Valley couple wins Toastmasters speaking honors

MAT-SU — Two Valley Toastmasters had an exciting day Oct. 19 demonstrating their public speaking skills. Bret Kolb won the annual competition for best Table Topics speaker at the fall conference of the Yukon-Alaska Council of Toastmasters in Anchorage. His wife, Meschelle Kolb, took second place in a very challenging competition for Best Humorous Speech at the same conference.

The Kolbs joined Palmer Toastmasters Club, which meets Tuesday evenings from 5:45 to 6:45 p.m. in the MTA Building in Palmer, last April.

The Kolb family moved to Alaska three years ago and is enjoying all the diversity that Alaska has to offer. As a family, they enjoy hunting, fishing and snowmachining. Their children are involved in many sports within the Colony schools. Bret and Meschelle say they joined Toastmasters to improve their public speaking and leadership skills, and they are enjoying the supportive and encouraging atmosphere within Toastmasters.

They are already showing themselves to be skilled and enthusiastic speakers. Table Topics, which Bret won handily, is an impromptu speaking contest. He was given a topic while being introduced and had less than one minute to think of an answer and plan an organized speech about it. The topic was Halloween costumes. After about 15 seconds of planning, he delivered an entertaining and meaningful two and a half minute speech about his family and a favorite homemade cow costume.

Meschelle delivered an extremely funny and instructional speech about wilderness survival. She used a family experience to demonstrate the results of not surveying the terrain, not planning your trip, not accurately assessing the abilities of your group members and listening to your mother-in-law.

She was one of eight excellent speakers in a challenging competition that kept the audience fully entertained.

Winston Burbank, a member of the Anchorage Advanced Toastmasters club, won the Humorous Speech Contest with a speech about the dangers of mixing microwave ovens with curious engineering students. The third-place winner was Michael Meeks. Doug McCormack took second place in the Table Topics contest and Justine Bishop was third. All participants were members of Alaska Toastmasters clubs who had won earlier contests at the club and area levels.

For more information, interested community members can visit palmer.toastmastersclubs.org or call Vicki Kluever at 539-7111.