Tuesday, the Columbus Rotary Club held its Lowndes Young Leaders program at Lion Hill Center, where the group honored the graduating class 10th-graders from schools throughout the county.

Each year the program affords a select group of students opportunities for personal growth, team-building and community service. It also gives the students a change to tour a variety of industries and businesses, both locally and regionally. That exposure undoubtedly helps many of the students find a career path that suits their skills and interests at a point still relatively early in the educational process.

As speaker for the event, you could tell that award-winning editorial cartoonists and illustrator Marshall Ramsey gave careful consideration to what he would tell these young leaders.

So, predictably, he built his speech around a dog and a janitor.

The list of inspirational dog/janitor stories is, of course, a long one.

So we will move straight to the message:

In the spring of 1991, Ramsey graduated with honors from the University of Tennessee, where he had already established himself as one of the most promising young cartoonists in the country.

“I thought I was going to be the editorial cartoonists at The New York Times, never mind that The Times hasn’t had an editorial cartoonist since the 1800s,” he said.

His father, being more of a pragmatist, countered by making sure his old bedroom was ready.

“He asked me how many cartoonists there were in the country and I said there were fewer than 200,” Ramsey said. “So he goes the math: 290 million people, 200 jobs. He was right. I did move back into my room.”

He did land a job, however. The honors graduate wound up as a school janitor and confesses he was miserable about it.

“I had a six-month pity party and was pretty miserable to be around,” he said.

Then, he had an epiphany. He was sitting on the back row at church during one of his infrequent visits when the pastor chose for his text the parable of the talents. The short version: A rich man leaves town and entrusts talents (back then, it was a measurement of gold). He gave five talents to one servant, two to another and one to a third. It was the third guy that Ramsey identified with. While the other two servants used their talents as investments, the third servant buried his talent, fearful that he would lose it.

That hit home with the janitor. He was determined that, even as a janitor, he would not “bury his talent” and while his circumstances did not immediately change, his attitude did.

Instead of being the self-pitying janitor, Ramsey became known for his sunny disposition and positive attitude. Soon he had allies, including one who arranged for him to have a job interview for a daily newspaper, which was looking for an editorial cartoonist. He land the job and said goodbye to the janitorial profession. Another person charmed by his good nature, suggested he meet his daughter, who later became his wife and the mother of his three sons.

Skip ahead a few years and the dog enters the picture.

“We got a used dog,” Ramsey said. “I’m not calling him a rescue dog, because he was already on his third owner. He was way past the rescue status.”

Somehow, the little brown dog — they named him Banjo — wriggled his way into the family’s heart. At about 10, Banjo was diagnosed with canine diabetes, requiring twice-a-day insulin shots.

Some time later, when his family was away on vacation while he remained home because of work commitments, he found Banjo near death from a pancreatic disorder. He rushed the dog to the vet, babbling like a child all the way, where the prognosis was not good. At 3:30 that morning, the vet called to inform Ramsey that he better get to the vet’s office — that Banjo wouldn’t last until sun-up. It was there at the vet’s office, that Ramsey whispered softly into Banjo’s ear: “Buddy, if you make it through this, I’ll sign the check no matter how big it is.

“His eyes popped open and three days later he was walking out of there … and I was signing the biggest check I ever wrote.”

Banjo, Ramsey said, had the one essential quality that is often hard to quantify — the little dog had a great spirit.

“What I want you to know,” Ramsey told his audience Tuesday, “is that if you believe in yourself, have that spirit, you can do amazing things.

“I’ve been fired, reduced to part-time, had cancer. But every time something bad has happened to me, it’s led to some of the greatest blessings in my life. So what I would say is don’t settle for less than your dream. In my life, I’ve been in some bad places, but the worst place a person can ever be is in a comfort zone.”

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].