Four-H club work is a specialized educational enterprise for rural youth. In Bonner county, it has grown steadily since its beginning in 1925, when Claudia Jones, daughter of Ben Jones of Kootenai, constituted the first 4-H club with a Guernsey calf for which she kept records and made a report.
The next year, the Glengary Jersey calf club was organized with five members and four Jersey calves shipped in from Tillamook, Ore.
Also in 1926, the “Watch Us Grow” potato club (8 members) and the “Stitch in Time” club (12 members), organized at Sagle, while at Laclede, 8 girls formed a sewing club.
As a direct result of these clubs, community fairs were held at both Laclede and Sagle. Club work continued to spread through the county, and by 1927, the year of the first annual Bonner county fair, 19 boys in potato clubs and 27 girls in sewing clubs entered exhibits.
In 1928, seven new sewing clubs were organized with 52 members. Today the county has 34 4-H clubs with a membership of 125 boys and 150 girls.
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I loved seeing this segment of the Daily Bee's "Bonner County History" notes this morning. I was 4 years old when this news was originally published.
So, when I entered the 4-H program six years later, it was well-established in the county.
I first belonged to the Mountain View ABC's and the Mountain View Livestock club.
The first was home economics-related with the main leaders being Lucille Hudon, Eleanor Delamarter and Winifred Nikkola.
The other, led by my dad Harold Tibbs and Dick Sherwood, served beef, sheep, dairy and swine members. A year or so later, the livestock projects included horse; my mother helped usher it in.
Back in those days, what I liked best about 4-H was the refreshments, served at every meeting.
Seems there were always sweets to drink and sweet to eat in those days----cookies, cupcakes or cake and ice cream.
I cannot forget Eleanor Delamarter's orange cinnamon rolls. Hard to forget those refreshments when you eat 13 of them in one sitting. Fact!
Yes, the refreshments were great with each tasting, but the lifelong attributes that the 4-H experience taught me have lasted significantly longer than any of those mouth-watering orange cinnamon rolls.
In fairness, I must add that the cinnamon rolls and other 4-H refreshments did have lasting power---as part of my body fat.
The 4-H attributes acquired took a little longer to digest and, at times, they didn't taste so good. Take the year I did not complete my projects cuz I didn't fill out my record books, for example.
That was a bitter lesson, indeed, but the following year when I completed two years in one---that felt good.
In 4-H, I washed and clipped cows and horses, learned how to judge and write reasons for why I made my judgments, learned the basics of cooking and canning, struggled through sewing, listened to adolescent catcalls as a style-review Klutz, wove reeds for a basket project, taught younger 4-H'ers, prepared and presented demonstrations, learned how to compete effectively and lose gracefully, wrote club news for the local paper and learned parliamentary procedure.
I like to say that 4-H was my "house that built me," and I'm pretty confident that I'm not alone in that assessment.
So, that's why it was neat to see the history notes about the beginnings of 4-H in Bonner County.
