To make the best better

That is 4-H's motto. I revisited my 4-H days last week when I went out to the Pawnee County Fair to be present as the first savings bonds in Dad's memory were presented to winners in the swine and horse competitions.

Dad served as a club and county 4-H leader for more than 30 years, so it was powerful for me (and I'm sure other family members) to see him continue to contribute in this small way.

The 4-H pledge explains what the four Hs are:

"I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living - for my club, my community, my country and my world."

The pledge sounds simple and wholesome, but we learned a lot in 4-H. My siblings and I belonged to the Rozel Rockets in western Pawnee County. They were the Rozel Hustlers before the space race erupted, but adapted to the times.

The Rozel Rockets are no more, though. They merged with the Burdett Blue Ribbons to become the Western Wranglers (western Pawnee County, I take it). I guess that's a reflection of changing times once again.

But a few clubs survive whose names I recognize from my childhood: the Gem Dandys, the Zook Zippers and the Tiny Toilers.

Get the feeling 4-Hers enjoy alliteration?

We learned all sorts of things in the various projects we could enroll in, along with how to run and participate in meetings. That included public speaking, parliamentary procedure and how to sit still for an hour!

That was no small task for tykes, even then.

The dregs of summer television

Beach soccer?
On television???

And they're serious?

Sorry, I just can't hate summer

I've been hearing a lot of people talk over the past few weeks about how much they hate summer.


I'm sorry, I just can't join in that chorus.

Maybe it's the farm boy in me, but summer means abundant sunshine and growing season and nature in its full glory: trees and plants and crops and calves and colts and kittens and piglets and puppies.

It means blossoming gardens and vibrant lawns and warm nights and showers that can seem to wash the day clean and make everything fresh. It means ice cream sounds right almost every night and fresh corn on the cob can call my name countlessly. It means barbecues and baseball and easy banter into the evening.

Sure, it also means heat waves and hail storms and maybe even a few tornadoes - but every season has its thorns.

We couldn't live without summer - both literally and figuratively. So count me not with summer's boo-birds.

I'll be over in the Halleluiah Chorus instead.

Reflections on a summer Saturday

I would be returning to the city later in the day, but buckets of freshly picked ears of sweet corn demanded my attention at this given moment on our family farm.


I stripped husks from the ears, eliciting screeching sounds from the leaves as I pulled. Silk clung stubbornly and stickily to the yellow kernels.


A southerly breeze suddenly appeared, notable not just for the cool freshness on my back but for the way it clattered through the trees in the yard.


This, I thought as I glanced up, is summer in full blossom. As the wind whipped through the leaves, it sounded much like raindrops on a roof...or applause building, peaking and ebbing at a stage show.

Off to the east, clouds were erupting and darkening, and I knew Larned and Great Bend would soon get rain. Rarely is moisture unwelcome in farm country - when it halts a harvest, say, or aggravates a flooding risk - but I knew farmers east of our place would smile even as the sky grew increasingly angry.

These weren't tornado clouds, they were just a hearty summer shower in the making. My goddaughter, Rachel, was helping me clean the corn, and I told her to close her eyes and listen...to the wind, the leaves, the birds.

To summer.

"Oh, yeah," she said after several moments, a smile spreading on her face. "That's cool."

Faces at a fair

I spent a couple of hours at the Larned community building with Mom yesterday, wearing red "volunteer" ribbons, to make sure no one walked off with the champion onions or the best jar of wheat or one of those hand-stitched quilts that got a yellow ribbon for participating.


Let's just say I wasn't worried.


Among those who came to browse the projects on display was Mrs. Haun. She remembers being a young 4-Her...back when Herbert Hoover was president.


"I showed a hog at the fair," she offered sweetly. "I sold it to pay for my wedding dress."

She was 17. It was 1929.

Her children would form the backbone of the Gem Dandys 4-H Club, in the northcentral part of the county. The Gem Dandys club is one of perhaps four left in the county. "We came up with the name," she said of her family.

Fitting, since Mrs. Haun is a gem, and it was dandy to talk to her.

****

Then there was the anonymous guy who was wearing a ball cap boasting of Iron City, Mich. It's cold there in the winter, he said. So cold that you could go sledding and if your sinuses were running it would freeze as you slid down the hill.

"By the time you got to the bottom, you'd look like a walrus," he offered.

Um, thanks for that visual image, sir.

****

Stephen Schartz, who was one year behind my twin brother and me in school over at Pawnee Heights, came through the building with his wife, Kaye. He stopped to say "hi" and tease me about my red "volunteer" ribbon. And then he opined to Mom and me that this was the best time to buy chicks, so you wouldn't need a heat lamp to keep 'em warm in the first few weeks of their life. Oh, and it would be comfortable temperatures in the fall...when it comes time to kill 'em, clean 'em and put 'em in the freezer. He's even figured out a way to strip the feathers quickly and hands-free.

Good luck with that, Stephen.

****

Then there was the Josefiak girl who is getting ready for her wedding. She just graduated from vet school at K-State and will be marrying another vet, a schoolmate who has already moved to northcentral Nebraska to help expand an existing vet practice.

Her grandmother said she talked repeatedly about never, ever, moving farther north because she hates winter...and ends up falling in love with a vet who will be living and working a stone's throw from South Dakota. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor?

****

And finally, there was a former classmate of my oldest brother, Don, who was the essence of patience as his wife studied quilts and crochet and cookies. He asked my Mom if I was one of her grandsons.

That made me smile.

And the winner is.....

.......well, actually, she was the reserve grand champion in the "fitting and showing" class of the swine project at the Pawnee County 4-H Fair.

Her name was Briana O'Neill, and Dad would have been pleased that she won the first $50 savings bond given in his memory.

"She's a good girl," Mom told me. "She comes from a nice family."

That's Mom in the background of my photograph. The savings bond is one of two that will be given in Dad's honor at the annual 4-H fair. The second will go to the total points winner in the junior division of the horse project on Friday. That's appropriate, because Dad loved horses and he was a swine project leader for decades.

Sure, it's only $50, but it's a way for Dad to keep giving to the organization - and the young people - that he loved.

The maelstrom otherwise known as swine judging

I had to stifle laughter as I watched the "fitting and showing" judging of swine at the fairgrounds arena this morning. Hogs are ornery and independent, and by 9:30 in the morning they were more in the mood to nuzzle and nibble the wood chips on the arena floor than pay any attention to what their "handlers" (and I use that term very loosely) wanted them to do.

The 4-Hers were using riding crops to try to control their animals. When I was in 4-H, we used wooden canes. Not that they were very useful, though I guess the crook of the cane could come in handy for tugging rooting snouts out of the dirt.

One boy's hog made himself at home on the wood chips and wouldn't budge for anyone or anything. Not squirts of water, not knees in the ribs, not metal panels that fair volunteers used to separate pigs grappling with each other (or, as I put it, sparring spare ribs of the future). Yes, that's him glaring at my camera after they finally roused his porker from a prone position.

In 4-H, grand champions get purple ribbons, reserve grand champions get pink ribbons, top performers get blue (the champion and reserve champion come from blue-ribbon entrants), mid-level receive red, and third-level get white.

In some projects, such as foods and photography, the non-winners get a yellow "participant" ribbon. Ouch. "Thanks for coming, but...."

Anyway, I wish I'd had my video camera rolling for the entire junior fitting and showing competition. The animals were bigger than some of the children in the arena (you have to be 7 before you can join 4-H), and some of the hogs were determined to root and root and root with their noses 'til they had a comfy place to flop in the shade. Makes sense on a hot summer day - but not in the arena during the fitting and showing competition.

That may seem like no big deal - after all, they are pigs - but one of my enduring memories of 4-H fairs was getting up at the crack of dawn to wash your two hogs entered in the swine competition, and then using baby oil and baby powder on their hides to make them glisten. Why? So we can make hogs look good!!!

But, to me, hogs look best as bacon, ham, barbecue ribs......