District 57 Toastmasters
May 14, 2011
USS Hornet, Alameda, California
I served as the Conference Chair (producer) for this event. Our headliner was US Airforce pilot Lt. Col. Rob “Waldo” Waldman (“The Wingman”), so the District 57 Education Director Dave Oriss chose for the venue the USS Hornet, the same US Navy aircraft carrier that had retrieved the astronauts from the Pacific Ocean after their trip to the moon (the first moon trip ever!) on July 24, 1969. After its famous trip, the Hornet was decommissioned, anchored in Alameda, California, and turned into a floating museum.
The only place on the ship that was big enough for our 400+ attendee conference mainstage was the hangar, and the Hornet had no event equipment, so I built the event from scratch on bare-bones budget with the help of a team of 18 sub-chairs and coordinators, and 40+ other volunteers. There were several technical challenges that arose: The ship was not ADA-compliant so we had to use the platform-hoist (that usually brings up planes and heavy equipment) to lift our disabled folks from the dock into the hangar. I had two planes relocated and the stage moved to be in front of the repair shop so I could bring in two large rear-projection screens and have enough room for the 17ft throw the projectors required. The saltwater environment had corroded the Hornet’s audio equipment, so we had to bring our own. The weather was unseasonably cold and rainy two days before the conference and turned the ship into an icebox, so we had to deploy all twenty of the Hornet’s space heaters to keep everyone from turning into Toastmaster-shaped ice cubes.
We had record attendance and were within budget, despite having to order more food than the catering company had originally anticipated, and we had to gallop through the program and shoo folks off the ship in order to be done right at 6pm and clear our stuff out in time for a group of Boy Scouts to come in for their haunted sleepover… BUT we did it! The post-conference survey indicated high satisfaction levels with the venue and the program, many of the attendees were former military and came in full or partial uniform, we had a youth colorguard open the conference, and everyone had a lot of fun, as you can see from the pictures. <grin>
