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A Laugh a Minute

Those at the Chamber banquet bewildered until they realize joke's on them

By Dan Wallach
The Enterprise
October 24, 2003

BEAUMONT - Chamber of Commerce audiences attending previous Spindletop Award dinners have been taken to outer space with astronaut Jerry Linenger and to the bottom of the sea with explorer Rober Ballard.

They've been taken to the top of Mount Everest in an inpirational tale spun by leukemia survivor and climber Alan Hobson.

Thursday evening, the audience simply was taken.

A rumpled, hulking, fast-talking man with a crunchy, peanut-buttery Georgia accent - introduced as some sort of economic advisor to the president - slipped in some of his trademark double talk before some dismally pondered treatise on jobs and money could take hold.

And the audience members began to look at one another, mystified.

Jim Rich, president of the chamber and safely up on the dais with all the other big shots of the night, must have loved it, having kept his silly secret for most of the year.

He had refused to divulge the identity of the "speaker," intimating some sort of national security.

The man at the podium's real name is Durwood Fincher, and even he admitted he couldn't have made up that one.

His stock in trade is comical double-talk, which is nonsensical, run-on, sort-of words mixed in with what sounds like regular English. And once the audience at the annual event caught on, Fincher shifted into gear.

"When you don't have a lot to say, it doesn't take that long." Fincher said, while some of the tables began laughter that would not stop.

"Mistakes are just stepping stones to failures," he said, dropping out of high gear to draw that one out a bit to let the audience catch up to him.

"Light travels faster than sound. "That's why some people appear to be brilliant until you hear them speak," he said, gearing back up, and hten he pitched a local curve:

"I am the brain behind the Southeast Texas Entertainment Complex," he said. "It goes without saying. Its like buying a suit with two pairs of pants and burning a hole in the coat."

Most speaker's bureau types write into their scripts something like, "Pause for laughter." Fincher tried to beat the air out of the Civic Center with a tour de force of double talk.

"Roughly translated, it's two wrongs don't make a right. Three do."

And, "You are never completely worthless. You can always serve as a bad example. Oh, my Lord. Some of them are actually writing that one down."

Fincher had conducted some of his trademark "man-on-the-street interviews," complete with double-talked questions, to selected members of the audience, many of whom are Hibernia National Bank employees. Hibernia was the recipient of the Spindletop Award.

Unsuspecting marks such as vice president Charles Cox and loan officer Trudy Johnson gamely tried to make a go of it; City Councilwoman Nancy Beaulieu, however, simply took the microphone away from Fincher.

And Eddie and Shari Arnold nervously glanced at one another in shock and horror.

No, it wasn't real.

Hibernia's former regional president Dan Hallmark, who retired in July, accepted the Spindletop Award, joining previous honorees ExxonMobile Corp, Entergy Texas, Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital and Conn's Appliances Inc.