Q&A With a Family of FFA Leaders
The Mellon family boasts three FFA members who served as Arizona state presidents. FFA leadership involvement and training gets credit for many of their accomplishments.
On the Record: Barbara Jenkins
Barbara Jenkins discusses her work to connect students to the food industry and her Honorary American FFA Degree.
Q&A with Champion Calf Roper Tyson Durfey
World Champion Calf Roper Tyson Durfey says his FFA background in Missouri helped him achieve his biggest dreams in the Super Bowl of Rodeo.
Q&A with Original FFA Band Member Neil Overly
Concert bands have been a fixture at the National FFA Convention since 1947, when the first official band was selected from FFA member tryouts. But that wasn’t the first band to play at the convention. An FFA band from Fredericktown, Ohio, performed in Kansas City at the fifth convention in 1933. Remarkably, two members of that band are still living – Linden Scheff (pictured above, left) and Neil Overly – and they attended a recent ceremony that recognized Fredericktown as the home of the FFA jacket. Overly, a retired farmer, turned 100 on Nov. 8. Here, he discusses his FFA experience and the years since. New Horizons: What is the background of that 1933 FFA convention band? Neil Overly: I grew up on the family farm and was a pretty good trumpet player, too. When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, the school FFA leader asked me to join FFA and go with them to Kansas City to play in a band he was taking. We rode the Buckeye Stages bus line and stayed overnight in Indianapolis. [...]
On the Record: Robert Jones
The chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana started on a sharecrop farm in the segregated South of the 1950s. An FFA background launched his incredible journey.
