“Hello, Mr. President. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mr. President. And you?”
Most people know of a famous photograph snapped in the summer of 1963 of a 16-year-old Bill Clinton shaking hands with John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C.
The once-and-future Leader of the Free World was tapped for that year’s American Legion Boys Nation, an eight-day immersion in the nation’s capital of just how government works — from writing legislation to getting one’s self elected to high office.
Clinton, according to the lore that followed him to the Oval Office, was so impressed by the Kennedy encounter that July day 59 years ago in the White House Rose Garden, that he told a friend, “Someday, I’m gonna have that job.”
Meanwhile, Colin Street doesn’t know if his ambition is that presidential.
He’s just hoping he can get his fellow senators at the 2022 edition of the gathering to talk about sustainability in his native Mountain State and the importance of a living wage everywhere.
Sustainable service
Colin, 17, who will be a senior at Morgantown High School this fall, will be one of 98 delegates — make that “senators,” of the automatically elected variety — from across the nation trekking to Washington for the 2022 outing of the civics celebration.
He most recently participated in the West Virginia version of the proceedings last month at Mountaineer Boys State, which was back at Jackson’s Mill in Weston, Lewis County, after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic.
The Monongalia County representative successfully ran for Commissioner of Agriculture, which went with his desire to keep his strong West Virginia roots.
His mother hails from Mason County and his father grew up on a farm in Preston County that is still in the family.
“Lots of visits and summers there,” Colin said.
Which started him thinking about food, really thinking about food, in a place where it sometimes just isn’t a meal — unless it comes batter-fried in a take-out carton.
It started him thinking about sustainability, in terms of energy, agriculture and economics.
For all its green spaces, West Virginia is still a food desert, meaning many locales aren’t served by grocery stores or at least farmers markets, where nutritional fare can be purchased.
West Virginia also needs to grow some economic sustainability, he said — as in being able to present jobs providing paychecks enough to cover the needs of the household.
And the state, he said, needs to start considering sustainable energy alternatives as part of its power grid.
It was all in his platform at Mountaineer Boys State. Participants were required to write and sponsor legislation for a cause of causes which move them.
At Boys Nation, he’ll do the same on a larger scale.
“I’m looking forward to meeting and working with people from across the country,” he said.
He did the same in microcosm at Mountaineer Boys State.
“West Virginia has distinctly different regions,” he said. “Boys State got me out of my Morgantown bubble.”
Almost heaven, but …
A lot of people, he said, want to get out of West Virginia altogether.
Especially bright, young people, he stressed. Colin wrote his anti-brain drain legislation specifically for Boys State.
As said, he’ll carry that through at Boys Nation, when he tweaks the bill to take in the needs of those struggling — and not just residents of West Virginia and Appalachia.
“I want to stay here,” he said, “to see if I can help make it better.”
Right now, he plans on staying home for college, too. He wants to study marketing and economics at WVU, and he hasn’t ruled out public life, either.
That’s reflected on his pursuits at Morgantown High.
He’s a member of the Green Initiative Club and successfully wrote a grant to the Monongalia County Commission for the funding of an organic garden at the school on Wilson Avenue.
There’s also his volunteer work with the city’s Planned Parenthood chapter and the Appalachian Prison Book Project, which provides free books to those behind bars across the region.
He’s on the drumline of his school’s renowned Red and Blue Marching Band and is treasurer of the National Honor Society.
Colin is also president of Mountaineer Area RoboticS — MARS — the Morgantown-based haven for those with a bent for engineering and robotics.
Motorcade homecoming?
He thanks MARS, in fact, for launching him out of his middle-school shyness.
“I was pretty timid,” he said.
His advice to anyone who still is?
“Put yourself out there,” he said. “If you don’t, you’ll never know. Apply for that job. Join that club.”
High School senators in Washington next week can put themselves on the ballot for president.
Might the student from Morgantown go the same way as his Boys Nation brother, William Jefferson Clinton?
“We’ll see,” he said, laughing.
“If I come home with a Secret Service detail, you’ll know how I did.”
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