When I was younger and a bit more robust, I would hit the road for weeks at a time, giving speeches all over America and Canada…

The late Ben Franklin, Sr. formed what came to be called the Knife & Fork Circuit at the turn of the century. No…not this one, the last one.

He traveled around America visiting small towns. He would go into the community and convince the village elders that they should form what amounted to social clubs that would meet once a month and feature a speaker.

Mr. Franklin's role was to help form the club and then provide the clubs with speakers for their events. His contract required the club to purchase their talent through The Associated Clubs, his speaker's bureau.

When Mr. Franklin went on to that great banquet chamber in the sky, his son, Ben Franklin, Jr., who himself was quite an accomplished speaker, took over the reins. It was the younger Mr. Franklin who helped launch my speaking career.

A number of his clubs locally in Darlington and Sumter, South Carolina learned of me and hired me directly to speak in 1978. I was completely unaware of Mr. Franklin's role but later found out that he should have been commissioned on the fee I received.

Being new to the business, I did the moral thing. I made copies of all the checks I had ever received from his clubs and cut him a check for 25%, which would have been his commission had they booked me through him.

Don't get too excited with my noble gesture. My speaking fee in those days was a whopping $250, but my token action was perceived by Ben Jr. and the most honorable thing that had ever happened to him as an agent. In fact, he spoke about it at various speaker bureau conventions. Sadly, a lot of those dogs eat other dogs in that business, so for someone to do the right thing was principled and admirable.

From my perspective, it was just good business. After all, why would I want to stick the guy for $62.50? As a result of that token action, Ben Jr. booked me hundreds of times over the years.

The deal he had with his clubs was that he would bring in at least one or two major headliners like Paul Harvey, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Earl Nightingale and would fill the rest of the schedule with "nobody's" like yours truly. They could not afford the Paul Harvey's of the world, but by pooling their monies, they could plug in the lower cost speakers and give the club more value over the long haul.

Most of these clubs were staunchly conservative groups off the right side of the isle, i.e. largely Republican and mostly Caucasian.

Ben Jr. would put me on the road for weeks at a time. I would always have to speak in a tux, which meant that every few days I had to find local cleaners to launder my threads.

Some of the places to which I traveled required that I either take a bus or rent a car. Some of the towns were so small that they had no local hotel. I remember staying in the home of the local club President in Minot, North Dakota.

While it was physically taxing, it was the most amazing experience I have ever had in my entire speaking career. I got to visit places like Wenatchee, Washington and Cape Gerardo, Missouri. I would go to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and to Victoria, Texas. My only regret was that my wife Christine could not accompany me on the tour. She was busy raising my three sons. She is a much better "tourist" than I.

I remember I spoke on the campus of the Oregon State University in Corvallis one night. The next night I had to be in Baker, Oregon, clear across the state. I got up early to make my flight only to find that we were "fogged in" for the day, not an uncommon occurrence in the great northwest. I couldn't take a chance of another flight leaving in time for me to get to Baker, so I rented a car and hit the road, grumbling to myself.

About an hour into the drive, the fog lifted and I found myself witnessing the most gorgeous scenery I've observed in my life, the gorge along the Columbia River. I'll never get to see what heaven looks like but if it's close to that picture, I need to clean up my act and try to get out of Purgatory (a Catholic half-way house) to get to see it, because that's what I got to see that day.