OUTDOOR CLUBS
Have you a boys' club in your neighbourhood? Or a girls' club? You used to have a literary society in school, and it failed? Why was that? The boys didn't take any interest in it.
Why not have a club that the boys will take an interest in and a club that the girls will take an interest in? What kinds of clubs do boys like? Athletic clubs where they wrestle, box, turn handsprings, have jumping, skating, walking, and running matches, and play such games of skill and endurance as hare and hounds, pitching horseshoes, and baseball. They like all sorts of clubs that get real things done, like raising prize corn or cotton or pigs or training colts or steers or dogs. Boys and girls like to compete for prizes. How boys or girls will work to do something so much better than any other boy or girl in the crowd that the judges will award the prize to them. It is hard in contests like these to be able to walk up like a true sportsman and congratulate the winner. But a boy can learn to do it; so can a girl. All over the United States boys are banding together to raise better corn, better cotton, better chickens, better fruit. North, west, east, and south, thousands of boys are raising corn. They test their seed, prepare the soil, plant, cultivate, and harvest the crop, weigh it, take it to the exhibition where they compare it with other boys' crops, and see for themselves who has the best yield. One boy, a member of the Winnebago County Farmer Boys' Experiment Club took first prize of fifteen dollars in gold for the best ten ears of corn. This club has about eleven hundred members. There is a Winnebago County Girls' Home Culture Club with an equally large membership. These boys and girls are growing up to be good citizens right there in the country, where they were born. They don't have to go to the city to find education or good manners or a good time. The fathers and mothers, the school teachers, the ministers, and the county superintendent of schools all work together in Winnebago County, Ill., and they can everywhere.
Photograph by Helen W. Cooke
Is This Work or Play?
The boys in your home school can form a Boys' Agricultural Club now. The first thing you need is information about other clubs. Your club will not be just like the others. It ought not to be. But if you know how the others are managed it will help you to manage yours. Send to the Secretary of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., and ask for Farmers' Bulletin No. 385 on Boys' and Girls' Agricultural Clubs. On page fifteen of this bulletin are suggestions as to an invitation to be sent out for the first meeting. If your teacher is willing you can hold the first meeting some Friday afternoon in the early spring at the school-house. If the teacher is not yet interested hold the meeting at some home in the neighbourhood. If you are acquainted with the county superintendent or the school commissioner, tell him about the club you want to start, and maybe he will arrange for the first meeting and get all the boys and girls in the county organized. You could have a local chapter of the club, with local exhibits and local prizes; then you could have a space at the county fair, and members of different clubs all over the county could compete for first prize.
The bulletin gives suggestions for a constitution, enrollment of members, and a scheme for cards on which to keep a record of the crop you are going to grow. There are rules, too, that each person who competes for prizes must observe.
A good many boys' clubs start in with growing a crop of corn, and girls' clubs with bread-making. They need not do these same things every year, although one can learn something new about growing corn, raising chickens, or making bread every year.
The country would be a better place to live in, if there were more boys' and girls' clubs.