Boy Scouts

All things considered, Boy Scouts has been one of the best experiences of my life.

I was 12 years old when I first got involved there. My first Scoutmaster was Jerry Snider. One experience I had with him was passing the cooking part of my First Class rank in his back yard. I built a fire in the middle of his garden area. It was Autumn and all his vegetables had been harvested.

Other Scoutmasters were Charles Crosby, and Tom Wall. 'Bing' Crosby, as we all called him, was a retired U.S.Army cook. He was a great positive influence on my life. Most of my Scouting was done under his leadership.

Tom Wall had us earning the money we would need for our activities, including summer camp. He organized us and took us out almost every Saturday to sell stuff. We went all over the Salt Lake Valley to a different neighborhood each week. We sold Maxfield chocolates and pecan bars, bath oil, and bags of light bulbs. I earned much of my camping gear, my uniforms, as well as my camping fees. It was a great experience which would be the basis for being a salesman later in life.

My first year I was not able to go to Scout Camp in the Summer. I do not remember why. They went to Camp Steiner in the Uinta mountains. The stories they told about it made me want to never miss another one.

The next year they went to Camp Hunt at Bear Lake. I got my Canoeing and Nature Merit Badges and passed a few other requirements and generally had one of the best times of my life.

The following year we went to a camp near Bryce Canyon, Camp Pine Lake. Once again I thoroughly enjoyed myself and being out in nature and the friendship with the other boys.

Each spring, when we had a 3 day break from school, we'd go to Mount Topaz for a campout. There was a dry stream bed there that had a lot of clear gem stones, topaz, in the sand. Around the stream bed were rock outcroppings where you could dig into crevasses in the rock and find the orange colored gems. Once they were washed into the stream, the sun would bleach all the color out of them. We would also stop on the way home to climb and jump in the sand dunes in the area. One night we had a spring rain storm, accompanied by some strong winds. Most of the tents had blown over in the night, leaving us with puddles of water on the sleeping bags. Another night, there was a full moon and we went on a nighttime hike. As a I jumped onto a rock while coming down a mountainside, the rock moved a little, and I heard the unmistakable buzz of a rattlesnake's tail. I think I cleared about half of the mountain in one jump, getting away from it.

Each winter we would have a campout in the snow at Tracy Wigwam. It was only a few miles from our neighborhood up Millcreek Canyon. We slept in bunks in 3-sided Adirondack cabins. I always had a hard time sleeping, because I could not keep warm. I was very skinny, and would always wake up in the night shivering. One morning a very cold pocket of air had settled in there during the night. It was so cold that the leather on our boots was frozen and several boys could not get their boots on. We were trying to cook breakfast on an open fire in front of the cabin. It was so cold that the sausage we were trying to cook would be burnt on the bottom and still frozen on the top. Eggs would not come out of the shell. The camp staff finally realized that it was too cold for us and came and collected everyone to the lodge and finished cooking breakfast for us in the kitchen there.

In between time I passed my other rank requirements. We went to the YWCA swimming pool every week in the winter. I earned my Swimming and Life Saving Merit Badges there. I really started to learn to swim well during that time.

Other merit badges I remember were Reading, Music, Hiking, Cooking, Camping, Citizenship in the Nation, Citizenship in the Community, Home Repairs, Personal Fitness, and Geology. I ended up working many years later when we lived in Orem, Utah, for the man, Dr Preston Hyatt, who taught the Geology Merit Badge class. He once showed us evidence on a hillside in North Salt Lake where the Wasatch Fault had slipped some 50 feet in one quake. That would level everything in Salt Lake Vally were it to happen now.

I also went with a bunch of other Scouts from our troop to The University of Utah to take Aviation Merit Badge classes from the Air Force ROTC. That eventually led me to join the ROTC when I was at the U, which led me to a career in aircraft maintenance in the Air Force.

Other merit badges I worked on but never completed were Pioneering, Rifle and Shotgun, and Astronomy. I learned a lot from every badge I worked on, even those I didn't complete.

My final rank earned was Star. I was about to earn my Life rank when Dad grounded me from Scouting. I had been with some friends who decided we should work on our Cycling badge. When we got home from school, we grabbed our bikes and headed for the Salt Lake airport for our first long ride. No one was home when I got there from school, so I was not able to get permission. I left a note, but that didn't cut it. I stopped to buy some food on the way home and got way behind my friends. I got home very late, and Mom was very upset because she was worried.

Dad blamed the whole problem on the Church, and since the Church sponsored Scouting, I was taken out of that. Dad was socializing with a bunch of anti-Mormon friends at the time and looked for any excuse to get us away from church. I think he was also a little jealous because I had passed him in Scout rank advancement.

When I was in the Air Force in Omaha, Nebraska, I had the opportunity to work with the Scouts again. I was working with the Young Men, and the Scouts were going to drive to Yellowstone and Teton National Parks for their summer adventure. I was asked to go along to help with the driving. The troop rented several cars. We visited Yellowstone for 3 days and nights. We camped out on the banks of Yellowstone Lake near Fishing Bridge. We went to Teton National Park, swam in Jackson Lake. It's very cold, but not as cold as Yellowstone Lake. We also went to Custer Battlefield, Devils Tower, Mount Rushmore, and the Badlands of South Dakota as we were traveling homeward.

It was a wonderful trip except for one incident. The Scoutmaster was a very high strung, nervous man. He was an excellent organizer, so the trip was well planned. He also had a medical problem that was exacerbated by stress. He had medication for the problem, but he was very worried about the boys. They were fine, but he still worried. His medication was therefore not handling his problem, so he took a double dose. Big mistake. That caused him to hallucinate, and there was a very scary outburst in front of the boys as we were getting ready for bed one night. The other leaders anointed and gave him a priesthood blessing and then took him to a clinic for medical treatment. I was left behind to calm the boys and get them to bed. He was brought back late that night and the rest of the trip went without further incident.

However, he was very embarrassed by the incident, and soon after the trip he asked to be released. I was subsequently asked to serve as Scoutmaster.

We had a lot of good times while I was Scoutmaster. The Air Force encourages it's officers and others to support Scouting. I was essentially given as much time off from my duties as I wanted to serve in that position. I took advantage of that and spent at least 2 weeks each summer with the boys on Scout campouts. I read in Boys' Life magazine about a canoe outfitter in Minnesota that catered to scouts. I talked to the boys and their parents, as well as the other leaders, and then organized a trip to Ely, Minnesota and the Canadian Border Waters Canoe Country. We went for 9 days each of the 2 summers I was Scoutmaster. Fortunately, both years we had an outstanding group of boys and leaders. We traveled over 50 miles each of those years canoeing and portaging between lakes along the U.S./Canadian border. The boys all got their canoeing and swimming merit badges. Most of them also got Cooking and most of the requirements for Camping merit badges. The second year most of the boys earned their Mile Swim patch. I picked out an island about a half mile out in the lake where we camped, and we swam to the island and back. It was an easy swim for those boys who tried it (only one boy on the trip did not do it). I learned then that all of the boys were on age-group swimming teams. The first day on the lake each trip was always a learning experience. The boys would be doing loops and zigzag courses, trying to learn how to make the canoe go straight. One year there was a windstorm blowing the day we had to go home. I was in the lead canoe. The big lake we had to cross coming back had white capped waves, which made it quite treacherous. As we got to the middle of the lake I turned around to see how the boys were doing, and was very pleased to see an absolutely straight line of canoes following my canoe. They were having no trouble handling the rough water. A week of practice had made them all excellent canoeists. A couple of the boys also became excellent cooks. We did a lot of our cooking in dutch ovens. There were lots of blueberries in the woods around us, and we were treated to some excellent blueberry pies. On the next to last day of the trip we discovered hidden in the bottom of one of the packs a large bag of raisins that we were supposed to have eaten throughout the week. Oops. But the two boys, who were brothers made a couple of raisin pies, which we all enjoyed.

After the Air Force time, I had the opportunity to work with the Scouts again. This time I worked with Georgia as the 11-year old Scout leaders. It was a really good experience for Georgia in helping her understand what it takes for a Scout to make Eagle rank. So she was able to help all 3 of our sons to achieve that rank. It was also good for our sons Lyle and Eric. They were just a little younger than our Scouts at the time, and we allowed them to participate along with the Scouts in many of the activities. It got them started well on their road to Eagle.