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Perhaps as a recurrence of thumb-sucking in a higher form, Joe thought long and seriously about becoming a professional pop singer. For as far back as he could remember, he and Donneita had sung in the parlor while Thelma Moore beat out tunes on the upright piano. As a duet, Joe and Donneita appeared on a Cookeville radio station program and at Rotary club and other similar gatherings in the area. A Sinatra-type baritone, Joe made his first trip to Kansas City to sing at the national F.F.A. convention there. For the fact that he is not today draping himself around nightspot microphones, he can thank the Future Farmers of America.
Breaking the Complex. Almost as a matter of course, Joe joined the F.F.A. when he entered high school in Gainesboro. Under his vocational agriculture teacher, Robert ("Woofie") Fox, Joe began studying the schoolbook side of modern farming: crop rotation, contour plowing, terracing, grass and grain mixtures for good cover crops, soil testing, plant foods, livestock bacteria, basic veterinary practice. In shop class, Joe learned how to build hog feeders and cattle chutes, how to wire a barn for electricity, how to hang gates, how to solder and weld, and how to care for his machines. (Lesson I: "Grease is cheaper than bearings.")
From the F.F.A. Joe learned that there is a lot more to modern farming than the techniques of handling plants and animals. In F.F.A. public-speaking and essay contests, he learned to organize his thoughts and express them clearly. In his F.F.A. meetings he became familiar with parliamentary rules of order and fundamentals of self-government. In his trips to national conventions he came to know and understand farm boys from Maine and California, from Hawaii and from Puerto Rico. Says Joe of his benefits from the F.F.A.: "It's an ideal training ground for qualities like citizenship and leadership. In farming, just like anything else, there are disappointments. A fellow has to learn how to give and take in anything he tries. Here in the F.F.A. there are a lot of awards offered, with thousands of boys all trying to win them. We don't always get what we're aiming for, but we learn how to win and lose in the right way. By inspiring the boy, like the F.F.A. does, it helps him to take better care of what God has given the American people."
Through its teachings, its competitions and its organizational orders of ascendancy, the F.F.A. gave Joe Moore—as it has given thousands of other farm youths—a feeling of worthwhileness and prestige in his school, his community, and even in such cities as Nashville, Knoxville, Kansas City and Chicago. To impart this sense of high standing, thereby breaking down the classic inferiority complex of the farmer in a city-dominated culture, is a key mission of such organizations as the 4-H and the Future Farmers.
Under this influence, Joe took the big step that was to commit him finally to farming. Beginning to make good money from his Durocs, he decided he could do even better with a modern, sanitary farrowing barn. When his father resisted the idea, Joe and Donald came to a resentful impasse before Thelma intervened with a compromise. Donald ended up contributing $400 toward the new hog barn, with Joe paying another $600.