A full-length 4-H career is 10 years, but 91-year-old Morgan Township native Rachel Hannon has been honored by the state of Indiana with its Golden Hoosier Award for the 50 years she served as leader of the Morgan Township 4-H group The Hustling Hoosiers. That service, coupled with her 11 years of youth participation back when members could belong from age 10 to 21, brings her illustrious 4-H career to over six decades.
The Golden Hoosier Award is given annually to Indiana residents 65 and over with a distinguished record of service. Hannon received her award in a ceremony at the Statehouse in September presided over by Lieutenant Governor Suzanne Crouch. “That was a big ordeal,” Hannon said. “I had never heard of the award. I kind of shoved it off, but I’m learning it kind of is a big deal.”
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Those whose lives have been influenced by Hannon already knew she was a big deal. The longevity she gave to 4-H was not unique.
The cafeteria at Morgan Township Schools was named in her honor after her retirement in the spring of 2023 at age 89. She had been a cook there for 36 years.
Her nephew Neil Hannon, also of Morgan Township, says she was legendary in his youth for her popcorn balls at Halloween. “She’s a great cook besides,” he said. “She just multiplied her love about a hundred times.”
Rachel Hannon grew up in a farmhouse near the Malden grain elevator and was herself a member of the Hustling Hoosiers. “Back in those days if you were a girl, you took girls’ stuff,” she said of the project categories such as home economics, clothing, and foods she participated in. “Of course, back in those days, they didn’t have all those projects they did today.”
What they did have was two 4-H clubs in Morgan Township that tended to fall along a gender divide, so Hannon, who was Rachel Brust at the time, also joined the Morgan Sodbusters, the predominantly boys’ group, to show cattle and swine.
A photograph from 1950 hanging on Hannon’s living room wall shows a beaming teenager in cuffed jeans and saddle shoes posing with father Henry Brust and her grand champion steer. A faded, 73-year-old purple ribbon rests beside it under the glass.
Hannon said 4-H was popular because rural kids didn’t have a lot of other options to keep themselves occupied. “It was growing when I took it over,” she said of her first year as a leader in 1969. Some years she had over 100 girls in her group, including her own daughter Susan, whom she had with her husband Frank, a Morgan Township farmer.
“I learned right along with the children. We had demonstrations and the club had never done that before,” Hannon said. The categories they focused on were mostly foods, sewing, entertainment and public speaking.
“You get through 10 years of foods you’d be amazed what the kids are making,” she said. “The little girls start out making aprons and they get in high school and they’re making formals.” She guided them until 2019.
Hannon said it amazes her that some of her former club members went on to careers related to their 4-H interests. Kim Schwant, formerly Kim Wellsand, of Greenwood, nominated Hannon for the Golden Hoosier Award and credits the training she received in the basement of Hannon’s small white ranch with leading to her 14-year career at the Indiana Supreme Court.
“That’s quite a ways to work in the Indiana capitol building from tiny Malden,” she said.
“I was really pretty shy and Rachel thought that doing demonstration contests would help with that,” she recalls. “About mid-way through my presentation about my pet guinea pig I froze,” she said of her first attempt at public speaking at age 9 or 10.
“She said I didn’t have to continue if I didn’t want to, but of course, no one wanted to disappoint Rachel,” Schwant said. “Many years later I actually won the state demonstration contest and won a trip to Washington, D.C.”
Schwant knows of peers in Rachel’s Hustling Hoosiers who went on to become business leaders, college professors, and neurosurgical nurses. “I’m the person that I am because of Rachel.”
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.