4-H Struggles to Shuck Corny Image : Clubs: A decline in San Fernando Valley membership runs counter to record increases nationally. Of 14 local branches serving 400 young people in 1984, just six are left, some with fewer than a dozen members.

Jamie Johnson, 14, will be ironing, brushing, bathing and baking this week, readying 28 projects for Wednesday’s opening of the San Fernando Valley Fair at Hansen Dam.

There was a time when hundreds of Valley children, ages 9 to 19, would have been frenetically putting the finishing touches on projects stressing development of the four Hs: head, heart, hands and health.

Before a new club started meeting last week in a Pacoima housing project, Jamie was one of just 90 4-H club members left in the San Fernando Valley. Of the 14 4-H clubs that served 400 children in 1984, just six are left, some with fewer than a dozen members.

A relative newcomer to the Country Bumpkins 4-H club in Sylmar, Jamie’s projects include three kinds of chickens, her goat, Christi, a dozen eggs, applesauce cookies, soft pretzels, banana bread, bran muffins, brownies, coffee cake, a two-piece pink knit outfit, a cross-stitching project, two original photograph albums, and five crafts painted with pictures of puppies.

“I like it a lot better than Girl Scouts, where you went camping and stuff,” she said. “In Girl Scouts you didn’t win anything. In 4-H you go to fairs and enter things and get recognition, and your parents can help you with the projects.”

Despite Jamie’s preferences, the number of Girl Scouts in the Valley is increasing 5% annually, according to the San Fernando Valley Girl Scout Council, while 4-H is in a steep decline.

The drop-off in Valley membership also runs counter to record increases nationally, according to the National 4-H Council in Chevy Chase, Md.

One reason may be that 4-H clubs elsewhere have successfully shed the organization’s strictly agricultural reputation and attracted urban youngsters by offering projects as varied as auto repair and first aid.

Largely because of new clubs in low-income neighborhoods, 4-H membership in Los Angeles County as a whole is also up, with 2,311 members during the 1988-89 fiscal year, up from 1,593 in 1984-85. Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which saw declines in club membership from the mid- to late 1980s, are now seeing a turnaround as well.

Linda Araujo-Wilson, 4-H youth development adviser in Riverside County, said the organization is gradually adapting to new demographic challenges: holding club meetings during lunch for children bused to school, conducting 4-H leadership seminars in English and Spanish, and working with the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League to bring clubs to low-income neighborhoods.

Much of the subject matter of 4-H has changed as well, said Andrew Buhler of the National 4-H Council, with clubs around the country conducting workshops in teen-age suicide, substance abuse and teen-age pregnancy. Some of the programs are in small, rural towns, but most are not, he said. In 1988, only 13.3% of the organization’s national membership lived on farms.

The clubs in the Valley, meanwhile, still cater, by and large, to the few children whose yards still have room for chickens and vegetable patches.

“The reason the clubs are small here is because most of them have always concentrated on livestock, and of course, livestock is dying out in the San Fernando Valley,” said former 4-H club leader Virginia Norman of Arleta.

Although it has lost membership, the club Norman founded 20 years ago, Stars and Bars, is still active because it has always attempted to appeal to the interests of suburban kids by offering such projects as pet care, guide dog training, guitar, computers and astronomy. “Whatever kids are interested in at the time,” she said.

She also believes that resources that might help traditional 4-H clubs adapt to the changing interests of Valley children are being directed instead at inner-city housing projects and schools. For the past three years, the Los Angeles County 4-H staff has emphasized seeking out minority and low-income children who often do not have access to activities such as scouting, soccer clubs or church youth groups.

Just such a group, in fact, opened last week at the San Fernando Gardens housing project in Pacoima, where 190 children have signed up. The program there is staffed in part by VISTA volunteers and supported financially by corporate and government grants. When fully organized, the program will offer such activities as arts and crafts, camping, computers and sports.

John Pusey, a Los Angeles County 4-H adviser, acknowledged that a shift in resources has occurred. “We are a traditionally suburban and rural organization that is attempting to reach out to environments and economic groups that hadn’t been reached before,” he said.

“Nationally, regionally and locally, everyone is working to decide, What is the best direction for 4-H to take? Where will 4-H be most effective?” Pusey said.

The new 4-H mission, and budget cuts within the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state cooperative extension programs, which help fund the clubs, have drained resources away from traditional clubs and activities. Almost certainly, the result will be clubs that are far different from the homespun groups of the past, where children worked for a year to perfect their apple pie recipes, or raise the perfect cow, Pusey said.

Pusey, whose office is in downtown Los Angeles, offered another possible explanation for why 4-H has lost its niche in the ever more urbanized Valley.

“Maybe 4-H just doesn’t sound very hip. It does have a corny image that we haven’t transcended yet,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like something urban kids would be involved with, even though they are.”

As a rooster crowed in the front yard of her Sylmar home, 4-H leader Marcia Thompson despaired over the decline of 4-H in the Valley.

She said she can’t understand why members of her club, the Country Bumpkins, balk at wearing their uniforms--white shirts and pants, green ties, and McDonald’s-like hats with merit pins on the sides--in public. Thompson said some kids say they don’t have time for 4-H, then she sees them hanging out in malls.

Her son, Daniel, who wants to be a mechanical engineer, said 4-H “just isn’t popular. . . . The kids don’t like it. I don’t care for it either.”

Thompson acknowledged that Daniel is embarrassed about 4-H. “He doesn’t want to be called a farmer, but he’s got trophies that just choke my living room because of farming,” she said.

Heather Bagwell, leader of the San Fernando Valley Highlanders club that serves the West Valley, said that even when the kids are gung-ho about 4-H, parents aren’t always supportive.

“4-H is a family thing that requires kids to get around to different meetings and activities,” she said. “Parents in the Valley have other agendas, and 4-H just doesn’t fit in.”

Virginia Norman said that, given the right project, kids will overcome many obstacles to belong to 4-H, especially if leaders are young enough to relate to them. Her club’s most popular project is dog care and participants respond enthusiastically to the lessons.

“Annie, Heather, what’s the pastern?,” quizzed 4-H project leader Peri Norman, 29, as children gathered around her dog, Kanuk, at an Arleta park. The children went on to identify the dog’s withers, brisket, croup, elbow and pads.

Project leaders Peri Norman and Carrie Elks arrange to bring extra dogs each week, so there are always enough animals for kids who live in apartments that don’t allow pets.

“It’s not important whether these children learn to clean their dogs’ ears properly,” said Peri Norman, who as a child was a member of the club her mother started. “We want them to learn responsibility, learn to set goals and achieve them, learn to win and learn to lose.”

Millie Trafton, 45, who was raised on a farm in Canoga Park and who leads the 13-member Chatsworth club, believes that even as 4-H changes, it should still offer participants the opportunity to raise animals.

She cited the example of Angie Arnold, 16, of Reseda, who is legendary in 4-H circles for her championship animals: 120-pound lambs expected to sell for $32 a pound, steers that may go for $1,800 and chickens that could bring $500 for a matched set of three at the fair this week.

Even at those prices, however, Angie said: “I always cry. They’re so hard to give up.”

Hard as it is, Trafton said, it is important for children to learn that meat isn’t made at the grocery store, and “meat animals” have a purpose.

Trafton said children who raise animals learn about the cycle of life and something more.

“When they want to go to the beach, they have to make arrangements to have someone take care of their animals, or they will suffer,” Trafton said.

Not that sewing or welding projects do not teach skills, she said, but “a motorcycle or a dress can be ignored for a few days, and an animal can’t.”