TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 143 



The club work teaches the boys self-reliance, as each one Is expected 

 to work out his own problems; it teaches h^m how to care for livestock; 

 how to show them in the judging and sales ring; it teaches him how to 

 produce a finished animal for the market, and at the close of the contest 

 he knows that his success or failure is due to his own judgment and 

 efforts. 



So I say the baby beef club is the greatest educational feature of any 

 fair. As an illustration of the interest taken by the boys of the county and 

 their eagerness to study the methods followed in the club work, early in 

 the morning of the day on which the calves were to be judged, the prin- 

 cipal of a consolidated school in the southern part of the county brought 

 six of his pupils, bright-eyed, manly farmer boys about fifteen or sixteen 

 years of age, into my office and asked me to admit them to the fair ory 

 their school tickets which were good on the following day, as they 

 wanted to see the baby beeves judged. I studied the question for a 

 moment and decided that if this teacher would leave his school and 

 allow these six boys to be absent for the day, they must be interested 

 and that the benefits the boys would receive would overbalance the price 

 of admission; so the boys saw the judging, and I am told that three of 

 them will be in the club another year. 



These boys and girls are not learning to feed and care for stock alone; 

 they are learning to transact business on modern business methods by 

 the buying of commodities used to feed their calves; by shipping their 

 calves to and from the state or their county fairs, and the various other 

 transactions that come up during the year of feeding. It was not uncom- 

 mon for a boy to walk into my office and say, "Mr. Secretary, will you 

 cash a check for me?" pull out a check book, write and sign a check, 

 and walk out with the currency. You men with gray hair, think of it, a 

 boy of fifteen having a bank account in his own name. Most of us would 

 have thought we owned the world if we could have had fifty cents in our 

 pocket at fair time, to say nothing about a bank account in our own name. 



One example of a boy now seventeen years old, who was brought up 

 in a small village, had never had the care of livestock until two years 

 ago, so plainly shows the benefits of club work that I trust I will be 

 pardoned for using a personal illustration. I was at our grounds a few 

 days prior to the opening of our fair and observed a man walking around 

 as though looking for some one. I approached him with the inquiry if 

 there was anything I could do for him. and he told me in broken English 

 that he was waiting for his boy who was shipping his calf back from the 

 state fair. The boys who show at the state fair keep their calves at our 

 grounds the week intervening between the state fair and ours. I talked 

 with him about his boy and what a good thing it was for him to be inter- 

 ested in the baby beef club; how much he could learn about the care and 

 feeding of livestock, and of the benefits it would be to him in the future. 

 Finally the man broke into the conversation with this remark, "Joe has 

 learned more about feeding cattle in the past two years than I have been 

 able to learn in all my life." The boy, the son of a man who a few years 

 ago immigrated from sunny Italy, was Joseph Caputo, who received the 

 first premium at the state fair in the Shorthorn class, reserve grand 



