Boy Scouts

My Troup met on Monday nights in the basement of the Methodist church on Main Street. I would usually walk over towards Terry’s house and then we would walk over to the church together. I think I learned a lot on the way to and home from scouts. Terry usually filled me in on the mysteries of life. He was a year older than me and felt obligated to mentor me. He had older brothers who had done the same for him

There were things we knew about and things we thought we knew about. Sex, of course, was one of those things we thought we knew about but actually didn’t understand at all. Terry would tell me jokes his brothers had told him and then just laugh like crazy. I would laugh, too, although I often didn’t get it. I made the mistake a few times of trying to tell one of those jokes and then not being able to explain it when someone pressed me about why I was laughing so hard. I’d try repeating the punch line a couple of times but after that I was helpless.

I learned about the black market in Scout camp. If somebody wanted comic books you could get a premium price if you had them to sell. I came home from Camp Eastman one summer with more money than I took. Of course, I was out of comic books but I thought I was rich anyway.

In Scouts I mastered lanyard-braiding way before I was supposed to. Boys in OA (Order the Arrow) were the only ones who were supposed to make the twisted and round braid lanyards. Somehow I figured it out early and made quite a bit of money selling those, too. That really annoyed some, but the senior Scouts protected me because they wanted me to make one for them, too.

I am ashamed to say it but one summer Billy bought a package of cigarettes at the corner gas station for me. He told them they were for his parents and they were used to him coming in and doing that so they didn’t think anything of it. I sold the cigarettes for a dollar a piece and was sold out after the first night at camp.

Our adult leaders were Dr. Kral and Al Riepe. They were men of remarkable patience and they also cared a lot about kids. They willingly gave up a lot of their own time for us. Both of them had boys in Scouts… Gerry and David Kral, and Mike and Jerry Riepe. I know we kept those men up many nights with our shenanigans at camp. They never seemed to get too mad at us. Maybe that was because their sons were often in on the trouble with us.

Our tents weren’t bad. There was room for two cots that sat on top of a wooden floor that was a couple inches above the ground. You could put gear under the cot and not worry about it getting wet. The tents were tall enough to stand up in and your stuff usually kept dry even in heavy rains as long as you didn’t touch the ceiling of the tent. That would start a drip.

One rainy afternoon Van Carter, Joe Hunsaker, and Terry and I were sitting two to a cot and having a comic book trade discussion. Joe was casually sticking his knife in the floorboard between us and pulling it out. Somehow my foot got in the way and knife went through my shoe and popped out and landed on the floor. We all looked in shock as the front half of my tennis shoe turned red. The blade had gone deeply into the soft tissue of one of my toes. The scar is still there.

Joe wrapped up my foot with a bandage and we told no one. He thought he would be in trouble and I thought I would be singled out at mealtime. There, anyone who had carelessly cut himself with a knife had to come up front and they put a big sign that said “Tenderfoot” around his neck. Then everyone sang a silly song about how careless the poor fellow had been. The humiliated person had to wear the sign for the next twenty-four hours.

We changed the bandage regularly and I went on a ten-mile hike the next day. It bled quite a bit but somehow it healed fairly quickly and none of the adults ever found out.

We had many great adventures in Scouts. I will write about some more of them another time.