Healthiest Boy And Healthiest Girl
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During the summer of 1922, while visiting the Iowa State Fair, Guy Noble, director of the National Committee on Boys and Girls Club Work, watched with great interest the state health contest conducted by Josephine Arnquist. He thought this was intriguing and decided to replicate it and expand upon it at National 4-H Congress that December.
At Chicago the event was made national. State leaders were invited to have their youngsters select the boy and girl from their delegations whom they deemed healthiest. In Chicago, behind some screens in the cattle barn at the International Live Stock Exposition, candidates were thoroughly examined by physicians from the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund, a health foundation.
The idea of presenting a farm boy and farm girl as the "healthiest in the United States" had an appeal that fired journalistic imagination and won headlines across the nation. The names and pictures of the first two winners, Joseph Isaken, of Springfield, Minnesota, and Marguerite Martin, of Shepard, Tennessee, were advertised from one end of the nation to the other. In that first year, 1922, and for years thereafter, the health contest produced more newspaper and magazine space than any other single feature at the 4-H Congress, and in spite of its defects, the contest focused attention on the importance of health to boys and girls as well as the livestock being raised. "Be your own best exhibit," became a familiar club slogan. The contest continued for a number of years.
An accounting on the "facts about the health champions" from the 1925 4-H Congress shows the thoroughness of the contest:
George Cuskaden, a 14-year-old Indiana farm boy was found to have the highest score, 97.7 percent. Deductions were made for filled teeth and an almost imperceptible tendency toward flat footedness. He had never touched coffee or tea in his life, preferring cocoa or straight milk as a beverage. He eats fruits every day of the year, apples being his mainstay. Since he was a wee tot his hours of sleep have been as regular as the sun, 9:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. in the winter and 8:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. in summer. He helps his father run a 200-acre farm near St. Paul, Indiana. Last summer his club pig took first prize at both the county and state fairs. "Regular hours, mother's cooking, meat two or three meals a day, milk and fresh vegetables all the year round, plenty of work and plenty of play" are the reasons George Cuskaden gives for his remarkable physical condition. With the exception of the flu several years ago, the boy has never been sick in his life. He is five feet, five inches tall and weighs 55 pounds.
Alice Burkhart, chosen as healthiest girl in 1925, tells a very similar story. With more emphasis on the use of cereals for breakfast and a scientific balanced ration conducted by her mother, her diet has been much the same as George's. She is five feet four inches tall and weighs 131 pounds. Her score was 95.7 percent, deductions being made because of a slight cold contracted after arriving in Chicago, and because of slightly faulty teeth and insufficient muscular development in the arms. Alice is living on the farm where she was born and where her mother is rearing a brood of six children of which Alice is the fifth. She suffered from measles and other children's diseases when she was smaller, but there was no later effect from these ailments. Her hours of rest too have been as regular as George's but she has been allowed more sleep, from 9 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. For exercise she walks four miles a day to school where she is a junior in high school. She washes dishes, rides horseback, plays basketball and tennis and is a member of the physical training class at high school.
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