My historian hat has been with me since at least 2006, but was heaviest through the years of preparation for Michigan Farm Bureau’s yearlong Centennial Celebration in 2019. To this day I may be better known as MFB’s de facto historian than for doing my actual job, partly because my workspace is visibly loaded with historical material inherited from county Farm Bureaus or on loan from our warehouse.
To date only three county Farm Bureaus have taken me up on my offer to take unwanted archives off their hands. Oceana, St. Clair and Tuscola have entrusted to me all their old photos, community group minutes, newspaper clippings, certificates, awards and scrapbooks documenting county FB activities from decades past.
The scrapbooks are amazing, and I’ve learned they were a common means of showcasing a county Farm Bureau’s program year — either for posterity or to enter a contest or judged competition.
Several Oceana scrapbooks were entries into a regional “Farm to Prosper” contest coordinated by Extension in five western Lower Peninsula counties. (More about those another day.)
The Tuscola scrapbooks — all 15 of them — are a mixed bag. Some are general program-year overviews, some are applications for county Farm Bureau award programs, several document only Women’s Program activities.
Suffice to say Tuscola in the 1960’s and 70’s was firing on all cylinders, and they spared little effort compiling and documenting their own excellence. By today’s standards, the effort that went into compiling and assembling these records is hard to comprehend.
They slimmed down over time, but especially the scrapbooks from the 60’s are massive compendiums documenting — and embodying — a tremendous amount of human effort. Fashioned by hand with paper and glue and staples and tape, they are products of a time and place very different from today.
They’re all packed with great Tuscola County names: Keinath, Rupprecht, Findlay, Laurie, Sattelberg, Ruggles and both spellings of Schluckbier/Schluckebier. (Current Tuscola President Jeff Schluckbier says they’re not related.)
Especially impressive is Tuscola’s entry into the 1964 Outstanding County Farm Bureau Program — a competition they couldn’t win because they’d won the year before:
“Perhaps we were wasting our time in preparing this presentation as we are not eligible for prizes this year,” wrote Mrs. Clare Carpenter of Cass City (in flawless mid-century penmanship) to Delbert Wells, then manager of MFB’s Family Program Division.
“The challenge lay in ‘recognition if we merit it’,” Carpenter continued. "After working hard a whole year it seems necessary to evaluate our work by putting proof together for others to see.
“Then it becomes history for members to enjoy in the future.”
Well, that was 62 years ago, so congratulations: Mrs. Clare Carpenter was writing about you. As the county Farm Bureau’s exceptional information chair, she summarized Tuscola’s year of hard work and taped and pasted it into a three-inch-thick scrapbook, expecting you might enjoy it.
It’s too brittle to pass around now, and would surely crumble during the weeks it would take to scan the thousands of images and articles and correspondence and clippings and handwritten notes and brochures and pamphlets meticulously pasted inside. (Link to photo gallery below.)
Remember it was the previous year’s entry that won Tuscola the recognition that made the one I’ve been pawing through a mostly moot, futile expression — a scrapbook to nowhere. (The previous year’s winning entry must’ve been a real humdinger. Maybe it’s under bulletproof glass somewhere.)
An inch into the 1964 book are the newspaper clippings documenting Tuscola’s win the year before. They had dispatched a 35-member delegation to MFB’s 44th Annual Meeting, Nov. 11-13 at Michigan State University. Commodity programs and meal functions took place in the Union; all the business proceedings happened in the Auditorium, beginning with welcoming remarks from MSU Secretary Jack Breslin.
Day One of that 44th Annual Meeting ended with the Miss Farm Bureau Pageant — yup! — inside the Kellogg Center. Day Two wrapped up back at the Auditorium, where the awards program kicked off with “a filmed action report” titled “Panorama of Progress” (How Farm Bureau is that?), starring MFB Secretary-Manager Clarence Prentice, who in 1963 was still stuffing tissue into the big shoes Clark Brody left behind for him in ’59.
We know all this because the program booklet is taped inside the scrapbook.
The same booklet has Mrs. Jesse Smith of Kalamazoo County at the organ, providing incidental music throughout the event. I like to think Mrs. Smith was tastefully noodling away that evening when Tuscola’s name was announced — twice — for winning both the Information Program award and the award for most Outstanding [County] Farm Bureau Program.
Remember Mrs. Carpenter’s appeal to Mr. Wells?
The words “Perhaps we were wasting our time…as we are not eligible” occur halfway down her single-page cover letter, but she uses the same words to begin a longer document in the miscellaneous ephemera inside the cover of that 1964 scrapbook.
I haven’t read it yet — 20 more pages of Mrs. Carpenter’s flawless cursive, every line filled to the edge, every paragraph indented some consistent fraction of an inch — but I did scan it for you.
Why? Because her words from 60-plus years ago, and the effort she put in, and her foresight about its value, and the pride she exhibits, and the drive to spotlight her county Farm Bureau’s exceptional programming…
Six decades later, it’s all convincing proof we’re still fighting the right fight from the same side of the front lines. And win or lose — eligible for recognition or not — Farm Bureau members put in the work.
Here’s that photo gallery. Pardon my fat fingers; the thing does not lay flat. (Image #2 has a different background because I needed a banana for scale. I don’t like bananas so I took the thing down to the cafeteria.)
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