'Hooked' on 4-H, (at least while in front of the tube)

Six Degrees from Galesburg

Alison McGaughey

NEWS

Friday, July 28, 2006

How do you do it? I always ask.

She'll look at me as if I ought to know the answer. "4-H," she'll say. As in, isn't it obvious?

Well, no.

Because I, too, was a 4-H kid, and I'm so domestically challenged that when a button pops off a blouse, I'll throw the whole thing in the give-away bag that I take each month to the Salvation Army.

I am a 4-H failure.

Despite the fact that I was a member from grade school through the beginning of high school, I can't even remember what the four H's stand for.

Actually, come to think of it, I never knew what they stood for even when I was in the club. When our leader would ask us to stand and say the motto, I'd look at the floor and hope no one noticed I was fudging the words.

"I pledge my heart to...something something something, watermelon watermelon, and to the republic, for which it stands..."

I don't remember how I even got involved in 4-H, but it probably happened just like riding the school bus happened: I was a country kid and a farmer's daughter, and it just came with the deal.

Somehow, though, my sister and I ended up in a town kids' 4-H club. They were called the Peppy Peppers.

Peppy Pepper kids didn't show steers or hogs. They were in 4-H for purposes I didn't quite understand, but that had something to do with a lust for youth government. They fought over who got to take down the minutes. Each year when we held elections - conducted via head-down-on-the-table, arm-up-in-the air voting method - the same two boys, Jason and John, competed for president. They became bitter rivals.

When it was time to choose projects to work on for the annual 4-H fair, there was a clear delineation between girls' projects and boys'.

The Peppy Pepper boys took the same project every single year: model rockets.

The girls made dollhouses, stained glass ornaments and clothing.

All that stuff looked like it would involve way too much work. So I found a girl project that could be completed in front of the television.

I took latch-hook.

Three years in a row.

Instead of learning life skills like hemming and mending, I spent the summer evenings of my youth pulling pieces of colored yarn through a stiff mesh lattice, using a tool that looked like a cross between a dental hygienist's scraper and a gardening trowel.

While my sister created complicated cross-stitch designs that would eventually make it to state, I mastered the color-by-numbers version of sewing.

I could do my art and still watch "The Cosby Show." Sometimes I accidentally hooked pieces of the living room shag carpet.

Eventually, after the entire upstairs of our house was decorated with latch-hook pillows and rugs, I branched out. I took cartooning and photography. I got blue ribbons and felt proud.

But in my last year of 4-H I tried to do what all the other girls were doing. I took microwave cooking. I never opened my cook book all summer. I tried to whip up my concoction just hours before the fair. I brought a bowl of runny eggs to the extension center, and I got my one and only red ribbon.

So I did learn at least one thing from 4-H: I should've stuck with the 'hook.

For now I'll just hit up my friend Jane when I need something sewn.

At least until colored-yarn curtains come into style.

Alison McGaughey lives in Galesburg and works at Western Illinois University.