Charles L. Ficklin

              Figure
Charles L.Ficklin
Redpath





CHARLES L. FICKLIN

Editor = Lecturer



I
N CHAS. L. FICKLIN is given to the Lyceum a new man with new ideas.  He gets away from the beaten paths of thought and discovers to his audiences thought realms heretofore unexplored by them.




Reports on his present season's work are most enthusiastic and the prevailing thought in all letters and comments received by the Bureau is that his lecture is 
new,
 
different,
 
broad-minded,
 
uplifting,
 
unique and to the point,
 
should be heard in every community.




Mr. Ficklin speaks with confidence, with authority and directness on the subjects in hand.  He is in dead earnest.




Mr. Ficklin is a newspaper man who writes as he thinks, 
logically
; who speaks as he writes, 
clearly;
 and who gives life to his thoughts, because of his intense, vigorous personality.




The people of any community will be benefited and uplifted by Mr. Ficklin's lectures.  The lawyer, the editor, and other professional men can drink deep of his philosophy; everyone can laugh, think and resolve to go to the tasks of the next day with firmer walk and determination after hearing him.




Mr. Ficklin lives in his daily life the ideals he talks from the platform.  His life measures true to the highest of Lyceum standards, and the Bureau takes great pleasure in presenting him to its patrons.




THE MANAGEMENT.




Charles L. Ficklin is equipped by nature and training to meet the demands of the platform.  He began to make public addresses at the age of fourteen.  He has been seventeen years a newspaper man, and life has passed before him in aggressive review.  On the platform and in the editorial room he grapples with the basic problems.  It is his mission to shuck life of its externalities and move straight to the heart issues.  In all his lectures he goes to the fundamentals.  He is direct, definite, full of action.  What he says is shot through with life and crowned with the temperamental glow of a tense and earnest personality.  His lectures are strong and full of a fine fitness because he has lived them:  they square with his life and they come forth with a natural force and charm that artificiality never has.





Men and Machinery



M
EN AND MACHINERY
 is a survey of the man of this time in the grip of social apparatus he has set up.  Is the big industrial system an expression of the men who work in it or have the men who work in it become an expression of the system?




Does the war machinery of the nations serve or riddle the people?




Do the people run the social machinery, or does the social machinery run the people?




How much is the man on top of the religious, political, business machinery, and how much is the machinery on top of the man?




Does the dominion of apparatus over the man put him in ruts, narrow his vision, take the concrete out of his backbone, cripple the whole spirit of service?  Does it produce dough men and subvert the mission of civilization?




These and allied questions are vigorously put and met in Mr. Ficklin's lecture on Men and Machinery.  It helps the drayman get on top of his luggage.  It lifts the soul of the meat man above the domain of bones, blood, saws and kraut barrels.  It pulls the citizen out of the tangle of political apparatus.  It hauls the preacher away from stale paraphernalia.  It is a clean, potent call to clear thinking and rugged manhood.





The Pre-eminence of Jesus



H
ERE is a lecture on perhaps what might be termed an old subject, yet in no part of its construction has Mr. Ficklin employed 
hand-me-down
 arguments.  Instead he brings to light some entirely new and practical ideas which he throws alongside the so-called scientific discoveries of modern materialists.  As a business man, and in a pleasing, common sense and robust way he pierces through the fallacies of the dirt philosophers who are now trying to straddle and dominate the literature, the schools, the religion and the thought of America.  The lecture is at once an assault on the clay temple men have sought to set up, and a vibrant plea for the vital supremacy of Jesus, the Son of God, in the heart, the school, the church, the nation.





Red Blood and the White Way



T
HEY say that blood will tell.  How much will tell?  They say that your path is fixed by heredity and environment.  Are you a pool ball in a game of life and is your course determined by the pool cue of heredity and the pool balls of environment?  Have the heroes of heredity and environment dogma carried their teaching to a ridiculous length?  When little Bill stole the duck, did little Bill start his own meanness and do his own meanness, or was it all because little Bill's grandmother's great-uncle's second cousin stole a goose back in Virginia in 1795?  What about the soundness and omnipotence of the slogan, 
It's in the blood
?




Do the proper standards of life grow up out of the blood, the atmosphere and the much talked and much dignified 
viewpoints
 of men?  Has an overtowering false dignity been settled down upon the red blood impulses and the viewpoints of man in this day?  Are principles and standards just football things and dough things to be shaped or kicked about or molded by human viewpoints—without definite form and void?  Or did God, who fixed the mountain's base and who fixed the north star in the physical universe fix also unchanging standards and eternal right in the moral universe?  Is there a fixed and shining White Way of life in which the man can walk and in which he must walk if he is to be worth while?




These questions are pressed and answered in Mr. Ficklin's lecture on Red Blood and the White Way.






ENDORSEMENTS



A fine orator.—


Rhodes, Iowa, Tribune.




Mr. Ficklin had a full house and certainly delighted his audience.
—J. A. Gunsolley, Treas.  Graceland College, Lamoni, Iowa.




His deliverances make sentiment.  A splendid speaker and a fine fellow.
—Dexter, Missouri, Statesman.




Unique and different from the rest of the lectures we have had.  He pleased his audience.
—O. H. King, Fairbank, Iowa.




Mr. Ficklin has brought to the rostrum a power of speech and a mastery of constructive statement that places him in the front rank of the speakers of the day.
—John M. Atkinson, chairman of the Utilities Commission of Missouri.




The address delivered by Charles L. Ficklin was the best that has been heard in this section for years.  Mr. Ficklin held his audience captive for an hour and twenty minutes.
—Arthur Huff, County Clerk, Ironton, Missouri.




One of the very best attractions we have had in our new building at St. Joseph was the lecture of Mr. Charles L. Ficklin.  He treated his subject in a masterful way and held his audience in rapt attention to the close.
—W. T. Lawhead, Y. M. C. A., St. Joseph, Mo.




Mr. Ficklin gave us one of the best lectures it has ever been the privilege of our people to hear.
—Mrs. Robert Nelson, Blooming Prairie, Minnesota.




Enclosed find check for the Chas.  L. Ficklin lecture.  I want to express my own and the community's satisfaction in the lecture.  It was unique and to the point, and to my mind, a message needed by the public now.
—G. M. Squires, Gilmore City, Iowa.




Mr. Ficklin gave us his lecture, 
Men and Machinery,
 and I will say that he is a man your Lyceum should be proud of.  He certainly held his audience at all times, and his lecture was the best I have ever heard.
—A. G. Shupe, Supt. of Schools, Oakville, Iowa.




Editor Ficklin possesses an exceptional faculty in making descriptions.  His lucid word pictures could not fail to make an indelible impression upon the minds of his auditors, and the ideas thus clothed found ready access to the open minded.—


The Record, Rolfe, Iowa.




Charles L. Ficklin appeared here last night and successfully delivered his lecture, 
Men and Machinery.
  We were very much pleased with him personally, and the broad-minded ideas expressed in his lecture could not help but be uplifting to everyone who heard him.
—E. B. Hauser, Merchant, Melbourne, Iowa.




Mr. Chas. L. Ficklin was with us Saturday night and all who heard him were well pleased.  He speaks along a different line from any other speaker I have heard, speaking on things as they are.  Every community in America should hear this lecture.
—R. W. McNie, Cashier Farmers Savings Bank, Atkins, Iowa.




Charles I. Ficklin is a dandy.  He had the house at his command from start to finish and every one I have seen this morning says it was the best lecture we have ever had presented to us in this town.
—C. C. Crawford, Mantorville, Minn.




The lecture by Charles Ficklin at the hall Thursday night, the second number of the Lyceum course, was a decided success from start to finish.  Mr. Ficklin is a very able and entertaining speaker and his lecture, 
Men and Machinery,
 had the audience captivated throughout.—


Mantorville, Minnesota, Express.




One of the best popular lectures heard here in recent years was given by Charles L. Ficklin Monday evening.  Mr. Ficklin makes no attempt to use the tricks of oratory.  He is too much in earnest for that.—


Hawkeye, Iowa, Beacon.




He takes undue advantage of his audience.  By the power of personal magnetism and charm of humor he gains complete control over his hearers; and then without a moment's warning he mauls them with sledge-hammer blows of stubborn facts.  His clear-cut sentences come with unaffected sincerity and dramatic power.  Maysville, the Mother of Chautauquas, is proud of Charles L. Ficklin, her representative on the lyceum platform.
—D. H. Holloway, Superintendent Maysville Public Schools and Secretary Lyceum Association.




We are pleased to learn that Hon.  C. L. Ficklin, the brilliant editor of the DeKalb County Herald, has invaded the Chautauqua-Lyceum field.  He has a splendid grasp of present day problems and can talk about them in a way that will be mighty interesting and helpful to the hearer.  For several years he has been much in demand as a speaker in political campaigns, and he will be just as popular in Chautauqua circles.—


Liberty, Missouri, Advance.




Chas. L. Ficklin was with us last night in his lecture, 
Men and Machinery,
 into which he has woven a most wonderful scope of thought relative to the individual and the machine.  Mr. Ficklin has in this lecture a broad, deep subject, full of meat and spice, and holds his audience in a deep study, with due reverence to the Almighty.
—J. G. Houts, Plainfield Savings Bank, Plainfield, Iowa.




From the familiar and commonplace Ficklin constructs new mechanisms, erects new structures.  He gave us that miraculous thing—a new view of life, a new view of ourselves; the view the other fellow has, provided he is sufficiently wise.  The lecture is the finest, widest resume I have heard of the mechanism of modern industrial and social life.  It is 90 minutes long—and much more than that too short.
—Dr. E. W. Gardner, Webster, Iowa.




The lecture at the Grand last evening by Charles L. Ficklin, a successful Missouri newspaper man, pleased a comparatively large audience.  Choosing as his subject, 
Men and Machinery,
 Mr. Ficklin gave a very intelligent discussion of present day problems.  Speaking with an earnestness and confidence not often found on the Lyceum circuit, Mr. Ficklin discussed the 
machinery
 of the present day industrial world in a lecture brim full of thought and well worked out.  He entered directly into his subject and for over an hour held the entire attention of his audience, which came away satisfied that they had heard something that was well worth their while.—


State Center, Iowa, Enterprise.




ESTABLISHED SINCE 1868
JAMES REDPATH Founder of the Lyceum