By Clyde Noel

Town Crier Correspondent

Before the speaker had an opportunity to say hello, the Flint Center audience stood and gave Sidney Poitier a long, standing ovation for his 50 years of personal and professional contributions to the world.

The gifted actor and director is generally acknowledged as Hollywood’s first black superstar and was the first black performer to win an Oscar for best actor. In 1964 he became the first black to win an Academy Award for best actor, for his performance in “Lilies of the Field.”

Dick Henning, moderator of the Foothill College Celebrity Forum, introduced Poitier last Tuesday as a person who changed racial attitudes and broke existing racial barriers in cinema, but Poitier spoke only about his life’s experiences.

“What would I have to say to an educated, young audience like you?” Poitier asked. “I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I’ve suddenly come up with all the answers to life’s questions. I introduce myself as a filmmaker, writer and actor, but the point is made - a name and a title do not a person make.”

Poitier gave credit to his parents and his childhood in the Bahamas, with four brothers and two sisters, for equipping him with a sense of right and wrong. The family’s struggles hammered home a lesson he lives by: “Survival requires everybody to carry their weight.”

By the age of 13, he was working full time to support the family.

“My life is a reservoir of experiences and survival,” Poitier said. “There is living proof that trial-and-error is not the way to learn about life. Life is just outside the reach of surface experiences.”

Poitier gave the audience different snapshots of his life starting at the age of 9, and the “wap, wap method.”

“Through my misbehavior and my mother’s tolerance, I learned discipline by the ‘wap along the side of the head’ method,” Poitier said. “My restlessness and her disciplining served as the fundamentals of my life.”

At 15, he was sent to Miami to live with relatives, and at 16, he arrived in New York City with $3 in his pocket. After a short stint in the U.S. Army, he auditioned successfully for the American Negro Theater.

Poitier entered movies in 1950 and turned in a number of memorable supporting performances - “The Blackboard Jungle” (1955), “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961), and “In the Heat of the Night” (1966). He appeared in 56 movies before beginning his second career as a director in the 1970s.

Poitier made no reference to his cinematic career until the question-and-answer period. His speech concentrated on his passionate struggle against adversity and living close to the edge in terms of survival.

Now 75, Poitier said, “When I had my first senior moment it scared me. Now it doesn’t bother me at all.

There are things I can’t do like I used to, but who knows - in the final analysis, maybe the best is yet to come.”

Asked what his three greatest achievements were, Poitier said, “Winning the Academy Award, the Kennedy Center honors and the Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.”