CASSOPOLIS — A hiss of smoke wafts across the Ross Beatty Junior/Senior High School stage from a crate signaling familiar TV and movie music and 4-H’s version of “Mission: I’m Possible,” a creative theme carried through the 2011 Senior and Leader Awards Program.

Five black-clad young women, the Citizen Washington Focus delegates, burst from the crate as it destructs.

Before Brenda Davis, 25 years, is announced as Leader of the Year, Maxwell Smart will even make an appearance, talking into his shoe phone, the height of Sixties-style espionage.

Leader recognition is a Cass County tradition since 1976, when Gertrude Albertson and Virginia Springsteen were the first.

Virginia Edgerly, marking her 54th anniversary with the youth development program, was a leader then, too.

Keynote speaker Bobbie Jo Hartline of the Dowagiac Dogwood Fine Arts Festival, and also a Decatur graduate who participated in Edgerly’s North Red Hill club, appreciated what she got out of 4-H involvement, but she joked that she never guessed it would be a security detail.

The black-clad gals, posing like “Charlie’s Angels,” listening to their earpieces and conversing furtively into their cuffs, escorted her to the stage Thursday night before an audience which included three Cass County commissioners, Vice Chairman Ed Goodman of Silver Creek Township, Skip Dyes of Calvin Township and Roseann Marchetti of Edwardsburg and four fair board members, Zelda Cloud, Bill Grabemeyer, Kevin Hershberger and Brian Kuemin, RBHS Co-Principal Tracy Hertsell and MSU Extension’s Brad Neumann, District 13 coordinator, Beth Ferry, Nora Lee, Patty Dohm and Mary Wilkinson.

“Our intel indicates,” Ellis said, that Hartline, a “former Decatur Raider,” has also been affiliated with Dowagiac radio station WGTO and Straight from the Heart Interior Design and Decors, putting her arts degree to use, for “this homegrown powerhouse also infiltrated SMC to fortify her position as an exemplary citizen of Cass County.”

Hartline said she “felt 11 again after meeting my 4-H leader the second I walked in the door. It brings it all full circle again celebrating your achievements and your possibilities.”

Hartline said, “At one time ‘they’ said flying was impossible. Don’t tell that to the Wright Brothers — or when I’m about to board a plane for spring break! The moon is too far away and we’ll never reach it. Don’t tell that to Neil Armstrong or the men and women who flew our space shuttle missions. The dream was there. Fantasy. Imagination. Creativity. Some people say that’s child play, that you’ll grow out of it. Don’t tell that to Walt Disney. He made his entire career — and a childhood for all of us — with his imagination. Did you know Walt was fired from his very first job for a lack of creativity?

“In negotiations with MGM Studios for his first film featuring Mickey Mouse,” Hartline continued, “they told him it would never fly. A mouse that big on the screen would scare women. In his career of books, movies and theme parks, more than 300 banks turned him down as a bad investment. It would never fly.”

Computers were “too big, too slow and too expensive” for them to have any practical business applications for more than a few companies. And they’ll certainly never be adaptable for home use. Certainly not in everyone’s purse — she holds up her cell phone with an app that’s more than 100 years old.

“Don’t tell Bill Gates computers aren’t possible,” she said, “or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. He is one of the youngest, richest men in America and has more than 500 million active users even though his site has no fee and sells nothing. That’s pretty impossible. The dreams were big enough that the ‘facts’ didn’t count. They chased their dreams. Maybe we should do the same thing. How big is your dream?

“At 4, I wanted to be a nurse, a doctor, a veterinarian, a fireman, an astronaut, an archaeologist, a mom and I wanted to drive a dumptruck — all at the same time.”

“There’s nothing wrong with having those dreams,” Hartline said, “because dreams keep us alive. We believe in you. People in this room have invested in you, in your talents and in your dreams … the world will poke at them and they’ll shrivel if you don’t protect them. Dreams can get squeezed and sometimes people want to stomp on them. Tell them to get off!”