Dozens of gold-colored pins, similar to tie tacks, decorate the shadow boxes hanging in each of my sons' bedrooms. Every medal bears an icon—a loaf of bread, a dog or a four-leaf clover. They represent individual 4-H projects and were awarded annually, on Achievement Night.

Just starting its second century, 4-H continues to play a vital role
here in the lush foothills of Lewis County, New York, where people like to say that dairy cows outnumber the human residents. In fact, it was a farming couple, Jane and Tom Gillette, who founded our local club 21 years ago. And since a lot of kids the same age then lived along our road, they limited membership to our immediate neighborhood. Then they took a bold step.

Any parent whose child wanted to join (and every kid was dying to!) had to teach one project a year. One! We could choose anything from birdwatching to woodcarving. But the rule stuck. And it reaped an unexpected reward.

Rather than simply dropping off kids and supplies, we parents found ourselves gabbing in driveways and schmoozing at kitchen tables. Phone lines buzzed as we exchanged ideas, coordinated schedules and solicited snacks.

The more involved we got, the more connected we became. If ten kids gathered in someone's cellar to paint model rockets, almost as many mothers (and sometimes fathers) showed up to help. The Turin Turtles developed into something not unlike an old-time quilting bee.

"It turned out better than we ever dreamed," says Jane. "4-H became this huge, community-building thing."

Our family joined when Matthew, our oldest, turned seven. That first spring, he faced a roomful of people (minus his two front teeth) and lisped his way through a public presentation on making a "bunny salad." From that shy start, he went on to emcee a fashion revue, entertain at a leader's banquet, and speak before an audience of 500—all before entering the ninth grade.

Of course, problems arose. Parents sometimes nagged. "You've got to finish that memory book!" Kids sometimes rebelled. "Line-dancing is stupid! I feel like a dork." Soccer games conflicted with Achievement Nights. Kids earned red ribbons instead of blue. And occasionally a family dropped out.

My own husband, Neil, complained about the hours 4-H consumed and the messes it created. For over a decade, our dining room table lay buried beneath scrapbooks-in-progress, half-sewn sweatshirts and magic markers. But Neil, too, caught the bug. A favorite picture shows him, thumbs tucked in pockets, practicing the 'two-step' with a gang of 4-H'ers.

As the kids got older, the focus changed. Teenage Turtles rejected crafts, preferring to volunteer at the library and sew sleeping bags for the homeless. We held summer campouts and followed winter meetings with raucous games of touch football in the snow. One spring, we boarded a bus to Syracuse to hear the band "Candlebox" in concert.

The large "middle wave" of Turtles grew so tight that we even hosted a joint high school graduation party at the Town Park. Guests ate at handmade picnic tables our club had donated years before.

Then tragedy struck. One of the graduates, my 18-year-old niece, was diagnosed with cancer. Throughout her terrible ordeal, 4-H'ers and their families responded with gifts of money, cards, food, emails, prayers and blood. When Becky was released from the hospital, the kids gathered at our house. It was Thanksgiving. Becky donned her favorite polar-fleece vest and raced outside to play football. She died two months later.

For a while after that, our club became inactive. But then our younger son, Wade, and his pals began lobbying to start things up again. They wanted to work at the state fair—which meant they'd each have to give a twenty-minute public presentation. And they asked me to serve as project leader.

Now, 'public presentations' is a lot tougher project than, say, making muffins. I was busy. And I wasn't sure I was up to it.

"Aw, come on," they wheedled, with those disarming grins so peculiar to teenage boys. "You won't have to do much. We promise."

Well... I did a lot. But so did they!

Their chosen theme, The Winning Edge, required days of preparation. It involved a weight-lifting demonstration, concocting a high-protein sports drink and using calipers to measure the body fat of people in the audience.

But the poise and authority those guys displayed on stage brought a smile to my lips...and a lump to my throat. It was our final project.

Last year, Wade went away to college and there are no more parental planning sessions. No more late-night practice speeches. And no more football games.

But memory books occupy an entire shelf in our family room. And leafing through the one that Matthew kept when he was 14, I came to this caption, carefully printed beneath a photo of him manning a club booth at the county fair. "This was a lot of work," he wrote, "but it was awesomely fun."

And so it was.

Resources:

• Visit the 4-H Web site [1].
• Visit the Connect for Kids Volunteering and Mentoring [2] topic pages.

Talk Back

If you've got comments or questions about this story, we'd like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips [3].

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Aline Newman is a public school teacher and freelance writer in Turin, N.Y.