CHAPTER 54
You may become a Boy Scout at eleven years of age. I joined Downingtown Troop 82 in April 1955, less than three months away from my fourteenth birthday. Troop 82 had nothing in common with Troop 2 except they both had 2 in their number and a scoutmaster called “Red”.
There was no initiation, no pretend goat and no request to strip. My mother signed the application and I went to a meeting at the Lutheran Church on West Lancaster Avenue. I very quickly passed the requirements to become an official Tenderfoot.
These were:
Repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.
Demonstrate the Scout sign, salute, and handshake.
Demonstrate tying the square knot (a joining knot).
Understand and agree to live by the Scout Oath or Promise, Law, motto, and slogan, and the Outdoor Code.
Describe the Scout badge.
A requirement in the present time is to complete and do exercises with your parents in the pamphlet How to Protect Your Children From Child Abuse: A Parent’s Guide. This did not exist in the time of 1955. How sadly far we have come. Of course, maybe it would have been useful during my first attempt at Scouts with that other troop, not that my parents would have exercised with me.
Scout meetings were similar to MYF in structure. We met, had opening exercises and spend about 15 minutes drilling (well, we didn’t do drilling in MYF, we did prayer). There was then some type of project, test or special recognitions of achievement presented. At the end there was a social period that included games such as “Submarine”. Submarine was a physical game. You divided into teams. One team would then be submarines and the other submarine catchers (perhaps destroyer escorts like the ships my dad served on in WWII). The catchers would line up with their legs apart. The submarines, one at a time, would try to crawl beneath everyone’s legs without them closing their legs and catching you. It was something on that order.
The meetings were fun, but I loved camping the most. I went to at
least two Camporees. These were large gatherings of different Troops from all over. You would meet Boy Scouts from different parts of the country, sometimes even from another country. Troop 82 had an outstanding reputation for being a disciplined, but fun group. We were never rowdy as were some.
standard frame was the “Trapper Nelson” at that time; it showed how to build one in the Scout Manuel. Troop 82 designed our own frame, which we called the A-Frame. This frame allowed us to carry a larger load with more comfort than a Trapper Nelson. Other Troops visited our camp asking directions for
constructing these frames. They recognized us at the Closing Campfire for our innovation and we even received a write up in a Scouting publication. I think we stole our A-Frame design from the Koreans.
I remember one Camporee held at Longwood Gardens near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. We were able to see the great fountain and light show while there. The
Camporees were fun, but I liked our private campouts more. These were just our Troop and it was a bonding experience. I took to the hiking and sleeping in the woods, bathing in streams and cooking meals over an open fire.
It was an open fire during such a campout that caused one of the darker moments to occur. It
didn’t happen in our Troop, but at the campsite of another Troop from another state that were our immediate neighbors on a patch of meadow. One of the boys was doing the cooking and he took a large kettle filled with scolding soup just made off of a rack over an open fire. Carrying it to serve, he tripped on a stone or grass clump, fell down and the kettle landed upside down upon his legs. He was rather badly scalded and an ambulance had to be called in to take him to the county hospital. I don’t know his ultimate fate, but eventually it became part of a story I wrote called, “A Brother to All”.
He couldn’t find ear lobes in the manual, although he reread the medical section a dozen times. What frightened him now was how feverish and week he felt. His body oozed a thick sweat that turned his shirt black. He lay back and waited for breath’s hand to cool his fire.
As he laid waiting he grew even hotter. Outside the returning troop had begun cooking supper. They built a good fire and Bucky Lefebvre had constructed a spit from which hung a great kettle of water. The water was beginning to boil.
Terry too was coming to a boil. The tent was stifling. He choked with every breath. Perhaps he thought he should read his Bible in preparation for his soul. He sat up and rifled his pack for his pocket sized new testament. Before he found his Gospels, he found a small dictionary he forgot he carried. In here might be something about Ear lobes, he thought.
There was nothing under “Ear Lobes”, so maybe simply “lobe” or “lobes”. Yes, “Lobe—N. 1. A roundish projection…as of an organ or leaf. 2. The soft, pendulous, lower part of the external ear. Akin to L. legula lobe of ear…”
Hey! What!
Back to the word “ear”. There was an illustration listing parts of the ear. An arrow pointed to the lower part of the ear labeled, “G—The Ear Lobe.”
It isn’t a disease; it’s just a part of the ear, every ear. It’s a joke. He reached over and threw back the tent flap.
Bucky Lefebvre was cautiously lifting his soup kettle of boiling water on the end of a thick forked stick. He stepped back from the fire.
Terry yelled as he came out from his tent, freed from his own fears by the madness of anger cooking for so long in the tent.
“Goddamn you, Richie!”
Everything froze. Each scout stopped as if solidified by the strange curse. Everything froze except the boiling water, which cascaded backward over Bucky.
Excerpt from “A Brother to All” ( 1976)
In my collection, Sin of the Sons (1976)
At that time there was a practical joke going about. Someone would come up to you, suddenly looking very startled or concerned. You would ask them, “What’s the matter?”
“I hate to tell you, man, but…”
“But what?”
“You got ear lobes.”
It was surprising how many kids didn’t know what ear lobes were
and would get scared, especially when told their ears might have to be amputated. I used that joke in my story as well. (On the right is one of the famous celebrities who was a tragic victim of ear lobes.)
I rapidly gained Second Class rank through out the spring and summer. I have looked at the requirements of today and a lot has changed. Obviously in 1955 I was not required to explain the Internet. I also saw nothing in the current requirements mentioning Morse Code. We were required then to show proficiency in Morse Code. Maybe we were preparing for the cutting edge technology field of telegraphy. Most of the Scouts dreaded this test more than any. I passed it with a perfect score and in record time. The test I feared was the swimming requirements. I see today you have to pass swimming for Second Class. I didn’t have to worry about that until I went for First Class.
I was working on my First Class Requirements, knowing I had a problem since I couldn’t swim. The Scoutmaster told me I could learn to swim at Camp Horseshoe and pass the requirement there. Camp Horseshoe was a large Boy Scout Campgrounds near Silver Springs, Maryland in the area where Mason-Dixon Speedway existed. Our Troop was going for a two-week stay that summer. I did not enjoy this trip as much as I had expected.
I had to wear the summer uniform. I did not like this uniform because it had short pants. I did not wear short pants anymore in the summer. I thought they were little kid’s clothes. I also was too skinny and gangly and hated the way I looked in the summer uniform. My head looked like a balloon about to pop.
I was carpooled down to the camp with another boy’s family. It was chaos upon arrival. There were Scouts and families swarming about the parking lot and grounds like ants. Eventually staff people herded we Scouts over to the medical tent. This looked like something out of M*A*S*H. It was a large tent with the side flaps rolled up, just a canvas roof providing shade. They lined us up at one end to pass through to doctors at the other. The doctors would check us physically or so it was claimed.
This was redundancy to my mind. They required a doctor’s
signature before a boy was allowed to even attend as proof he had a physical examination and passed. Why another exam upon arrival? Nurses instructed us to take off all our clothes and place them in these cubbyholes at the entrance of the tent. This was embarrassing. It was bad enough I had to be naked in front of these other boys, but there were families, including mothers and sisters walking all about and could plainly see us. I gritted my teeth and snaked along with the others to the doctor’s station. The doctors sat on little stools.
When I reached my doctor he said, “Reach down and spread your toes on your right foot.”
I did so and he bent forward and stared between my toes.
“Now the left,” he said.
I switched hands very aware of my undignified position of being bend over with my bare rear end in the air. He examined this foot and then said, “Okay, you may go get dressed.”
I had to go out and around the outer rim of this tent to get my clothes while families were milling all about the grounds. The world was not making a lot of sense to me. If all the doctors were doing was examining for Athlete’s Foot, why did we have to strip naked? I didn’t know it then, but I would be asking those kinds of questions the rest of my life.
I have been told I should have brought a charge of sexual harassment for this silly exercise, but nobody though of such possibilities back then, especially again an organization as the Boy Scouts. You night as well claim you were wrongly touched by a priest, and everybody knew that would never happen.
After this ordeal, a P.A. voice called the varied Troops to the parade grounds. (By golly, I think this is M*A*S*H; wasn’t that Radar O’Reilly?) They lined us up in formation before the welcoming speeches. It was July and very hot. Scouts were keeling over in faints. I was already beginning to not like Camp Horseshoe.
Actually for much of the time I did enjoy it, but two rumors began
to weigh on my mind. Both involved nudity. The first was that you didn’t wear swimming trunks in the swimming pool. I was already nervous about the whole swimming lessons/test thing, now I decided to completely avoid the pool. It turned out the rumor of skinny-dipping at the pool was not true, but I never learned that until the last day of the trip.
The other was the Great Capture The Flag War. This was not an ordinary Capture the Flag game. This was an elaborate war game played as night was falling, so some of it was in the dark. They pitted Troop against Troops Everyone fanned out over the camp attempting to snatch handkerchiefs from the belts of other Scouts. If your handkerchief was captured you became a prisoner of war. The winning Troop was the one who took the most prisoners. However, a rumor circulated that one of the Troops made their prisoners strip. (Gosh, was Troop 2 attending?) A couple of Troops claimed they would do this, which gave the rumor credence. In any society there are the good and the bad. I hid out in a field with a couple fellow Scouts that night. Hiding in the tall grass. They never captured us. We might have been cowards, but to the others we were heroes.
I didn’t mind some things. Each Troop was responsible for KP duties for a day, which involved preparing meals, serving and clean up. One of the features of Boy Scout camp, by the way, was a drink called Bug Juice. It was some sort of concoction, who knows, maybe mixed Kool-Aid. You could always gross out some kids by telling them it was made from squashing real bugs.
You could sidle up to some Tenderfoot and say, “I had KP last night and saw it made!” After that you could throw in anything you wanted.
We slept in these open-sided bunkhouses. There were wooden racks along each side and you put your air mattress and sleeping bag on it to be your bed. The latrines were outhouses located down wind from the bunks. If you had to go at night it meant getting up and walking down a trail into a wooded area. Dickie Dietz had a top bunk and I am glad I didn’t have the one beneath him. He couldn’t be bothered with this walking to the woods in the dark. If he had to go he would roll on his side and urinate over the side of his bunk.
Once again I relied on my super holding it in strength to minimize my visits to these public latrines. I would keep a watchful eye out and whenever it appeared an outhouse might be unoccupied I would dash in and relieve my burden. I, of course, only urinated on these dashes. I never did the other during such trips.
I passed a lot of my First Class Requirements at Horseshoe, except the swimming. I did traditional crafts such as make a beaded belt with a horseshoe buckle. You weaved into the belt skills you accomplished at the camp. I also picked up a couple Merit badges during those weeks; I forget which now. I know I earned Badges in Camping,
Reading, Reptiles and Amphibians, Insect Study and Zoology in Boy Scouts. I think I got Stamp Collecting and I might have got Astronomy. I still had an interest in science; the teachers hadn’t completely beaten that out of me yet.
I do have another memory of Camp Horseshoe that was great, but it wasn’t on that summer stay. In the winter of early 1956, January 7 to be precise, some of us in Troop 82, along with the Scoutmaster, hiked the Mason-Dixon Line down into Camp Horseshoe. It was bitter cold. The frigid weather turned even the little waterfalls in the streams to solid ice. We spent the night in a cabin at Horseshoe, bundled up in our sleeping bags. There may have been fireplaces in that cabin. I know we ate Cream of Wheat for breakfast, something I didn’t usually eat, but it was nice and hot. I net developed a taste for it, though. We were the only ones in the camp at that time. I loved that hike. It is one of my fondest memories.
I was elected Patrol Leader in December 1955. That was an
amazing change. People usually picked me near last and my peers elected me their leader. I took it seriously. I was Patrol Leader of the Beaver Patrol. That probably would have been a position bringing derision in some circles today. Even Beaver College gave up its historic name in the face of jibes, which personally I consider cowardice on their part.
I had a good patrol. There were four Patrols in Troop 2, if memory serves. There was a Patrol Leader of the Quarter named. Points were awarded and this honor went to the patrol that earned the most. In February 1956 the Troop scheduled a weekend at our private campsite. This camp was located up Rock Raymond road on a hill overlooking the town and called Camp McIlvaines. However, the Scoutmaster cancelled the outing due to a storm predicted for the weekend. Beaver Patrol never got the message for some reason. Four of us showed up that Friday evening.
We hiked to the campsite expecting to see other members of the Troop already there. The site was deserted. We waited and about a half hour past the posted meeting time realized no one else was coming. It was beginning to rain. Nip Wilson decided to go home, but the rest decided to stay. These were Jim Dawson (pictured right), Dickie Dietz and I.
(The photo on the ;left is Nip Wilson. My mother thought this was a picture of me even though I looked nothing like Nip and was several inches taller.)
Now when I say campsite, I mean there was a clearing in the woods with a couple of designated fire pits circled by rocks. There was no other resemblance to a camp. We pitched two of our tents each designed to sleep two, but we choose to squeeze into one. We dug a latrine in the woods and a trench around the tents. This trench would keep the rainwater from getting into the tents if it started to flow down hill, which it did.
We were able to have a fire at first. The rain was light, but eventually the storm moved overhead and we couldn’t keep any flames going. We retreated into our tent. We ate food that didn’t need to be cooked. We sat around a flashlight in the tent and talked well into the night, shivering in the bitter February chill. We told a lot of gross jokes. Phony book titles were a fad at the time, things like, Yellow River by I. P. Daly and Plop! Plop!by Lucy Bowels.
We stayed through Sunday. We got some breaks in the storm by them and cleaned up the camp, made some repairs to the fire pits and did everything one should do on a campout, such as make sure any fires are doused and covered, bury your latrine and leave the place looking like you hadn’t been there.
We earned enough points for braving the weather that I made Patrol Leader of the Quarter. I also passed my remaining Second Class Requirements.
On one of our campouts Dickie Dietz’s home burned down. I don’t remember if it was during that weekend or not.
I wrote a story called, “A Brother to All” based on this trip.
Jimmy Dawson was also in MYF with me and he was very religious then. During the camp out he preached the Gospel to me and handed me a little card. It basically just said: “If you were to die tonight, where would you be tomorrow. Fill in the blank: H_______.”
I told him I hoped I’d go to Heaven because I was pretty good, but I really didn’t know. I didn’t see how you could really know. I carried that card in my wallet for many, many years without filling in the blank. Many Jimmy Dawson planted the seed that didn’t blossom for another two decades on that camping trip.
I guess the last two memories of my years in Boy Scouts were in
September of 1956, because they were probably the last I was involved in Scouts. On September 8 we went on a tour of the penicillin plant in West Chester. Stuart was along. Wyeth, Inc. had opened a penicillin manufacturing plant on East Neilds Street in 1952. They had first made penicillin in a garage at the corner of North Walnut and North Chestnut Streets in 1943, when they were known as Reichel Laboratories. Now they offered tours of a modern plant to see how this “modern wonder” drug was cultivated. My only real memory of that day was how the whole neighborhood smelled like bananas. Wyeth closed the West Chester plant in November 2004.
Then in the same month on the 22nd, also with Stuart along, the Troop went for a visit at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. We had a guided tour of the campus and the classrooms and then we went to the Homecoming Football Game at their stadium. I only have vague memories of the hoopla surrounding that game, the cheering and a section of students wearing beanies grouped together in one section, the Freshmen.
I was all of a sudden in two organizations that gave me sanctuary,
MYF and Troop 82 BSA. They accepted me as just one of the boys in both. No one bullied or made fun of me. People respected and treated me as an equal.
Reverend Thomas Ogden
(pictured left) provided lots of activities for the Youth Fellowship besides the regular Sunday evening meetings. Some one else led those Sunday meetings because Reverend Ogden was conducting the evening church service at that time. He and his wife were very nice people. He would have these special get-togethers at the parsonage next to the church and they were always fun. His wife would make lemonade and brownies. I remember three such events very well.
One time he put us into teams of three or four and handed each team a list. He sent us out on a scavenger hunt all over Downingtown. If you have never participated in one of these it works this way. The host gives you a list of items, some quite ordinary, but most a little offbeat. You try to find as many of the items on the list as possible. Whoever gets the most wins the game.
On Halloween we gathered at the parsonage in costume and he
sent us to trick or treat at the downtown stores. It was for UNICEF, not for us. We had large cans and asked the merchants for donations. I don’t think any refused, and many gave we kids some kind of treat as well.
At Christmas we became a living manger scene between the parsonage and the church. I was a shepherd. (I always seem to end up being a shepherd.)We had shifts. Some of us would stand for an hour in the little stable he had constructed on the grass plot. We would then come inside the parsonage and another group would take our place. Inside the Pastor’s wife would have hot cocoa with marshmallows waiting to warm us up. We did this living scene for several nights.
Reverent Ogden got his fifteen minutes of fame in 1958. He played the Fire Chief supplying the extinguishers at the climax of The Blob starring Stave McQueen. He was plain Tom Ogden in the credits.
I was whisked away to another land like Peter Pan a couple nights
a week or for a weekend or fortnight. Unfortunately I had to spend the majority of my time in the world of Junior High. In this world, somewhat like in Peter Pan, there would be Pirates, but they were nothing like Captain Hook.
No comments:
Post a Comment