No. I was never in Scouts. I don't think they had a troop for girls in my town. I was in 4H which was more popular in our town. They had a club for girls and one for boys. In the girls club, we learned to cook, bake, sew, crochet, knit, and draw. There were also projects in home canning and flower arranging. We met once a week and worked on a project, or projects, we had chosen to show at the county fair. This is how I learned to sew and cook. Mom was always so busy with her housework that she didn't have time to teach us all the skills we could learn in 4H. There were also skills we could learn from the adult leaders that she didn't know. It was fun too. Especially going to the fair in the fall. We went as a group and had a lot of free time to roam the fairground and look at all the exhibits picking up all the free stuff we could carry. Paper fans, pencils and rulers were the most popular giveaways from the machinery dealers and the politicians. We were required to model what we had sewn but the other projects we just had to give to the leaders and they would see that they got to the proper place in time for judging. We would walk over to the animal exhibits too to look at the cows, pigs, lambs, chickens and the fancy pigeons. This was the province of the boys club or the agriculture half of the 4H. I don't know if girls were allowed in this club or not. When my children were in 4H, both boys and girls were in the same club. It was not divided. However, you couldn't show animals in the home economics groups. Another booth that we had to visit was the corndog and the lemon squeeze. These were treats that we didn't get anywhere else. We could have made the lemon squeezes but they wouln't have had the same taste as those made in the heat and dust of the fairgrounds. That dust flavor could not be replicated at home. Cotton candy was available but I didn't like it well enough to spend those precious quarters to buy when they could be spent on carnival rides to make me sick after eating all the other junk the vendors had to offer. We would come home a darker shade of brown from sweating and walking through dust all day. We might even come home a bit stinkier if we weren't careful in the animal tents. It was fun. I was in 4H from the age of ten until 14 or 15. I don't remember exactly. After that I was too busy with school and school activities.
My children were in 4H too. They were in the ag group because they raised and showed rabbits. It was still fun for them and they enjoyed the corndogs and lemon squeezes too. Some things never change.
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