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As It Happens

As it Happened: The Archive Edition - The Next Generation Episode

The individuals featured in this episode may be young, but they're not kidding around. Meet a dogged nine year-old journalist, an eight year-old mooing champion, a tweenage taxidermist and more.

Stories of newsmakers ahead of their prime, making news before their time — from 50 years of AIH archives

CBC Radio ·
Ivy, 9, hopes to one day be a journalist like As It Happens host Carol Off. (Sarah Jackson/As It Happens)

Adventurers. Philosophers. Scientists. Game changers. Social activists. Entrepreneurs.

Over its 50-year run, As It Happens has had the pleasure of interviewing a number of young trailblazers and trendsetters — all whip-smart and wise beyond their years. This episode revisits a handful of our favourite interviews with those amazing kids.

Click on 'Listen' above to hear the broadcast version of the episode. Full-length versions of each of the interviews as they originally aired, as well as archival images, appear below.

First we were gonna try Julie Payette, the astronaut. But she was away meeting the Queen. So we decided to do you.- Ivy Brooks, 9, on why she wanted to interview Carol Off.

Chapter 1: On the Off beat

Budding journalist/dancer/teacher/astronaut/scuba diver Ivy Brooks, aged nine, gets the scoop on reporting from an industry vet — our own Carol Off. 

Ivy came prepared for her interview with Off. (Sarah Jackson/As It Happens)
As It Happens0:01Meet Mackenzie McCarty, the 12 year-old taxidermist
Grade six student takes dead mice and squirrels, stuffs them, and then dresses them up.

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RELATED: Listen to founder and editor-in-chief of the Boardman Camera newspaper, 11-year-old Eli Boardman, in 2012.

Chapter 2:  'Heifer' is the kid who wears the crown

At just eight years old, Philip Prantle won the mooing contest at the Wisconsin State Fair — and just hearing him might have you believing in bovine providence.

A young cowboy — not Philip Prantle — at a rodeo. ( Orlando /Three Lions/Getty Images)

Chapter 3: Death and taxidermy

Two certains in the life of 12-year-old Mackenzie McCarty — who told us in 2015 about her determination to make a career of her passion for embalming, stuffing and arranging dead rodents in thematic dioramas.  

Mackenzie McCarty. (Submitted by Mackenzie McCarty)

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Chapter 4: Kids just wanna have funds

Meet Andrew Burns, the nine-year-old founding president of the Children's Bank of Omaha.

A bank run by pupils of the Emmbrook School in Wokingham, U.K, in 1968. (P. Felix/Daily Express/Getty Images)

Chapter 5: Bitten by the same bug

Seven-year-old Nomi Git and five-year-old Allison Perluv of Winnipeg Beach, Man., launch a petition to address the mosquito problem in their town.

closup of mosquito
A mosquito bites the arm of a Winnipeg resident in this recent undated photo. (Wayne Glowacki/The Canadian Press)

Listen to the full episode audio at the top of this post. 

Written and produced by Kevin Ball.

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