By BRIAN SANDERS

Holton Recorder Staff

  Gale and Dixie Haag of rural Holton didn’t just raise three children in 4-H — in fact, as community leaders with the Lucky Stars 4-H club, they were dedicated to helping raise generations of kids to work hard and live right.

  It’s that dedication that has led to the Haags being honored as grand marshals of this year’s Jackson County 4-H Fair Parade, which is set for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 28 in Holton.

  “When the kids needed something, we would take care of it,” Gale Haag said of that dedication to being there for his 4-H chargees. “If there was a vacant spot, we were there.”

  For more than 17 years, the Haags were involved in 4-H as community and project leaders, starting with their own children — daughters Natalie and Lynn and son Chris — and organizing several activities for the Lucky Stars. According to Cara Robinson of Meadowlark Extension District, the Haags “thought they were the luckiest people to be able to work with the youth of this community.”

  “They always told anyone asking why their kids should join 4-H that it gives the young person a chance to see what they can do on their own with just a little help,” Robinson said.

  For Gale, it began as a youngster growing up on a dairy farm, with parents who were themselves leaders in the Lucky Stars club, and milking shorthorn dairy cattle with his father. One experience with a dairy calf got him involved in 4-H.

  “I bet I wasn’t seven or eight years old,” he said. “I got a heifer, and I can remember that little heifer’s mother died… I babied it. I sat down there in the little hog house and took care of that little calf. That was how I got started.”

  The Lucky Stars kids at that time were meeting in the old Bateman school house, and Gale helped his father with Hereford hogs, showing them at the Jackson County Fair. He also raised corn, although his first experience with corn came at a bad time — the floods of 1951.

  “We lived in the bottoms, and it just washed out everything,” he said. “We planted corn, but we didn’t have corn that year, because when the river went down it was probably the middle of July, and we had a team of horses and went down in some of the spots that dried… It wasn’t 4-H corn.”

  Gale didn’t do so well with corn during the next year, either, since it was so hot and dry, he recalled. But that year, his father bought irrigation equipment, and Gale spent a lot of time working with his father in moving the equipment from place to place, at times being excused from school to do the work.

  “We got a little smarter after that first year,” Gale said.

  Dixie said that she did not have the same experiences her husband had in 4-H growing up. But after the two of them got married and had kids, she got a crash course in being a project leader.

  “It started with Natalie,” Dixie said. “She took everything she could take. One year, she had 17 projects… She had a dairy cow and a pig and a lamb.”

  Eventually, the Haag children split up their animal projects because, as Gale said, “the kids didn’t want to show against each other.” Natalie continued to show Holstein cattle, with Chris taking hogs to the fair and Lynn handling lambs and rabbits.

  Spending time with your animal for the fair can be an essential coming-of-age experience for a 4-H kid, Dixie learned, but it can be a somber experience as well.

  “You spend all summer with that animal, and you just almost sleep with it in the barn,” she said. “The hardest thing is when you go to that sale, and the auctioneer says, ‘Ship it, or locker?’ At ‘locker,’ I had a girl in tears.”

  The Haags also had the opportunity to try several different projects with their kids. Chris expressed a desire to get into woodworking, and Dixie said Gale was there to help him get involved with it. Natalie and Lynn also “sewed, knitted, crocheted and cooked,” she said.

  “We would just do anything that they didn’t have leaders for, and it’s like Chris once said, he wanted to do some woodworking, and that just kind of started there,” Gale added.

  Being in 4-H also teaches young people a sense of accountability, with Dixie recalling one year that Chris took charge of a dairy calf and making a note for every cent spent raising that calf for the fair.

  “Chris got one of his books done one day,” she said. “He said, ‘I didn’t make any money, but I didn’t come out in the hole. I made five cents.’ But he still had the animal.”

  That wasn’t always the case, Gale said, noting that one year he purchased 80 adjacent acres for cropland, and Chris expressed a desire to raise crops on the land. Gale agreed to provide his son with the necessary equipment, but advised him to go to the bank to take out a loan for the seed.

  “It was one of those years when the green bugs were getting into the milo, and he sprayed that four times,” Gale said of Chris. “It was just a hopeless deal. Those bugs just killed the milo… It was his 4-H project. He lost about $3,000 on that 80 acres.”

  The Haags also recounted a heartbreaking experience that Natalie had with a dairy cow, which gave birth and died of “milk fever” three days before the fair in which the cow was to be shown.

  “We had Doc Griffith come in and say, ‘You have to tell Natalie, because I’m not going to tell her that her cow just died,’” Dixie said. “They were like pets to the kids.”

  But there were also some pretty good years, as Gale and Dixie recounted one summer week spent in a “lay witness” project with a Nebraska sheep farmer. At the end of that week, he said, the farmer gave Lynn “a little orphan lamb,” and she took the lamb home and bred it, raising it as a 4-H project.

  “She paid for her first year of college with that lamb,” Dixie said of Lynn.

  The Haags also were heavily involved in pre-fair tours, in which community leaders visit each club member’s farm and let the members discuss their projects. Although Dixie joked that the annual tour was always on “the hottest Sunday afternoon of the year,” Gale said each tour still turned out to be “an awesome day.”

  One of the most important aspects of 4-H is that it prepares kids for later in life, and community leaders take a sense of pride in the results they see in their kids.

  “It really prepares them for the life they’re going to have to live, and it was so easy with the dairy, because we had a lot of cows,” Gale said. “Those kids, Dixie would help them out, and they’d help us out. And we told them there would be trouble when they’d start goofing off and not sticking to the business of milking those cows, or being there at a certain time.”

  “They were taught that you get the job done, and you’ve got to feed the cows,” Dixie added. “I don’t care if you played football until 10 p.m., they still have to eat. It was a good way to raise the kids, and lots of kids we got into 4-H didn’t have that, but they learned.”

  The work ethic that’s instilled in 4-H kids, whether their own children or the many young people they’ve helped in 4-H through the years, is also evident later in life, the Haags noted.

  “When Natalie was working for Gov. Bill Graves, and Lynn was in the Legislature, he was talking to us and he said, ‘Your kids have the best work ethic of anybody that I’ve ever had any dealings with. What did you do?’” Dixie said. “And Gale said, ‘If they fail at this, they’re scared they’re going to have to come home and milk cows.’”

  But pushing the kids to learn must always be an encouraging task at the outset, she said, because it is the best way to see a child grow from a 4-H “greenhand” to an accomplished club member.

  “You have to look at all the good things first, and then you tell them the things they need to correct,” Dixie said. “But from the first, you have to be positive, because that’s going to make the difference in whether the kid’s going to try.”

  It certainly made a difference in the way their own children turned out, they said. Oldest daughter Natalie Metz is now an in-house attorney for Security Benefits of Topeka, and son Chris is an operations manager for a heating and air conditioning firm in the Kansas City area.

  And, of course, there’s their youngest daughter, Lynn Jenkins, now serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  “She’s done all these things, and she knows the difference between just throwing money away and being responsible, so that if you’re going to do something, you have to be real about this,” Gale said. “That’s not something President Obama knows.”

  “He should have been a 4-H’er, shouldn’t he?” Dixie added with a laugh.