Scouting Part 1

This is a long one. I got on a roll. One of my favorite blogs. Please pass this blog to your friends if you can.
Here tis: I'm hoping to link you to the "Battle of new Orleans" Song.

SCOUTING:

I was a terrible cub scout and had no business going into boy scouts. In Cub Scouts I had to wear a little blue shirt, a yellow neckerchief with a brass doo-hicky with the face of a bear on it.  I was always surprised and dismayed when my mom told me to get my things because it was time to go. Instead of saying, “Mom, our “den” of scouts has the largest collection of misfits, special ed kids, just plain weirdoes you could find in the county, and I don’t want to go!” I just jumped into the car and endured the gluing of popsicle sticks into a log cabin and ate the cookies and warm cool-ade.

One day, I was told it was time to be a Webelow. No one could tell me what a Webelow was, just that it was what you were before you could be a Boy Scout…oh, and you have to buy another uniform for the year or two of limbo.  I probably went to two meetings.

My biggest memory of Webelows was trying to sell tickets door-to-door for a Bar-B-Q supper at the elementary school.  Now, the Bar-B-Q supper was not a rip-off for the $4

we were asking. I’m sure the scout leaders lost hard-earned money to buy the meat.  There were men and women in our town that had the secret recipe for

melt-in-your-mouth-eyes-rolled-back-in-your-head-with-delight beef and pork.  Not to mention the Baptist ladies who were trying to out do the other ladies by seeing who could make the best pastries and pies. 

Try telling all this to a sweating lady with a fat, crying kid on her hip when she opens the front door with a “What-the-hell-do-you want-kid?” look on her face.  Better yet is  the hard of hearing person who keeps saying “What?”  At most I had ten seconds to make my pitch.  It wasn’t rare for someone to open the door, and then slam it in my face without a word.

I think every teen should have a job selling to the general public, it’s the fastest way to hone your communication skills. “Yes sir, here’s your new burger because you thought we wouldn’t notice that you scarfed down  three quarters of the first one before you decided that the first one was not to the level of your finely honed culinary tastes. Have a nice day, and we know you’re a cheating scumbag.”

I stuck at the door to door selling that day because I knew I needed to hit the twenty houses assigned to me before I could enjoy the savory dinner.

I ran into some amazingly gracious people who bought a ticket for everyone in their family and smiled the whole time.  I realize now, they were probably members of the church who were putting on the BBQ, and just happy to help in any way they could.

I’m now a total push-over for kids selling anything door-to-door.  I recently bought  half-price tickets for restaurants I never go to, just to support the high school baseball player in our neighborhood.  We buy so many Girl Scout cookies we don’t have places to put them.

I’m pretty sure the eleventh commandment is “Thou Shalt Buy Anything Kids Are Selling Door to Door.”

I felt pressure to be a Boy Scout. My oldest brother, Mark nine years my senior, had been one after all. What nobody told me till later was that he was in for a couple of campouts then quit.  I thought I was upholding a grand tradition and following in his footsteps!

The Vietnam war was in it’s last two years.  We had a nearby Air force base called Perrin Field that was an advanced fighter training base.  Denison really gained from the having the Air force personnel in our town. The air-force kids had a maturity that comes from being around dedicated, focused people, and the knocks that come with constant uprooting.

As a rule, they were in the top twenty percent of the class. (which isn’t saying much since we had guys like “Stony Wood” who ran around the playground as if riding an invisible horse while slapping one leg, twirling an invisible lasso while alternately shooting his invisible Colt Peacemaker as a sixth grader) I still have a good friend who's dad was a fighter instructor at that base.  His family had been stationed in Japan before coming to lovely North Texas.  Jet’s were constantly flying overhead, and all of us boys could name them instantly. “There’s an F-105!” someone would shout and we’d squint to see it was really the correct aircraft. Not too secretly we often spoke about how cool it would be if they dropped a bomb on our school accidently. A friend of mine missed a few days of school and showed up to class tired and depressed. He told me his Dad was shot down in his Phantom jet bomber in Vietnam.  He was now fatherless.

The adult scout leaders were, with the exception of the grossly overweight, quasi-redneck Scoutmaster, good, hardworking Air Force personnel who wanted to help us pimply faced, booger -picking losers.

I don’t think there were any scout troops in our county that stood at attention, learned to march in step, had their uniforms scrutinized like us. I kind of liked it, and hoped we’d be issued M-16s soon.

Our scout troop is broken into smaller “packs” that were run by the senior, or highest ranking scout. Somehow mysteriously,  the pack I was assigned to was run by the son of the big-fat-redneck scoutmaster who was had his dad’s traits as well as a few of his own, most notably bully-dom. Already fat and sweaty at twelve years old, he talked down to us from his superior rank, and with the exception of one easily-impressed kid, was totally ignored by the others in our pack.

The only thing we did as a small group that had any value was to name our pack after a Black & white 60’s TV show about WWII American soldiers racing around in jeeps with thirty caliber machineguns mounted on the back, supposedly in North Africa bringing havoc to the Germans with their lightning fast attacks.  The show was “The Rat Patrol.”

We had a pack song to go with our little pack. We changed the words to “Aquarius” from the 5^th Dimension to “This is the dawning of the age of the Rat Patrol.”

We thought it was cool. We tried to sing it as a group once, but melted down quickly as each kid snickered at the others for trying to sing. It was never attempted again.

We DID have a troop song that we sang as we marched. It was a derivation of a 1959 song called "The battle of New Orleans" by Johnny Horton.  That was a famous battle of 1812 where the Red-Coats were routed by the straight-shooting Americans.

An older scout named Richard had worked out the lyrics to fit our troop.

If you know "The Battle of New Orleans" feel free to sing along…or picture a group of marching teen boys singing this as we marched in the Fourth-of July parade, flags waving.

Richard led off in a loud  voice: “We’re the boys of troop Six-Eleven, our mothers sent us here to study nature’s ways. We learn to light fires by rubbing sticks to together, but when we catch the girls we set the woods a-blaze!” Hup, two, three four, and we started again. I cannot imagine to this day, how we got away with singing that song in public…

Campouts are what “Scouting” is known for. If you don’t like bugs, smelly sleeping bags, being really hot, or possibly cold in the same day, waking up from a bad night’s sleep, eating cinders in your food from being too close to the campfire, then you are

the right person for this adventure.

My first campout was memorable, we were planning to spend a Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon in a wooded area know as Lake Randel (sp).

Since no one else in our family was a camper…except for the fifteen minutes my brother Mark supposedly was a scout, I had zero help or experience to draw on. I was given a faded mimeographed note with a list of what to bring. I thought  that I didn’t need help, so I went around the house gathering supplies. I ended up in the attic which is perennially sweltering to find a sleeping back and back pack. What I found  was my dad’s WW2 gear. The sleeping back was only 40 years old at this point.  Mice had wisely avoided it for years. The backpack looked like it was found in a dumpster behind a pawn shop.

Never mind the embarrassment of old gear, I was nervous about doing anything with these  misfits. I wasn’t sure if one of them wouldn’t try to kill me in my sleep, or worse try to climb inside my sleeping bag with me! Mom asked me if I was squared-away, and took my word for it. One of the requirements on the paper was to come in full uniform.

No problem there, my uniform, thank God, was not a hand-me-down, so I actually felt dapper.

It was early fall and weather was always unpredictable so much that the local weather man could forecast the weather correctly only if he could stick his head out the window and see it for himself. I packed for the temperature I felt at the time.

When Mom dropped me off at the little Presbyterian church where a troop met, I waved her off and boldly walked up the pickup truck where “the goobers” were gathering.