Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Raymond Lingenfelter, a junior at Sweet Home High School, has been named the Boys and Girls Club of Sweet Home Youth of the Year.
On Friday, he competed in the state Youth of the Year competition but did not win the honor.
Lingenfelter had to submit nine essays, two written by him and the rest written by others about him; and he had to write a speech about what the Boys and Girls Club meant to him.
“When I started there, we were moving around a lot,” Lingenfelter said. “It (the club) was a structure … It wasn’t going anywhere.”
Lingenfelter moved to Sweet Home from California with his mother, Lynn, and sister when he was in the second grade. They moved three times during their first two years in Sweet Home.
“It was just like a foundation,” Lingenfelter said of the club. “I built everything from there up.”
He got involved with the club’s sports programs, and since then he has worked there as “gym manager,” and volunteered with a variety of programs, including the Jamboree-related club fund-raising efforts, the Christmas tree sale, umpiring and the auction.
He said the club helped him academically, and he is involved with Key Club as an outgrowth of his Boys and Girls Club activities.
During the state competition, he noticed that all of the speeches were “tear jerkers,” Lingenfelter said. The first person to give a speech was a freshman and an actress. She got about three sentences in and started to cry. Lingfelter said he was different.
“I made them laugh,” Lingenfelter said. “I felt weird. I felt out of place. I wore a red shirt. Mine (speech) was really light-hearted. It was sad. It was a true story.”
Part of his goal was to push his audience that way, “but then I’d make a joke,” Lingenfelter said. On the way out, Lingenfelter said, one guy stopped him and told Lingefelter that his speech was the best.
“He couldn’t miss me because I was wearing a bright red shirt,” Lingenfelter noted.
Lingenfelter had six note cards for his speech, but he got up to speak and had only five, he said. So he winged the end of the speech.
In his speech, Lingenfelter talked about his parents’ divorce and the “disappearance” of his father, how it left him “with anger, confusion and rage so intense it followed me everywhere I went. It was my pillow when I slept, my backpack when I left for school, my shadow on the playground. Then it shifted. It became real. It became someone. It became my friends. At this point I had to do something.”
That’s where the club came in, Lingfelter said in his speech. “I had two of the best years of baseball in my life. I remember both coaches, (holding them) in the highest of regards my memory will allow…. I looked up to both of them. Both of them being male fathers, that was my first step to recovery.”
He made friendships through sports, Lingfelter said. “It made me happy to know I had friends, people who cared about my well-being…
“I made great friends and those who I believe to be the greatest staff members. I felt secure again. They put up the detour sign and redirected the road I was on.
“I’ve moved on to be a top student in my class (ready to graduate with an honors diploma), to be somebody who can influence others by my actions, someone who can go on to college and be successful in life, all of this because the Boys and Girls Club showed me the way… They helped me straighten out my life.”
Lingenfelter said the competition was “tons of fun” and thanked Program Director Bridgette Horlacher for taking him to Salem for the competition.
Lingenfelter said he enjoys math and science. He plans to attend college and major in math with a minor in science. He wants to work with electrical appliances, designing them or something else related. He is interested in industrial engineering.
At school, he plays baseball and basketball. He enjoys sports year round, including summer basketball; and he also likes traveling and getting out of Sweet Home.
“Any opportunity to be outside, I’m there,” Lingenfelter said.