Unless math fails me, they ought to be turning eighty-five this year. But this video and a book I wrote are a couple of items we put together and worked like madmen to get published largely during the month of September.

We somehow managed to pull it off while getting our regularly scheduled publications out the door and spending a full week on the road while covering the Hurricane Ike when it tore through East Texas and left half the state in darkness.

Nothing like deadlines bearing down to see what people are made of.

The Winds of Change Video ran complement to the roughly 100-page pictorial history of the organization, which made use of several great historical photos in combination with several more modern shots. As such, roughly a third of the photos used were my own.

The color scheme, theme and many of the quotations by current and past leaders were shared between the book and the video.

Although the book didn’t garner any accolades by itself, one of my photos inside it did. A single shot of boy in large black hat bottle feeding a calf, taken a couple years prior while we profiled a young family near Panhandle, Texas, for the organization’s annual Young Farmer & Rancher Award. The book gave me my first opportunity to publish that photo (shown below), and it garnered the 2009 Best Single Photograph Award from the national organization in Washington, D.C.

 

 

An abbreviated version of the book, published in both Texas Agriculture and Texas Neighbors, the organization’s two major print publications. It provides a nice glimpse at what the inside pages of that book look like. None of the print stories I wrote then are still online.

The video above (and below) ran as part of their television programming shown on the RFD-TV Network.

Incidentally, here are the stories we did on the hurricane StaringDowntheStorm (the print version) and the video story. That print story played a key role the following summer in College Station when the young man it features was named the County Extension Agent of the Year in Texas.