of this year he was 97 years old he lived a terrifically long life and he was our leader at the embassy I never saw him while we were in
192captivity ever he was held in a different building from where I was held but nonetheless he was our leader and I had the privilege of going to his memorial service a couple of months ago after he passed Dave Rader there Colonel lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force with his arms up declaring he's free Air Force Colonel Tom Schaefer at the bottom of the stairs here are other photographs including myself waving finally going free and then we landed at West Point where we did meet our families and guess what day it was it was Super Bowl Sunday the Super Bowl the Dome put up this in New Orleans put up this great big American uh this great big yellow ribbon in remembrance of the hostages I was 21 years old so what do you
193think I was interested in doing that day spending three hours with my family or watching the Super Bowl what do you think my mom wanted me to do we compromised we spent our time together down in the hotel bar at West Point and watched the game while kind of spending time with our families our families had it worse than we did probably in this room everybody knows someone who was either serving in Iraq or Afghanistan um maybe your own family member or somebody you know always more difficult on the family back home because of the level of uncertainty for sure we came from West Point down to New York down to uh down to Washington DC and uh bus after bus after bus our families were with us and there were crowds like you just
194cannot believe we finally realized we had not been forgotten by the way I remember that first phone call with my mom when I was back in Germany and um I called home and she was crying and the news reporters the TV station folks were in my mom's living room back in Milwaukee Wisconsin and I heard in the background this reporter shouting at her asked him what he wants to eat when he comes back home so my mom asked me what's the first meal I can make when you come back home and I said well how about making some some of those pork chops that I've so missed for the last 14 months and there it was on the front page of the newspaper the next day Kevin hermaning's first meal in Freedom will be pork
195chops and the Iowa Pork producers Association sent over a box 100 pound box of frozen pork chops and after about two or three days I got sick of pork chops so we donated them to the veterans administration up the up the street but um of course what would a mom want to know that was what she wanted to know the crowds the honor of going to the White House real honor and then back to Milwaukee my mom and dad and stepdad and stepmom myself getting off the airplane at Milwaukee Airport in my dress blues uniform having a big parade and then the Avenue of 444 Flags we're on the 10th anniversary of that failed Rescue Mission the one that was successful in a different way I traveled down to this place in Pennsylvania and I
196dedicated an eternal flame and this freedom statue of an eagle along with the Widow of Captain Lynn McIntosh and his parents and I really I remember her crying in my arms and his mom and dad both crying in my arms and how hard it was for me first to try to keep it together which I didn't do but just knowing the sacrifice that they made that their son their her husband gave everything just so that I might have had a chance of being free and here I am walking through the flags in my dress blues there was a reunion a few years ago only 15 of us showed up about 25 of the American hostages have already passed away the eldest hostage captured was Bob Odie he was 65 years old when we were captured
19765. he had already retired from the Department of State and they called him up on the phone and they said Mr Odie would you be willing to go to Tehran for three months just a temporary assignment and he looked at his wife and she said just be home for Christmas that's all I ask she didn't tell him which Christmas because we spent two Christmases in captivity but of course he's long deceased and another 24 Americans have already passed away Catherine koob who Mr Pratt told me spoke here a few years ago at the Chautauqua series it's terrific I saw her at Bruce Langan the ambassador's funeral memorial service a couple months ago and my friend Colonel Charles Scott still alive but not doing well a lot of health issues a lot of Calcium deficiency while
198we were in captivity a lot of lower back issues because of the way we were forced to sit all the time and then the men I never met but who wanted to meet me of course I wanted to meet them I just didn't know they were coming that's real life this is at an annual event in Arlington National Cemetery if you've ever been to Arlington and you've been to The Changing of the Guard up at the amphitheater there is a memorial to the eight men who died right on the other side of Where The Changing of the Guard happens at Arlington and this Memorial to operation Eagle Claw which ended in tragedy at Desert one is right in the middle of the two space shuttle memorials the Columbia and the Challenger which blew up and
199those memorials have a lot of people who gather around them on a regular basis I just received one of the biggest honors of my life 60 years old one of my greatest honors happened three or four days ago Monday of this week when I was given I was called by a representative of the group that puts on this program every April 25th on the anniversary they've asked me to deliver the keynote next April 25th on what will be the 40th anniversary of that rescue mission very much looking forward to heralding the heroes and here is that Memorial by the way in military tradition just off to the side of this off to the left in military tradition when it is impossible to recognize or determine the remains of a fallen soldier a sailor a marine
200or Air Force men or Coast Guardsmen and there is more than one body they are buried together in a single grave three of the Airmen are buried together just off to the side of this Memorial that honors all eight of them Colonel Tom Schaefer died a couple of years ago and I went to the serum uh the funeral the memorial the burial at Arlington Colonel Tom Schaefer was the senior level American serviceman assigned to the U.S embassy and I went out there and there were 400 people who walked through the winding Little Road in Arlington behind the caisson that carried his remains for one and a quarter miles we got to his grave site and just as the Air Force representative got on his knee with the American flag and presented it to his widow
201Anita and two children and we're thanked for something like in memory and thanks for your husband's service to our nation I present to you this American flag four Air Force jets flew overhead and in what is known as the missing man formation three of them continued on and one of them turns upward and flies as hard and fast and high as it possibly can toward the heavens and all you see is the burning fuel jet fuel of that plane as it's going Skyward it is a very emotional event if you ever are in Washington and you ever have the chance to go to Arlington and be part of a ceremony it will be emotional even if you don't know the person because you know what happened for them to be in that situation so this
202is the past this Ayatollah has been dead for 30 years 1989 he died they have a new Ayatollah he almost has the same name this man's name was Ayatollah Khomeini the current guy is Ayatollah Khamenei the supreme leader unelected rule by force imprison or kill anybody who opposes you the protests the burning of the American flag the taking over of the U.S embassy and this is my life in the middle during the Christmas program in Iran in December of 1979 40 years ago next month and then events and activities that I've been involved in for the last 40 years most of them recent pictures involved in supporting Veterans Affairs and Veterans efforts really concerned about the fact that 22 veterans every day listen to this every single day 22 veterans are taking their own lives
20322 a day something that needs to be fixed I'm involved as best as I can in working to support and encourage mostly men but some women who find themselves at what they believe is the end involved in my community it is such an honor I'm sir I serve I'm elected to my local school board I'm involved in the Fine Arts in our community I own a small business back in Wisconsin where we support 14 families from that life to this life that's what happened to me I'd much rather be known not by what happened to me but by what I do what I've become what my community which welcomed me home 39 and a half years ago helped me to become these are all the people who are important to me eight men who I
204didn't know and then my team back at work 2019 my two daughters and my wife and I have 32 years I know it's hard to tell which one's my wife the American people awarded us the award for Valor the defense meritorious service medal which is the nation's highest peacetime award and the military folks were awarded the prisoner of war medal even though we weren't in a war Mr Pratt read the citation I'd actually like to get a copy of that Mr Pratt because a reporter stole my original one or they borrowed it but still haven't returned it I should say what I'd like to do is we have about five or ten minutes for questions like to open it up for questions I do have about a three-minute close at the end of the questions
205but uh why don't you raise your hand and speak up and oh you've got a mic terrific what was it like to have to spend your birthday there yep so uh the question why what was it like to spend my birthday there I would I fortunately had only one birthday in captivity it happened to be my 21st birthday in captivity but I do have a birthday story to tell you first of all I would rather have not been there but I was roommates with Bill Keough and Bruce German in uh July or August of 1980 we had already been there about half the time we didn't know we were at the half half point at that point but um by then we were able to talk to our roommates and we're actually able to play
206cards with them the guards gave us cards to keep us busy and so our routine was we would wake up in the morning we would walk in a circle in this Maximum Security Prison big thick concrete walls iron bars up on the Windows 20 feet above our above our head we had little foam pads that we slept in in the corners three of the four corners and we had a table and a lamp where we played cards and ate our meals and our routine was after breakfast we would play cards and one day Bruce German was sitting in on his foam pad in the corner this 40 year old guy crying and I looked at him and I said Bruce it's time to play cards What's your deal he said I miss my family I
207said Bruce we all miss our families all of us you'll see them someday he said I hope I do but today is a different day I said what's the deal he said today is my daughter's 16th birthday I said oh that's just got to be terrible Bruce um you know when you get home you can have a terrific birthday party for her and he never came off his foam pad to play cards that day and I thought to myself man he's so weak and on November 23rd 2005. November 23 2005. so this was 24 years after we got out of captivity I called Bruce German I had not talked to him since the day we got out of captivity I called him and he lives in West Virginia I said Bruce first thing I want
208to do first of all how are you second I want to apologize for the way I treated you that day in that big prison we were in he said what do you mean I said you know the day it was your daughter's 16th birthday and you didn't want to play cards and he said Kevin I don't remember that and I said well I do and I'm calling today to apologize because today is my daughter's 16th birthday and I just can't imagine what it would be like to not be there for her I finally could empathize with what he was going through so we bring our own personal lives and our own mindset and positions to our different situations question what is your reason for joining the Marine Corps yeah great question um I just was
209talking to a young person about this yesterday back in my back where I live and uh I joined the Marine Corps for a couple of reasons one I was I'm the oldest of five kids my folks got divorced when I was 13 and I saw it as a path to go to college and have some help through the GI bill I had never been on an airplane before and I thought it was a way so that I could travel and see the world which ended up happening as well and um lastly uh there was a little bit of an element of service involved because I've always kind of been involved in the community volunteering for different things Boys and Girls Clubs my church group and to me it just seemed like a natural extension and
210I went into the Marine Corps with a guaranteed contract I signed a contract now don't misunderstand I know that all Marines can be called to pick up a rifle and go to war I get that that's very true but my contract was to be an accountant and so when I left for I went to boot camp and after boot camp I went to be trained to be an accountant in the Marine Corps because the Marine Corps like all the services like all businesses like all schools all communities need accounting people and that's what I did until I heard about the Marine security guard program and I went to a movie I was in Okinawa Japan I went to a movie one night and there was next to the entrance of the movie theater was this
211life-size poster of a marine standing there in dress blues in front of the Taj Mahal in front of on top of the Great Wall of China in front of the Eiffel Tower and it was an invitation to come to a meeting the next night to learn about this Marine security guard program there are only 1800 Marines in the entire Marine Corps that have that honor of being a marine security guard at our U.S embassies and consulates abroad I went to the meeting I was mesmerized I went to work the next day and I asked my boss I said to him I don't want to be an accountant anymore I want to be a marine security guard can you tell me about he said I never heard of it I said okay fine I went to
212this meeting would you sign a letter of recommendation and um it was the best decision that I ever made I had a bad experience but it was the best decision I ever made up to that point um I uh I I went to my training in Quantico Virginia there were 179 students in the class other Marines um only 121 of us graduated from that class after after eight weeks the others all got kicked out of the program before we were going on it so even during the training it's a very rigid training program they do a lot of background checks you have to have a pretty clean background as far as upbringing goes can't have been in trouble you're not allowed to be married you can't have children so uh those became things some of
213the reasons people got kicked out my my class also was the very first one that had women Marines in it so women were then assigned and were able to become Marine security guards any other questions the flags are still up at Hermitage Pennsylvania when I was driving my daughter out to college in Virginia uh 10 years ago eight years ago we stopped at the Avenue and there are many uh it lists who put up every one of those flags and so my job I felt that day was to find the three flags that my dad put up even though they all look the same that was kind of a cool thing I got one more for you right here you got to meet Jimmy Carter Carter I did [Music] I have not had the privilege
214of meeting the president again but I would say that um this event that I was at a couple of weeks ago that I spoke of was for a movie premier through the History Channel a documentary called desert one and um um I'm I'm I'm I've been I was interviewed for the movie I'm in the movie um and uh Jimmy Carter was interviewed he gave an interview about his thoughts and his Recollections and his fears and his hopes for the rescue mission as well as uh his insight into the fact he knew if it didn't fail if it failed that he would not get reelected all right thanks sir so 444 days in captivity to me for me an event that of course is part of my life it's defined certain parts of my life it
215of course has helped to make me who I am today and it gave me a platform the opportunity to speak to Young audiences and community members and to tell all of you that I know there is a lot of uncertainty in the world today economic uncertainty political upheaval social uncertainty and some of you know what you're going to do when you're done with school and others of you do not when I took speech class in high school I could barely talk I was so afraid I was still afraid to speak in public when I first got back from captivity and the Marine Corps Captain said to me Sergeant Harmony just go up and answer the reporters questions and the questions that I was asked at that first news conference that really was not that frightening
216as it turned out has evolved into the presentation I just delivered to you today albeit shifting over the years 40 years is a long time I remember going to Memorial Day parades and Fourth of July parades and Veterans Day events and Labor Day events and standing on the side of the street and watching the veterans walk by those guys with the gray hair and those green caps on with the American flags and now I am one of those guys your life will go fast I've told my daughters and I'd like to tell you you've heard the phrase think out of the box I don't think anyone can do that so my separate instruction is to get a bigger box in which you think understand and recognize that the world out there is looking for great
217young leaders advocates people who want to roll up their sleeves and engage whether it's in the military whether it's in business whether it's a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home dad whether it's in public education or the health care fields or financial or in a factory job we all have opportunities some of which you aren't even aware exist yet as well as the ones that don't exist in real life that will in the next 10 years and Beyond I've had the honor of traveling to 47 States across the U.S and to 55 foreign countries in the last 40 years 55 foreign countries every time I come back to the U.S I don't actually get down on the ground and kiss the ground at the airport but I feel like it actually I did that in 1981
218at West Point when we landed at Stewart air base and I bent down and I kissed the ground at the bottom of the stairwell when we got off that plane coming back from Iran and Europe Germany back to the US and when we went back for that reunion you saw that photo of a bunch of us they took us out to that place where that airplane was parked and the stairs came down and what the airport people did they put a star embedded in the concrete tarmac at the exact place where we first put our steps down back on American soil want you to think about opportunity I don't want you to think we don't have problems We complain all of us every single day about something I want you to have a sense of
219gratitude not contempt I want you to know and understand and if you don't to learn that despite the problems America has despite the concerns you have about anybody in your life there's a way to solve them there are reasons to think more positively because this nation these United States of America because of men like those eight heroes our country continues to stand tall as the greatest one on the face of this entire planet thank you so much for having me here this afternoon it's been a real pleasure okay yeah [Applause] yeah oh my God [Applause] thank you we have three and a half minutes okay if you want a quick photo no questions come on down real quickly [Music] laughs [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]
220thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] somewhere thank you thank you test this test test
221test test test test test test check testing check test test foreign check 10. testing foreign good afternoon everyone thank you very much uh it's been a jam-packed uh Chautauqua day um you guys are doing absolutely fantastic and so do me a favor one last time for the day put away those phones um and uh let's give our undivided attention um you know one of the things I say about Chautauqua is it's a celebration of diversity and the greatness that exists within each one of us sometimes we have speakers who are powerful but it's very serious the Iranian hostage crisis very very serious okay so I set out to find one of the greatest musicians on the planet and lo and behold I found them in Greenville South Carolina and he's brought his band here now
222you want to talk about Legends in the field of Blues Music this icon if you know anything about the history of Blues is played with people like Muddy Waters BB King you ever heard of Jimi Hendrix James Brown John Lee Hooker okay I have fell in love with these guys please give it up for Mac Arnold and a plate full of Blues [Applause] all right how y'all doing out there I mean y'all give it up for Kevin man I don't know if y'all got to hear him but he did a great job only is he still here there he is in the back man we appreciate that I can't even imagine um one of these guys are getting in place I just give you my main instruments on Monica and so I wanted when I
223was y'all's age everybody else was listening to rock and roll when Twisted Sister and and we had all the hair bands back then and just by chance I I heard some Muddy Waters and I heard this thing and it was a harmonica and it was a guy named Little Walter playing him and that was it and the reason I want to tell you about that because macaron the guy was getting ready to come out with of course he played with Muddy Waters and muddy if it wasn't for Muddy Waters they wouldn't the Rolling Stones named their band after Muddy Waters so people like Muddy Waters basically set the whole foundation for rock and roll and Mac played with this guy you know and he's on some of the old albums so but he influenced so
224many people and so when I was y'all's age and everybody else was listening that music I was buying little Walters out albums from the 1950s and everybody thought I was crazy so when he's talking about thinking outside the box I was way outside the box I was like down the street another neighborhood and um everybody thought I was crazy but I'm still doing it well so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a little Walter tune probably I guess from the 50s and it's called everything's gonna be all right [Music] oh have a thing gonna be all right I said everything gonna be all right you know when we get together baby we can make love can't we oh baby let me hold your right hand [Music] baby [Music] cause you understand [Music] foreign
225[Music] but you know when we get together baby we can make love can't we oh baby you're so slow down [Music] you know when we get together baby you wanna call my name foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] album Max Hightower yes anybody know of Stevie Ray Vaughan we got some Stevie Ray fans here do y'all know where that stuff came from y'all heard about BB King right about Albert King Freddie King Buddy Guy yeah it's like he's getting less and less and less yeah yeah anyway here's an old one from Mr Albert King which Mac is going to tell you the whole story you'll hear but this is one of the fellas that he got to run around with do some playing with everybody wants to laugh nobody wants to cry I say everybody wants to
226laugh and nobody wants to cry everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die not everybody wants to hear the truth but yet they all still want to tell a lie I see everybody wants to hear the truth but yeah they all still want to lie everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die [Music] not everybody wants to know the reason uh without even asking why I say everybody wants to know the reason without even asking why everybody wants to go to heaven well but nobody wants to die [Music] oh yeah put your hands together oh all right this is the Blues one thing it's all about is the truth and the truth will find its way I promise Mr Mac Arnold played with all the greats a lot of
227the greats like Tavern Davis John Lee Hooker Muddy Waters Big Mama Thornton James Brown Jimi Hendrix you heard Albert King can you help me bring this man out to the stage make him feel good this song will tell you a lot about his life story please welcome all the way from Greenville South Carolina Mr Mac Arnold [Music] I used to live in Chicago long years ago I never will forget all the hard times living in the wind and snow I never will forget living in the ghetto well I learned how to sing the blues while living in Chicago well in 1965 I met a man named AC Reed we played Blues everywhere everywhere we go well I never will forget living in the dead zone in 1966 I met a man named Muddy Waters [Music]
228guitar better we played Blues everywhere from New York to Greensburg well I never will forget living in the ghetto well well well well well well [Music] awesome praise you ladies and gentlemen then I met another blues singer about the name of Tyrone Davis we used to sing and play a lot he would run the ladies crazy we played all the clubs South Side Chicago well well well well I never will forget living in the dead zone I better get tough man singer by the name of Buddy Guy Play the song the songs he wrote made everybody cry he played everywhere around Chicago well well I never never living in a ghetto look ahead y'all you know I've been around this Blues world for so long on the half the Bruce sang as I've met they
229already gone thank God for saving me and letting me grow [Music] but I never will forget [Music] I'm gonna say it again y'all you know I've been around this Blues world for so long over half the blue singers I've met they're already gone on thank God for saving me and letting me grow well well well well I never will forget living in the ghetto well well well well well well living in the ghetto living in the ghetto a living in the garage [Music] living in the ghetto South Side Chicago well I never will forget living in the guests [Music] living in the ghetto and leaving him again living in the ghetto [Music] South Side Chicago well I never really hey how did y'all doing [Applause] it's so wonderful to be here today it's great to
230see you all's face out there smiling it's a blessing to be able to come to school hang out and listen to other people and listen to some good music this music that we're doing uh uh I guess you all are not too familiar with the blues but the blues is one of the music stat was first it was the very first music ever it was created right here in the United States on the plantations in the South and we are from the south right now we're gonna do a song from the south we're going to take you to the swamps we'll take you to the swamps y'all ready for the swamps over on base Max Hightower [Music] Taco drums dizzy dizzy only guitar house and brazier come on y'all let's have fun well Amos Moses
231was occasion I lit myself in the swamps trapping alligator falling in I just knock him in the head with a stump well the Louisiana law gonna get James got the Swamp Boy everybody blame this old man for making him mean as a snake when Amos Moses was a boy his daddy used to use it that alligator me Tyro up around his weight throwing in the swamps [Music] 45 miles off [Music] was a cat named doc Millsap pretty right here [Music] and just use one hand so they had left of course the alligator beat him let them gone up to the Elbow and the chef got me into nameless was in the swamp Trapper and alligator skins he went in the swamp time to get the boy but it never come out again well I wonder
232where the Louisiana chat with too you can shot get lost in Louisiana by you about 45 miles south Mississippi [Music] and uh raise up the sun heat up the wind [Music] they named him after the man in the car calling me Miss Moe hey son about 45 miles south Mississippi [Music] thank you sir foreign [Music] thank you so much thank you thank you this year marks 68 67 years that I've been playing music and I've met some of the greatest musicians in the world and I'm just so happy to be here today and share some of their songs with you and this songs come from a gentleman that I used to love Grayson that stays with although we recorded this song about three or four years to go back and now the song belongs to
233us uh this song was originated from Mr Milton Campbell which is a blues player from down in the Delta of Mississippi um this song is entitled walls [Music] thank you [Music] are you here [Music] don't talk they never talk if doors could say who turned the knob when he's awake [Music] doors don't talk they never talk if calls could say who's been inside [Music] they never talk well or in a world of trouble with me if things ever told on me my love life would be true I'm guilty how about you if things ever talk that way ain't no telling what they might say it's your grand [Music] don't talk they never talk hey [Music] awesome bracelet ladies and gentlemen well I'm in a world of trouble we'd be if they've ever told on me
234my love life will be through I'm guilted how about you if things ever talk that way ain't no Talent what they might say it's you glad oh thank you [Music] they never talk his jewels get saved well they've been when you claim you were just visiting a friend ain't your plan [Music] shoes don't talk they never talk you know me don't talk trouble [Music] oh yeah [Music] foreign I guess you all wonder what this is I'll tell you a little story about this particularly guitar back in 1946 one of my older brothers one of the guitar my father was very religious and it had 13 children he had no money and he was very religious as in the southern baptist and Southern Baptist didn't lie guitars in the house back in those days they claimed
235that there were instrument that played music for the devil so I'm here feeling devilish today and and I brought you a gasoline can guitar that my brother created back in 1946. this is a authentic gasoline can and it is metal nowadays it's rough to find a metal can you'll find it most likely in the antique shop uh with some old folk like me so uh we're going to play a little music here on this Cannon and uh if we don't do good then you all have to say something about it but we're going to do the best we can and we're going to do this song right here for Mr Albert King he's a gentleman from over in the Delta as well I had great time with him over the years and all these folk
236that was great Blues musicians uh they're almost extinct now and thank God for keeping me here to keep their legacies alive this song is entitled don't lie to me [Music] thank you [Music] coming out to love me long time ago said a fella that you got you know warning no more don't you lie to me won't you lie to me [Music] if you make me mad I'll get evil as a man can be [Music] I just can't stand your Evil Hearted Woman in a blind man don't you lie to me [Music] don't you lie to me you make me mad I'll get evil as a man can be [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] told me that you love me long time ago said a fellow that you
237got you don't want him no more don't you a lot of money [Music] don't you lie to me you make me mad I'll get evil as a man give me [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Laughter] [Music] thank you so much thank you this is a song came from a gentleman that uh I really respected always will respect he treated me with specialty this gentleman I started playing with him in 1966. you know uh he had other band members but he always had them driving and a different car than he rode in and he selected me to ride with him all the time this song we're gonna do and I hope you all enjoyed it comes from Mr Muddy Waters Blues Band and This song is called hoochie coochie man all right that makes sense doing
238it [Laughter] foreign [Music] woman told my mother it's gonna be the greatest man alive and now I'm a man May 21 . I wanna tell you darling I'd love to have a lots of fun I'm a man I spilled him [Music] that's man no B [Music] old child why that's Spanish boy oh yeah [Music] oh yeah [Music] when I was a little young boy we're down at days of Fire [Music] somebody told my mother the greatest man alive [Music] I tell you people [Music] loud and clear [Music] I'm your hoochie coochie man and now I'm here when I'm here [Music] everybody knows I'm here [Music] everybody knows I'm here [Music] on the seventh hour on a seventh day on the south of the night the selling doctor say he's a born for good luck and
239now you see I got seven hundred dollars and don't you mess with me now I'm here everybody knows I'm here [Music] good to me everybody knows I'm here Austin Brazier ladies and gentlemen [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] I got a black cat bone [Music] I got a Mojo too I got a John the conqueroo I'm gonna mess with you gonna make burning women Lead Me by my hand and the world is Gonna Know [Music] everybody knows I'm here where where's everybody knows I'm here [Music] hahaha I'm so happy you all are here today and I'm so grateful to be here are there any questions anyone would like to ask about the Blues big Burton oh don't never mind just ask me any question then ask me that question he's going to
240come down with a microphone for you Caleb um is it okay if it's about another musician that I was wondering if you met um were you ever able to meet Elvis or no Evan Bishop Elvis Presley have you ever met honestly yes I got a chance to meet Elvis in Hollywood uh I was just walking around with a friend of mine in Hollywood back in 1973 and Elvis was on the street there at Hollywood at Sunset and Vine and my friend screamed at him as they were passing by and his drive his draw his driver stopped and they got out of the car and we powwowed right there in the street uh he was a very great guy and uh unfortunately we lost him but uh thank God for me being here to keep all
241of those great musicians legacies alive what are your thoughts on Bill Withers what are my thoughts on what Bill Withers Bill Withers I got a chance to play with Bill Withers 1971 uh out in California we played the Troubadour many many times and all around the area of Los Angeles I didn't get a chance to travel with him but we played around the region in 1971. we've got one back here in the back okay okay um I want to know how did you get into playing the Blues how did I get into the Blues was that the question well um growing up as a kid we had a little portable radios lying around and that we kept hid from our parents and late evenings like about 10 o'clock 11 o'clock at night we would tune
242into a station from Nashville Tennessee the call Little letters were w-l-a-c out of Nashville Tennessee and at that time they were pushing 50 000 Watts on an AM station and we could get it over 300 miles to Nashville from my house and that's how I got into the blues then I decided I wanted to meet some of the blues singers that I was listening to I started research and found out their lift in Chicago in Detroit over in Memphis and I decided I would go to Chicago and I got a chance to meet a lot of musicians and I I just love it because I had the opportunity and I'm going to do my best to keep everyone's legacy's life yes are there any songs in particular that influenced you more than others speak that
243again yes uh The Roots blues songs mostly are was my most influential uh songs um lightning Hopkins was one of the people from way back in the day and uh um Hal and wolf uh Elmo James um just many many musicians back then um which isn't around anymore unfortunately we have lost majority of Our Roots Blues entertainers uh I get a chance to listen to them and if you all ever get a chance and have the ability of the uh capabilities of tuning in to Blues field that's BB King's station that he left us uh to listen to blues uh it comes out of Washington D.C and it's entitled bluesville and if you all get the opportunity to please tune in and get familiar with the blues because Blues was the very first music and
244they tell you a story about people that has done different things people that has experienced other people the things that have had happened to them so these songs are all written from experiences of everyday life of people so please if you get a chance listen to bluesville what was your biggest challenge in when becoming a magician my bad my biggest challenge was to try to learn how to play without my father catching me we used to have a farm and uh we would go down to the barn while my father wasn't home and finding the guitar and sit down in the barn and try to learn to play things and uh uh that was a very large challenge because we didn't have a professional guitar my brother made the one that we were playing at
245that particular time so that was my challenge yes go ahead he got a chance to hear me play but it was at uh life he got a chance to listen to songs that I had uh played with other musicians um I I got on the road out of early very early age I was tutored through high school and I started playing music at 10 years old and I got on the road at the age of 15. so uh he didn't get a chance to listen to me as much as many of the other members of my family TV show TV shows that I was on back in those days uh was basically uh Soul Train I I was Associated producer for soul train from 1971 to 1975 out in California uh we recorded from Hollywood
246California Mac I got to ask you and and I I've enjoyed getting to know your music the last few months and I knew about your background with soul train but um what is your connection to the theme song from Sanford and Son Well um I was working with a very great uh producer uh Quincy Jones and uh here were producing a lot of songs for different people at that time and I got a chance to work on the Sanford and Son a show and I had the great pleasure of playing one of the baselines for uh the theme for Sanford and Son please [Applause] all right where did you get your shoes well we saw them on the way up site and uh my wife saw them and she decided I needed a pair of
247those so uh she ordered them off the website so they they happened to have Arnold on them and my name is Mac Arnold thanks for asking and by the way uh from the bass playing uh I'll sum it up with saying uh hey uh Max Hightower he'd catch his own real good um I had an unfortunate accident that uh took my spine out so I'm gonna have to have that fixed until then I'm not allowed to pick up anything no heavier than five pounds so uh Max I won't like you all to give Max a big round of applause for doing a great job [Applause] dizzy dizzy yeah he came in uh back in February our uh drama that's been playing with us uh most of the time for the past 17 years passed away
248on the stage and uh dizzy dizzy stepped in so if there's a big round of applause yeah [Applause] and Austin brazier I think Leo offender had him in the shop when he made the first guitar playing God his my guitar player for 17 years Austin brazier [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so right now ladies and gentlemen uh I'm gonna turn it over to the master right there back could could you uh you got time for one more yes we do and and then we'll have a couple minutes for some of the students to come on up and take a quick picture with you that'll work okay we're gonna do another song from a gentleman that I used to love gracing the stage with the really was yeah it is acts down uh he played a guitar that
249he loved calling Lucille this songs comes from Mr BB King it's entitled rock man [Music] um rock me baby [Music] Rock Me All Night Long [Music] I want to ride me baby like my back and got no bone roll me baby like you're all away it will oh baby baby [Music] you know how it makes me feel yeah baby [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] listening [Music] bro me baby like a roller Wagon Wheel [Music] oh baby baby [Music] I want to roll baby [Music] you know how you make me feel [Music] right baby rock me all day long [Music] I want to rock me baby me like my bike I got no phone [Music] thank you so much Mr Mac Arnold and a blade full of Blues yes [Applause] Scott Moore
250GTV crew give it up for him rocking it big time up there Mr Dustin Smith and lights and sound listen up Mac is back tonight for a full 90-minute concert at seven o'clock Mrs Hager is right back there wait for me Mrs Hager okay she's going to be in our bookstore students get buy one get one free tickets everyone else