Was anyone on DHP a Scout or Cub Scout when they were kids?

[Mah'chew]

Not sure if you get the scouting movement out in the US?

I always wanted to join, but my old man was having non of it, he called them a facist organisation and said that Badan-Powell was a straight up racist, he said the Scouting Movement was nothing more than the Hitler Youth with a British twist..

Read up on it http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3575

[Tim Martinez]

I was a Boy Scout for 5 years. I made it up to Life scout which was 2 away from Eagle scout. I was the senior patrol leader and helped out with the cub scout meetings. By far, it was one of my best experiences as a youth. I learned alot and I would reccomend this to all young boys. It will help shape you into being a better man.

Tim Martinez
Troop 74 Rattlesnakes

[Martin Red]

Boy Scout just to get to do outdoor activities and to be able to legally start fires

I was also a choir boy, for a sing song with changed lyrics.

I was also an alter boy, when we used to take the wine to the Vestible, urrm nice Red. graemlins/all_coholic.gif

[ May 16, 2003, 04:07 AM: Message edited by: Martin Red ]

[TAD]

Originally posted by Martin Red:
Boy Scout just to get to do outdoor activities and to be able to legally start fires

I was also a choir boy, for a sing song with changed lyrics.

I was also an alter boy, when we used to take the wine to the Vestible, urrm nice Red. graemlins/all_coholic.gif being the son of a priest all three of the above were mandatory including sunday school. the horror. an absolute nightmare that i thought would never end. graemlins/rofl.gif

[Munch]

I did the whole Cub Scout thing, as my parents thought it would teach me some values.

However once I moved up to scout level, I soon realised that it was time to quit,as there was a whole heirarchy in place run by a bunch of sadistic nutters. Summer scout camp was like a scene from "The Lord of the Flies" :(

[nev m]

Dib,dib,dib,dob,dob,dob. Wheres Archalor (dodgy spelling!) on the bog!

If you put a tin of baked beans on the fire, and they explode you get banned! (for longer than two days aswell!!) :D

[Discogoddess]

My family has a history with Scouting...

My grandmother was a Girl Scout leader
My dad was an Eagle Scout
I was a Brownie and Girl Scout (sold enough cookies to pay for my trip to camp one summer)
My brother was a Cub Scout
My mom served as a Den Mother to my brother's troop for a time

I enjoyed my experiences in Scouting. The only things I regretted about my time with Scouting were:

Falling down a hill and getting impetigo on my leg at Girl Scout camp

Being forced to bring my dad's early 1960's Boy Scout sleeping bag with me to camp (that bad boy was SMELLY as hell!)...you know I got CLOWNED about that damn thing!

Not having anyone at camp who was familiar with black girls' hair enough to redo my braids (The "lonely only" syndrome in full effect)

Having to clean the latrine for my troop while at camp (which, unlike other latrines on the campgrounds that were covered by trees, sat out in the hot azz sun all day long...eewwwwww!)

Being a lame and quitting in 6th grade cuz the "cool girls" were doing so...like those heffas were my friends, anyway!

[blackwax]

Originally posted by Martin Red:
Boy Scout just to get to do outdoor activities and to be able to legally start fires

I was also a choir boy, for a sing song with changed lyrics.

I was also an alter boy, when we used to take the wine to the Vestible, urrm nice Red. graemlins/all_coholic.gif hahaha I thought I was the only one I used to sing for st johns colledge choir then nature took its corse.
my dad was a scout leader so I had to go but I have got some good memories smile.gif

[mdpm99]

Originally posted by Martin Red:
Boy Scout just to get to do outdoor activities and to be able to legally start fires

I was also a choir boy, for a sing song with changed lyrics.

I was also an alter boy, when we used to take the wine to the Vestible, urrm nice Red. graemlins/all_coholic.gif graemlins/rofl.gif

d

[houseaddict]

Originally posted by b_cortes:
I did the whole Cub Scout thing, as my parents thought it would teach me some values.

However once I moved up to scout level, I soon realised that it was time to quit,as there was a whole heirarchy in place run by a bunch of sadistic nutters. Summer scout camp was like a scene from "The Lord of the Flies" :( i couldn't agree with the above statement more!! Once I got into Boy Scouts, I felt like I didn't fit in with the movers and the shakers of the troop. A few years later, after I had left the troop, it turned out that it was a very good thing. The scout leader was taking the "popular kids" into his tent on those outings into the woods and turning these kids out!! He got locked up and all that shit!! F@ckin freak!! It's pretty strange how certain things in life have a way of working themselves out. And man am I lucky for being unpopular.

[Koffy Brown]

for some reason I only remember 1 girl scout meeting...and it was boring...I don't recall ever going back, I never got to sale cookies, actually I never had a uniform, so technically I wasn't a girlscout...

I did take ballet (My moms was determined to get the tomboy out of me), I hated ballet, but I loved my new ballet bag with it's special compartments...after a couple months of tu-tus and ballet shoes, I got into a fight...(yea I know what do you fight about in ballet) and I got kicked out...that's probably the first disappointment look on my mothers face...she was so sad... biggrinangel.gif

[danny webb]

I got threw out of Cubs, I was only there twice. seem they weren't 'prepared' for me!

Did anyone see that documantary on Baden Powell, some accusations thrown about, about him having lots of young boys wearing that uniform?

[MC]

I had no desire to be a scout of any sort. graemlins/jpshakehead.gif

I did sing in the Choir, and play drums in Elementary. graemlins/grinyes.gif

[richierich]

Yeah and I had so much fun.

[Koffy Brown]

Originally posted by danny webb:
I got threw out of Cubs, I was only there twice. seem they weren't 'prepared' for me!

Did anyone see that documantary on Baden Powell, some accusations thrown about, about him having lots of young boys wearing that uniform? graemlins/rofl.gif graemlins/rofl.gif

[Walter M. Jones]

Originally posted by houseaddict:
The scout leader was taking the "popular kids" into his tent on those outings into the woods and turning these kids out!! He got locked up and all that shit!! F@ckin freak!! [/QB]Something like that happened to me when I was 10,but it was one of the other older Boy Scouts. He asked me for a pair of my dirty underwear. I told the Scout Master because I definately didn't want to share a tent with him. I felt out of place with the others that were into it as well. I learned a few things and got a few merit badges from it,but nothing more. Troop 42 Gator Patrol! Peace.

[jcapeverde]

Originally posted by b_cortes:
I did the whole Cub Scout thing, as my parents thought it would teach me some values.

However once I moved up to scout level, I soon realised that it was time to quit,as there was a whole heirarchy in place run by a bunch of sadistic nutters. Summer scout camp was like a scene from "The Lord of the Flies" :( I was a Cub Scout too for 3 years and a Boy Scout for 2. Our Boy Scout troop had what I would call "tribes". We had the Panthers who were really a gang; terrorizing the rest of us until you showed them you could fight. The Blackhawks were nerds; always picked on. The Scoutmasters son was Senior Patrol leader who we always snapped on with his big lips. Then there was my Patrol, the Flaming Arrows, the fellas in other words. We got along with everybody and won most of the awards at jamborees. We also had the best ballers. Our Scoutmaster left us at camp to fend for ourselves. That was OK; we came home men!

[Mah'chew]

So the following did or does not disturb you? This is Baden-Powell's thoughts on Africans, or was he, like Enid Blyton, a product of his time?

By Michael Rosenthal, Reply by Ian Buruma
In response to Boys Will Be Boys (March 15, 1990)

To the Editors:

In his review of Tim Jeal's biography of Baden-Powell [NYR, March 15], Ian Buruma refers to my book, The Character Factory, as one of the best known of the "leftist" or "progressive" efforts to debunk the Chief Scout's mythology, and praises the ease with which Mr. Jeal handles my "conventional, progressive" views of Baden-Powell. While I appreciate that "progressive" is intended to be intellectually disreputable in this context, I confess to being surprised by the labels. I had thought the point was to understand, even if the understanding involved some unpleasant truths.

Take, for instance, the question of Baden-Powell's racism, which I raise in my book. Following Mr. Jeal's lead, Mr. Buruma dismisses the subject with the knowledgeable claim that "B-P was no more racist than most Englishmen of his time, indeed in many ways less." (How Mr. Buruma knows the degree to which most Englishmen of the time were racist remains a mystery, but no matter.) The issue, of course, is not whether Baden-Powell was more or less racist than anyone else, but whether his racist thinking tells us something important about the originator of a significant social movement whose professed ideals transcended race.

So it won't do to be cozy with it, as Mr. Buruma is, or worse, as with Mr. Jeal, to pretend it doesn't exist. Jeal's ability to explain away the offensiveness of Baden-Powell's frustration at native sloth in forming a levy (The Downfall of Prempeh, 1896)—"The stupid inertness of the puzzled negro is duller than that of an ox; a dog would grasp your meaning in one-half the time. Men and brothers! They may be brothers, but they are certainly not men"—is a hermeneutic triumph which does not disturb Mr. Buruma in the least. It turns out to have been simply a mistake, indeed the "common European mistake," Jeal writes, "of supposing that Africans whose way of life did not require the punctuality of factory workers were too stupid to run their affairs in an organized fashion." (162) That this mistake is a splendidly incisive definition of racism does not seem to have occurred to Jeal, or to Mr. Buruma.

In addition to misunderstanding the benign and homey nature of B-P's racial beliefs, I was apparently also led astray by my progressive blinders over the issue of scout militarism. For Mr. Buruma, "Jeal's argument that B-P's Boy Scout Movement didn't have military aims may be quite correct, in fact is correct; what the Chief Scout aimed at was to revive the warrior spirit in peacetime, rather like the old samurai and his Bushido." It is hard to know where Mr. Buruma draws the line between reviving the warrior spirit and what is conventionally understood to be militarism. As I tried to demonstrate in my book, B-P was himself incapable of making that distinction. A lifetime army officer, he not surprisingly saw the military virtues of obedience and loyalty as comprising the basis of all human excellence.

Scouting explicitly developed out of the trauma of the Boer war and the anxieties it unleashed concerning the deterioration of Britain's manhood. One of the ways Baden-Powell sold the scouts to the nation was by stressing the critical role they could play in preparing the rising generation for the next war. As he cautions at the start of Scouting for Boys, "Every boy ought to learn how to shoot and obey orders, else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman."

To accept the militarism of scouting's origins and early ideals is not to undercut the value of scouting or to suggest that it didn't develop in different ways over the next eighty years. But why must we pretend that its origins were not what they were?

Finally, as a debunked debunker, I would like to point out a major scholarly blunder on my debunker's part which Mr. Buruma over-looks. Mr. Jeal is adamant—and Mr. Buruma seems to agree—that Baden-Powell was oblivious to class concerns and that the scouts were not in any way intended as an instrument of social control to help secure the loyalty of the poor who stood essentially outside the social system. In this regard, it is interesting to see that when Jeal reproduces the original scout law of 1908, he prints the second stipulation as follows: "A scout is loyal to the King, and to his officers, and to his parents, his country, and his employers." (392) In fact, "parents" were not included until the 1912 version. The omission was not accidental. Baden-Powell viewed the parents of the under classes as part of the problem, rather than respectable figures of authority to whom he could trust his scouts. It was only when scouting clearly emerged as a middle and lower middle class movement that B-P felt it was appropriate to require scouts to promise loyalty to their parents. Such was the jovial "boy-man's" innocence of class matters.

Michael Rosenthal
New York City

Ian Buruma replies:
I have the distinct feeling of being caught in a crossfire here, but if I had any lingering doubts about the respective merits of Tim Jeal's and Michael Rosenthal's views on Baden-Powell, they were swept away by the content and presentation of Rosenthal's arguments. The truth is always complex, but whereas Jeal carefully weighs its many ambiguities, Rosenthal bludgeons it into the shape of his often anachronistic opinions.

The point of using the dreaded word "progressive" for Rosenthal's view is not to discredit him as a mad pinko, but to show how Rosenthal's own progressiveness leads him to misjudge the nature of Baden-Powell's conservatism. As Jeal points out in various places in his book, Baden-Powell was certainly conservative, even priggish in many ways, but to call his complicated and at times contradictory ideas conservative is to ignore their radicalism and their links, acknowledged by B-P himself, with socialism and other progressive views of his age.

As to B-P's racism, neither Jeal himself nor this reviewer denied that the chief scout's views of race were, from the perspective of our own time and place, often offensive, but, as Rosenthal says, the thing is to see whether they said something important about the man and his movement. Rosenthal's juicy quote notwithstanding, B-P tried very hard to bring Indians (successfully) and South African blacks (unsuccessfully) into the Boy Scout movement at a time when this was vigorously opposed by many white authorities. As B-P himself put it in 1926: "The question stands with the politicians just where it did twenty years ago. They do not look forward to what is due to the native."

On the issue of militarism, I must confess that Jeal was not only far more subtle than Rosenthal, but also than myself. He did not say that the Boy Scout movement had no military aims, but that "at its inception Scouting was more a civil than a military institution, both as regards the predominant intention of its founder and in its practice by boys up and down the country." Again, Jeal sees shades of gray where Rosenthal sees black and white.

Finally, I have looked hard for evidence of Jeal's scholarly blunder in describing B-P as being "oblivious to class concerns," and found myself chuckling again at the many cited instances of the scout's snobbery and obsession with "getting on." So where is the blunder? Of course, he had class concerns, just as he had race concerns and military concerns. The point is that whereas similar concerns went hideously astray elsewhere, leading to tyranny and mass murder, Baden-Powell's martial fantasies were not much more excessive than affording the opportunity to boys of all classes, creeds, and colors to indulge in such silly but hardly noxious pleasures as blowing the koodoo horn.

[beaniboy67]

i was in the boys brigade.This was a Scottish thing i think.We used to play soccer, 8 ball,table tennis,gymnastics ect.We wore uniforms and we had a great bugle band.This was when i first learned how to play an instrument(bugle and side drum)that was good.i also won young footballer of the year(soccer to you americans).We used to go to camp evry year and fight with the locals.very scary when you were 13 years old.We also had the best boys brigade football team in scotland and won the league every year.Really wish i had been in the scouts or cubs tho a i am a total outdoor person. :D

[Wild i]

All of my brothers were scouts, but Tee is the only one who made it to the level of Explorer.

Neither of us girls did the scout thing for long (I think my sister was a brownie for about 10 seconds -- me, not at all).

Of course, all this was before scouting became so controversial. It was just a very upstanding American thing to do back then. Then again, I was young so there may have been more going on than I realized.