But the organization, the FFA, Future Farmers of America,
was a leadership organization
and in addition to having all kinds of farm project activities
-mine were always dairy cattle-
we also had parliamentary procedure contests.
You'd have a team of about five or six people.
I was the president of the team and you'd go through parliamentary procedure exercises,
open a meeting,
take motions, amendments to the motions,
appeal the decision of the chair;
you learned all this parliamentary procedure stuff
that most people never learn.
Most citizens don't even know how to make a motion correctly.
They have no idea that it requires a second
and that you can amend it,
that you can appeal the decision of the chair
and let everybody vote on whether or not the chair made the right decision.
I learned all that stuff in parliamentary procedure.
They also had public speaking contests.
Of course I represented my school in public speaking
and went up several layers in terms of that.
o in that particular farm youth organization
I learned a lot about leadership
and about how to speak and how to engage in
meetings and work to get things done,
how you go about getting action taken in the way you think it ought to be done.
All of that of course served me very well when I went to North Carolina State University
and ran for student government after a few weeks on campus.