Time was, in this land of ours, when public speakers were few and far between; today they are many and underfoot. When any organization decides to hold an annual dinner, it must first recruit a speaker whose name may attract enough customers to help the dinner committee break even. And since the audience are themselves all public speakers, they will be less interested in what the speaker has to say, and more in how he says it; a new technique or a new story is of unusual interest. Having had no other training in public speaking than that which goes along with standing in front of a squad of bluejackets and selling them on hitting the target, my technique was informal, conversational, and flowing. I might have memorized and carefully prepared my extemporaneous address, but I tried not to reveal the fact. And when, after giving my air-power theme the particular twist that belonged with the particular audience, some of them came up to congratulate me, I soon discovered that few ever remembered the words, though some recalled the music. With this in mind, it is often more effective to slant the speech at the newsmen or the newsreaders; the listening audience is only waiting to get it over with anyway—even as you and I. Meanwhile our several companies used their own resources to carry our story to their own localities where workers and businessmen were interested in the survival of the enterprise. Some of this, as Speaker Rayburn had foreseen, percolated back to Washington whether in the form of resolutions by various farm, labor, or business organizations, or just by letter or word of mouth. And so, with the hand of some government aviation agencies against us, we were encouraged by the reception given us by a group of senators and representatives who had come to dinner. At an informal affair arranged to introduce our company presidents to some of the leaders in Congress on aeronautical matters, men who had previously known each other by name only, we divided our guests among small tables at each of which one of our presidents acted as host. Afterward, we called on our guests to speak to us and to our surprise found the burden of their discourse to be something like this: “You fellows have sold the public on air power, what do you think we ought to do about it?” In reply we pointed out that the whole problem was too complex for us; neither we nor anyone else could have the answers. We thought the matter deserved an airing before a public commission like the presidential advisory committee of twenty years ago.