The recently restored auditorium of the North County Recreation District in Nehalem is perfectly suited to invite the audience’s imagination back to radio days. Settle into one of the auditorium’s spartan vintage folding seats with its carved hardwood armrest, and shortly it’s 1940. Hitler and the Nazis have overrun a defeated European continent. Among nations at war against the Third Reich, Britain alone has not surrendered. Winston Churchill is addressing the English-speaking people.

David Speer has edited and arranged “Words that Matter,” 15 selections from Churchill’s writing spanning his early years to the United States’ entry into World War II. Eight accomplished readers will bring Churchill’s words to life again at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 6.

“People know the sound bites — ‘We shall never surrender’ — but his speeches contain sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph of vibrant, beautiful language,” says Speer. “He thought in heroic terms.”

Speer and producer Peter Nunn have arranged the stage so that Churchill’s words matter. To the left, narrator Dave Bell knits Churchill’s speeches together with a bit of history. In the center, a screen shows a colorful Union Jack, patriotic posters and grainy black-and-white photos of London bombed, of Churchill touring ruins. To the right, the spotlight falls on consecutive readers, articulate, dressed formally in tuxedos or evening dresses; attire that, in the spare auditorium, reinforces Churchill’s appeal to dignity. No one affects an unnatural accent. Churchill’s speeches reach us in accents American and English, in voices female and male.

“I’ve always thought people today would appreciate Churchill’s words if they could hear them,” Speer says.

Speer’s first exposure to Churchill was from newsreels at movie theaters during World War II. “He was bigger than life,” he remembers. “Churchill supported himself by being a writer. His father was the second son of the Duke of Marlborough. As such, he had a title but no money. On the other hand, he had expensive tastes so, to support himself and his lavish tastes, he wrote. He wrote his entire life.”

Speer’s knowledge of Churchill’s life is extensive. “He started out as a correspondent in Cuba when Teddy Roosevelt was there, sending dispatches back from the Spanish-American War. He fought on four continents while he was in the military, and even then, and some people were not happy with this, he always managed to earn a nice income from his writing. He wrote all his life.”

A modern listener is struck by the single-mindedness, the self-assurance, the righteous conviction of Churchill’s words. “The times required it,” says Speer.

A listener is perhaps also surprised by his generous eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s antithetical rival who had made desperate, futile concessions to Hitler that Churchill abhorred:

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart – the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril.

Speer’s intent with “Words that Matter” is not to summarize Churchill’s political life, or even to take a listener with him through victory in World War II. “I haven’t attempted to cover the war,” explains Speer. “I’m emphasizing that he was the only prominent politician in the western world who recognized the evil that Hitler was early on, in the early ’30s.”

In the program, the last of Churchill’s speeches comes Christmas Eve from America as recent events have finally made the United States Britain’s ally at the dawn of the titanic struggle ahead:

This is a strange Christmas Eve. Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and, with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other … Let us grown-ups share to the full in (our children’s) unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.

When the lights come up and you’ve found your coat and headed back to your car, you may find the reassuring cadence, the elegant symmetry, the heroic appeal of Churchill’s words still resonating. Maybe you’ll drive home with the radio off for now.

The NCRD auditorium is at the site of the former Nehalem grade school, 36155 9th St. in Nehalem. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students. For further information call 503-368-3835.