It’s the Little Things That One Remembers 

I’m reminiscing here, but, truth be told, this piece is a plug for the FFA. You live in Texas and New Mexico. In God’s Country. Get your kids into the FFA and watch them grow.

Now for my own version of this, for what it’s worth.

Starting out, we weren’t much more than a bunch of hayseeds. But we would become more than that, thanks in large part to the greatest youth organization in America.

Four years of vocational agricultural education, and the accompanying four years of FFA involvement, has the power to change a person. And sometimes in the unlikeliest of ways.

In self-knotted necktie, this F.S.A. (future scribe of America) poses with his Future Farmers of America project.

In my senior year of high school, I probably missed more classroom time than any other student at Maysville (Okla.) High. And probably gained more from having done so. It wasn’t from ditching school. No, it was from excused absences, going down the road. From hitting livestock sales and shows, from competing in and observing all manner of competitions—farm electrification (we won state), livestock judging, and pasture judging. From going as part of a delegation to district or state conventions. It was from being a member of the FFA, then known as the Future Farmers of America. It was the best experience of all my educational upbringing.

You didn’t have to go down the road to benefit from the FFA, because there was always plenty of opportunity close at hand. Meetings at my chapter were held almost weekly, and held under parliamentary procedure, following Robert’s Rules of Order. That alone was an ongoing lesson in debate and political process. There were public speaking opportunities locally, and well as out in individual competitions.

We all kept books on our livestock projects, so we gained experience in economics and practical math. So much of what went on was extra-curricular. FFA had the power to nudge or even wrench a shy teenager out of his self-absorption and his tendency to duck involvements and to thrust him into group activity and even into leadership roles.

Those were the big things. It was the little things, though, that you remember most.

If a student got an answer right, the instructor might say to the class, “You can tell that [so-and-so] has been to a couple of pie suppers and a county fair.” High praise, that.

We had, and the FFA probably still has, much of that old-school, down-to-earth, down-on-the-farm plainspokenness, as well as a sense of humor.

In welding—and we welded as though the whole world was falling apart—one might hear the instructor say that “Yer beads look like chicken scratchin’.” In those days of cleaner language, one knew what chicken “scratchin’” was.

On one occasion our freshman class was being led down a line of hog pens, inspecting members’ mature show hogs on a cold day, when we came to a pen where the five inhabitants were holed up in the hog house.

“Mullins, you’re small enough—crawl in there and flush ’em out,” our instructor said.

Hearing those words, which struck me as insane, I got into the pen. At the door of the hut I was on my hands and knees, and had made it about halfway through the narrow, dark doorway, when here they came like lightning. There wasn’t room for boy and hog to occupy the same doorway, but that didn’t make any difference to the hogs as they banged and shouldered and rattled their way past me and out the door anyhow, the whole stinkin’ bunch of them, nano-seconds apart, like boxcars emerging from a train tunnel. That got a big laugh. When I staggered back to my feet, the one classmate who found it funniest (because he knew hogs best) said, “It’s a wonder they didn’t bite you.”

FFA (and vocational agriculture—the two become merged in one’s mind) was miles and miles in the back of open-bed pickups in mid-winter, barreling down dirt roads to members’ farm homes, there to wrestle, hold, and castrate squealing hogs grown well beyond the convenient castrating age. FFA was hands-on. It was practical and real world.

I don’t remember us being world-wise or connoisseurs. I do remember once on an FFA trip, seven of us walking into a Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors when such were new to our part of Oklahoma, and everyone’s order being plain chocolate or vanilla.

When the annual FFA-FHA (Future Homemakers of America) banquet approached, our advisor sized up our ilk and rightly surmised that we wouldn’t know (A) how to tie a necktie or (B) how to properly eat at a formal place setting. Amazingly, he proceeded to cure all that.

There was a day or two spent in class tying and retying neckties. Later the FHA instructor was borrowed for a day or so to teach us what forks or spoons to pick up and when and how to do so.

Those things were so far removed from Vo-Ag, and from school in general. But they mattered, and they stuck. There was more, so much more, of that. So many more intangibles.

How to talk, how to eat, how to survive, how to tie your necktie, how to think about life.

Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve. Every day of my life I use something I was given in the FFA.

Jesse Mullins, Editor

Jesse Mullins, editor of Permian Basin Oil and Gas, remembers exactly nothing of the algebra he took in secondary school but still knows how to unzip a feed sack, how to granny a hay bale, and how to pronounce “chaps.”