Crawford County. AR. Genealogical Society

Joyce Whittington became involved in the Home Extension Club because of her grandmother, Birdie Walker. Birdie was a charter member of the Walnut Hill Home Demonstration Club in Lafayette County, Arkansas and Joyce loved looking through the scrapbooks Birdie had made documenting her work. Joyce earned a degree in Home Economics and then worked for Extension for thirty years, teaching people about new and safer methods of preserving food, nutrition, cleanliness in the home and other topics which made the lives of her students better. Birdie was the wife of Dr. Alonzo Gordon Walker, and therefore knew more than most in her day about disease prevention through such methods as getting rid of trash that fed insects and tin cans that held water in which malaria carrying mosquitoes could breed. She was instrumental in teaching people about having cleaner homes and communities and was responsible for one community hauling off two hundred wagon loads of trash and greatly reducing the incidence of serious illness in that place. The website of the Extension Service is a valuable resource on topics like the ones recounted here.