Burton Allen Wagner was born on June 13th (Friday), 1941 in Milwaukee WI. He was raised in the Orthodox Jewish community of Milwaukee surrounded by a large extended family including
Jennie Wagner, retired Medical Lake FFA advisor, received the Excellence in Agriculture Award during the Spokane Ag Show.
Wagner estimates she taught 125 students a year for 20 years, including the last 12 years as an FFA advisor and agriculture teacher.
"No other teacher gets to build a relationship with kids like an ag teacher does," Wagner said. "Because we spend so much time in the car with them, traveling with them. There s just not a way you don t get to know a kid when you re both trying to hold on to a lamb and trying to shear the wool off of it, or treating a sick animal. You learn a lot about them that you wouldn t as they come and go in and out of your classroom."
The community remembers Carl Grub, founder of the Jensen Memorial Youth Ranch in Medical Lake, as a quiet, forward-thinking leader who worked to provide area youth with a free space to raise their livestock projects.
Grub, 86, died Aug. 18 in the Gray Fire near Medical Lake.
"His impact in the community is going to be felt more in his loss than I think anybody was going to know in his presence, because he was such a quiet man," said Rick Perleberg, chairman and president of the Jensen Memorial Youth Ranch board of directors and Reardan FFA advisor.
MOSES LAKE Medical Lake High School ag teacher and FFA advisor Jennie Wagner said some of the people in the Medical Lake HS FFA chapter will go on to careers in agriculture, and some of them won’t. All of them, however, have picked up important skills through FFA - something that’s also true of the young people in the 4-H clubs she used to lead.
“I think people, a lot of times, think FFA is just all those kids (raising) animals, or they wear those blue jackets,” Wagner said. “But what it really does is, it allows them to try things out in a safe environment and have experiences they wouldn’t get (in other clubs). Because it covers so many avenues, from public speaking to learning parliamentary procedure, raising animals, evaluating livestock, just tons of stuff.” .