PRESIDENT’S SPEECH: Strive to succeed!

By Keith R. Lemons

Strive to succeed! Overcoming obstacles is key to our success.

I think it is important to get the measure of a person who is going to lead the association, and I would like to give you a little background on who I am and how overcoming obstacles has been a lifelong journey.

I was meant to be a pirate. I was born with a condition in my right leg called KTS, Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome, a form of aterio-venous malformations with abnormal bone growth. The treatment at the time, as suggested by the expert doctors, was amputation at the hip. I guess I was meant to have a peg leg as well as an eye patch. My parents disagreed and found a doctor who would operate on the malformations. I was in the hospital seven times with 24 surgical sites on my leg before I was six years old.

I always tried to push my physical boundaries, and my parents supported me for the most part.

I graduated high school as a junior and enrolled at Casper College to be a music major because I love choral music. I met my wife, Kathi, on a warm-up hike on Casper Mountain for a 50-mile backpacking trip I was going on. Kathi and I hit it off immediately. We were both music majors and drum corps nuts. She had just moved from Indiana to Casper, and I had just moved from Lander, Wyo. She unfortunately moved back to Indiana State University and I stayed at Casper College. She wrote me a nice letter. I hated writing letters. I kept her letter in my Bible, intending to write her back. Oops.

Well, I was 17 at this time, if that’s any excuse.

Kathi came back to Casper during freshman Christmas break. I saw her in this red, gold, and black sweater dress with that glossy black hair and beautiful eyes, and I made up my mind that she was going to be my wife then and there. We dated for two weeks while she was on break, and I popped the question three weeks into our dating life. Sort of. She thought I had, and I was okay with that.

I married the love of my life 11 months later on December 28, 1977. She is my rock and my everything.

Funny story: Kathi had to sign my permission slip to go on a band trip after we came back from our honeymoon because she was of age, and I was not. She was 19; I was 18. That’s some of the backstory.

Now the backstory of my professional career. My dad was a fantastic court reporter, a natural. He typed over 125 words a minute on a Remington manual typewriter and he went through court reporting school in one year. In 1951 he was one of only three machine reporters in the state of Wyoming. He quickly added the CP [Certificate of Proficiency] and Merit Reporter to his arsenal. I’ve seen his notes. They weren’t copper plated; they were gold plated. He was always involved in association work, and it rubbed off on me. He told me to work hard, take pride in your work, and always give back.

Before our wedding, my dad took me aside and helped me realize that if I wanted to live a good life with a strong earning potential, I needed to be a court reporter. But I would have to, once again, overcome obstacles because being a court reporter was no joke and only the best make it. So after our semester ended in Casper College, Kathi and I moved to Denver, and I enrolled in Denver Academy of Court Reporting to study the machine.

Turns out I wasn’t a natural – not even close. My dad had a hard time understanding that. After three years I jobbed out because dad’s partners wanted me back in Wyoming immediately.

For the next three years I learned on the job how difficult it could be. I had over 2,000 pages backlogged. In those days you used a Dictaphone to dictate to your typist, and it was slow going. I was reporting oil and gas technical cases, Bureau of Mine Reclamation cases involving evapotranspiration – and everything else under the sun.

I. Hated. It.

I was a terrible reporter. My notes were barely legible. I relied on my memory to fill in the gaps. I suffered from depression. One night at about 3 a.m., I was taking a hot bath because my leg hurt badly, and I couldn’t sleep. I had an epiphany at that point and had a decision to make: Get better or quit.

I decided to get better. I changed the way I learned to practice, which was by forcing a stroke for everything I heard. That resulted in a lot of shadings and bad outlines. There was very little outside practice material available, as there was no such thing as the internet to look for material.

I chose to write every stroke cleanly. That was it. That was the lynchpin to my career. I didn’t get better right away, though. I still hated it. I did get better over the course of the next few years. My notes started to look like my dad’s – sort of – but I got better. During those first four years, I failed the RPR six times. I never typed it up because I didn’t feel like I had written it well enough to pass. The seventh time I took the RPR, Kathi took the car with our eight-month-old daughter, Sarah, to the mall and I had nothing better to do until she came back to pick me up, so I typed it up and submitted it. Six weeks later, I was notified I passed the RPR. That was when I understood persistence pays off. You cannot overcome an obstacle if you don’t face it.

I was a freelancer for the first five years of my career, then I became the official reporter for the 9th Judicial District in Lander, Wyo., right after we welcomed my son, Scott.

When I became an official, I saw Jan Davis, RDR, CRR – a reporter for Wyoming Reporting Service – give a demonstration of realtime reporting.

Realtime changed my life.

That’s when I fell in love with court reporting. I took seminars, bought equipment, learned how to write for my dictionary, got good. I took the CRR in 1995 and just missed. I taught myself to practice effectively, and I took the CRR again in 1996 and became a CRR. This is all because I decided to get better.

Twenty-four years later, I joined the practice group led by Rich Germosen, FAPR, RDR, CRR, with the intention of cleaning up my dictionary and keeping it in top form. I practiced with that group for 100 consecutive days numerous times until I had a procedure at the hospital in which I could not complete the 100 days I was in. I came back and started over because practicing means staying clean!

In my professional volunteer life, I was the president for both Wyoming and later Tennessee associations. I helped both associations rewrite their constitutions and bylaws and, in Tennessee, to fight battles in the legislature.

During my presidency at TCRA, my friend Trish Smith, RPR, and I wrote the initial draft of our licensure legislation because of some shenanigans between a reporter and a party defendant. We were told we were going to be regulated; so we chose licensure as the method of how we dealt with it. Our licensure passed the next fiscal year, a nearly unheard-of short length of time, and that action has helped protect reporters for years.

In my time as a volunteer for NCRA, I was the chair of the Scopist Task Force, worked on many committees, including Technology, was the C&B Committee Chair for five years, rewrote the NCRA C&B, which did not pass, and I was the Co-Chair of the Realtime System Administrator Committee.

In continuing with my dad’s advice to give back, I interviewed for the Director position unsuccessfully nine times. I decided I was not going to go for it again when I was urged to put my name in the hat for a two-year term. I won against a bunch of other members who were nominated to run from the floor that year.

I gave a little speech, and I won the most votes because I promised to keep the cowboy culture I was raised around in Wyoming — to be loyal and ride for the brand. I have kept that promise and will keep that until the day I meet the Lord. I have never forgotten my roots or the hard work that has allowed me to reap the rewards of my craft.

I do a disservice to you all to not let you know who I am and where I come from. I’m fairly private about my medical condition, mainly because it never occurs to me. My mom never let me say, “Why me?” about my vascular condition in my leg during my childhood. She’d only say, “Why not you?”

And I have handled it that way my whole life by overcoming obstacles.

During the years that I had been reporting, I had been in the hospital three times for deep vein thrombosis, or DVTs as they are called, and once for a “weird vascular problem.” In 2010 I developed some issues when we came to the NCRA Conference & Expo in Las Vegas because I was hypovolemic from a breakthrough tumor. I was about half full. We stayed for the remainder of the Conference because that was the year I was made a Fellow.

After we got home, and after a couple trips to the ER, it was determined that I had a carcinoid tumor in my stomach, a malignant form of NETs cancer, and I had a major surgical procedure to remove the tumors.

In 2020, just as COVID-19 hit everyone, my tumors came back and I have had nonsurgical treatment for it. I’m a Stage IV NETs cancer patient with a stable prognosis for years to come if I continue my treatments.

I retired due to complications of the chemo and other drugs I had to take, after losing the use of my right eye because it doesn’t want to play with the team. I can’t write for long without getting seasick. Nobody wants to deal with a seasick pirate in depositions or trials.

My faculties are good, just not my balance. I promise you I will still be that same cowboy/now pirate that I was when I was elected on the floor. I believe in the mission of NCRA. I want to do what is best for all members and for the continuation of stenographic court reporting and captioning being the gold standard of making any record.

We have had a disagreement in the past few weeks about whether I’m qualified to captain this ship for a year. I’m not sure if anyone really is. But as long as we have our Executive Director Dave Wenhold, CAE, PLC; our staff; and our board of directors – the finest group of people I know – to help the way, I believe I can be. I intend to steer the NCRA ship through the rocky shoals and find safe harbor in this time of great upheaval.

One last thing: I promise never to accept one single solitary dime from any AI or ER entity, and I will not trade on my position as a former president of NCRA. I’m with you every step of the way.

You see, I’m both a cowboy and a pirate. I ride for the brand and sail for the ship. I am loyal to our cause and will fight all the obstacles in our way. We are the very best in the record-making process and I want us to share the riches of our honest endeavors and move forward together.

Thank you.

Keith R. Lemons, FAPR, RPR, CRR (Ret.), is the 2024-2025 NCRA President.

This speech was given during the 2024 NCRA Conference & Expo. Some edits were made to better identify people mentioned in the speech.