Scoutmaster Podcast 222

Hi, I'm Robin Bridges and I'm an assistant scoutmaster with Troop 466 in Huntsville, Alabama, the Rocket City. This addition is a scoutmaster podcast that's sponsored by backers like me. Hey, thanks a lot, Clark, for what you did.

And now to you, scoutmaster, And you say your first name, Darnell. Yeah, can you imagine? That made me a pretty good freighter about the third grade. Listen, Clark was no prize. Yeah, I can imagine You and I are probably both pretty good fighters. Hey, everybody, this is podcast number 222..

Hey,

Well, hello and welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green And this week, oh my, you're not going to hear all that much that I record this week. As you can tell, I'm working on a pretty good spring cold here. I'm going to put off reading messages out of the mail bag this week. I just want to take a very few moments at the top of the podcast to thank Jim Appelly and Robin Bridges who have become ScoutmasterCGcom backers over the past week, And backers are people who step up and help make the podcast and all the other resources we create possible. If you're interested in becoming a backer, check out ScoutmasterCGcom and go to the support link at the top of the page And you'll get details about how to do that.

I also wanted to make sure to tell you this week that I put together a package of PDF documents- over 40 infographics and other documents that you may find useful- in PDF format that you can print out and use in your program. I put these together in a downloadable zip file to make it easy to get those resources And once again, go to ScoutmasterCGcom. Look for the link to the ScoutmasterCG PDF package at the top of the page And you can find out how to get that downloadable file.

Well, this week on the podcast- thank goodness, I recorded an interview. Every once in a while You come across people who you're pretty sure you've known for a really long time, even though you've just met them. Bailey is one such person. He is the author of The Commissioner's Corner.

It's a great book about scouting that I want to highly recommend to you, And Darnall was good enough to take the time to sit down with me last week and record the interview that you're about to hear, And I think it's great listening because Darnall has a very infectious enthusiasm and cheerfulness that we all could really use. So, without further ado, I'm going to take you right to that interview with Darnall daily, and that's going to take up the rest of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we?

F Darnall Daily Jr might be a familiar name to you. He has a long record of service to scouting And we're going to find out a little bit more about that. And he has plenty of unit level experience too, And we're going to find out a little bit more about that. But you may know Darnall through his book The Commissioner's Corner, which is a collection of essays and thoughts and poems that reflect his love for and appreciation of scouting, And I'm happy to welcome him to join us on the podcast today from his home in Redding Pennsylvania.

How are you doing, Darnall? I'm doing really well. You started out as a Cub Scout. I was a Cub Scout. Yes, I was in PAC 35 in the Baltimore Air Council, chartered to Church of the Redeemer. That would have been 47,, 48, and 49.

I think, if I remember correctly, my mother was involved with the den. So I became 12 and then went into the troop, troop 35,, still at Church of the Redeemer.

Instead, They've had well over 300 Eagle Scouts in this troop. The troop is still there. My patrol leader was a guy by the name of Charlie Starr, And he was the Eagle Scout number seven in the troop.

And then of course that September went to the military school and that kind of cut my Boy Scout career short. There was a reason.

Mother sent me to that military boarding school- you know, I was just reading about that- as a reward for your good conduct. Exactly right, yes, And you have to take my word for that, because mother's long gone.

You know, I met with a bunch of those guys for dinner last Saturday night down in Baltimore And one of my classmates was a four-star Navy admiral and always thought that he was the exception to the rule, that his parents had really sent him there for a good education and not because of behavior problems. And so I invited him up next to Reading to be a speaker at one of our fundraising dinners, And at the dinner he confessed that just before he was sent to the military boarding school he had been on a Boy Scout camp out And he was not the one that set off the firecrackers, but he was the one that brought them to the camp out.

And so there are no exceptions. So the four-star admiral, the immediate past president of AARP, past chairman and CEO of Saks Fifth Avenue, and that's just my class. Go from scouts, you go to military school, then we skip forward to you becoming reacquainted with scouting and getting involved again.

How did that happen? Well, my son's joined scouting Started with. My older son was in the cub pack.

I was not officially involved then, but when he joined the scout troop, which was a troop of 423 in the Delaney District in Baltimore Area Council, I went to pick him up one night and the Scoutmaster says: hey, why don't you hang around and help me out? You know, just one hour a week, you know the usual one.

And I said: well, geez, I don't know anything about scouting. You know, I was only in for a few minutes.

So he said: well, don't worry, we'll get you training. I said, well, okay, I'll hang around and help you out.

So that kid was 11 then and he's 57 now. So that was a few years ago.

So I became assistant Scoutmaster And then this guy says: you know, I promised that we would get you training, but I realized I'd never taken the training. So he and I took- I think it was- Scoutmaster- fundamentals.

We went a couple of three nights and then a weekend And he and I went through that And then he did wood batch that year And then I did wood batch the next year, 1972. And long about that time he said: well, you know, it's your turn to be Scoutmaster now. Yeah, okay.

So I was Scoutmaster of Troop 423 in Baltimore Council for six or seven years And then I lost my job in Baltimore and had to move to Massachusetts. I became assistant district commissioner in the Sama set district in the old colony council.

Up there in the old Boy Scout handbook where it showed you the directions for how to put your council strip in, It said: Sama set council did that for about a year And I had two scouting executives come to my office- Never a good sign, right, And we want you to become the district commissioner. Yeah, Okay.

So I became the district commissioner and it really was a dysfunctional district. There never was a chairman. In the time I was there I wound up doing the roundtables myself.

I even ran a Scoutmaster fundamental course myself- I think that for about a year and a half, And realized I hadn't seen a Boy Scout in all that time. And you know, no chairman, no committee meetings, I think three different executives in a year and a half. Anybody who's been involved in scouting has seen those situations.

So I quit And having been the district commissioner for a year and a half, I knew where the functional units were and where the nonfunctional unit went. And one of the units that was really functional was Troop 101 in Marshfield, Massachusetts. I went to that and I said I would like another assistant Scoutmaster. Oh yeah, I would like you.

So I was an assistant Scoutmaster there for the rest of the time and I was in New England And then I lost my job again, moved to Redding Pennsylvania. So I called up the office and talked to the executive and said: hey, I'm in town And I didn't realize that that's a red flag to executives when you call up and volunteer. Not too many people do that, That's right.

And he was a new council executive and he said: oh okay, Why don't we meet? So I became an assistant council commissioner for training. I did that for about a year, a year and a half. I did a stint for a year as the vice president relationships.

You know I had all the religious relationships and membership committee and that kind of thing. I did that for a year. The guy that was the council commissioner kept saying I don't know why I'm doing this. Donald's the one that ought to be doing it. He knows much more about scouting than I do.

So after his year-long campaign in May of 1986, I was elected council commissioner And I did that for 16 years. Wow, That's a long time, Much too long. And it wasn't until I stopped being that that I realized that Roger did this too long.

Well, nobody tried to unseat you- apparently, Apparently not. And we basically had the same council executive all that time, A fellow by the name of Dick Bennett. He was council executive in Chester County council. Yeah, that's my council.

I remember Dick very fondly And what a wonderful guy, And so he and I were good buddies and that worked out well. About 20 minutes after I was elected council commissioner, I got a phone call and said: is your article ready for the newsletter?

You know the stuff they don't tell you. And I said: well, no, tell me what you have in mind.

And I said: well, the council commissioner always writes a monthly column in the newsletter. And I said: okay, when do you need this?

Well, we're hoping to put that to bed by five o'clock tonight, You know. And so that was every month for the first couple of years. In all there were 144 of those little articles. I guess about a hundred of them were in the book. And that's your book, The Commissioner School. Yes, exactly right.

I recommend it to anybody who's listening. It's a great read And there's a lot of good, I would say, old school scouting in it.

How about this? How about we call it timeless scouting wisdom?

How about that? Well, some of the things in there have definitely stood the test of time. Two things in there that I get requests for all the time. One is my poem The Boy Scout's Mother Asked. I read that at Eagle presentations. Still 12 years after I stopped in Council, Commissioner, I still get invited to do Eagle presentations.

And then the other one is Guardian of the Gate, which was reprinted two years ago in the advancement newsletter And there's now a video of me on the National Boy Scout website reading that, That particular essay. I think what's so effective about it is there's a picture of a gate that you form in your mind. Tell us a little bit about what you were driving at All of those articles. Something happened that led me to want to deliver a message And I kept running into- and I still run into today- people who are saying advancement is the issue.

We have to be strict on the boys to make sure that they don't get advancement they don't deserve. And the truth is we want to work the other way.

We want to make sure that all of the boys that deserve any kind of advancement get it, Because advancement is just a tool we use to keep kids in scouting so we can influence their character. That's what I was getting at, Just an article written out of frustration with people trying to prevent kids from advancing.

Shortly after I had came, Council Commissioner, this woman calls me up and she said: you know, my son turned in his Eagle application two days after his birthday And they're saying he turned it in late and can't get his Eagle. I said let me check into it and I'll get back to you. At that point I was not that familiar with the forms or anything.

So I called the office and I get the Director of Field Service and I said: how about lunch? And would you bring with you this kid's papers And also bring with you what we show the kids for their getting ready for Eagle? I meet this guy for lunch and I look at the application and across the top of it, in red letters. It says: all the work has to be done before your 18th birthday, but the form can be turned in later.

I said: so why are we turning kids down? Because they turned the form in?

Well, that's what the Advancement Chairman has said we have to do. I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to get this kid a Board of Review and by the end of the day, I want a new Advancement Chairman for this council.

And there was- And I would keep running into this- There are- people that were making kids stay under the tension that a Board of Review and Scoutmasters stopping kids from advancing because they were too young, and all of the nonsense you hear. One day I'm writing my article and I don't know what I'll write, and I wrote the Guardian of the Gate and it's nice image because that's what they were doing. You could just see a Scoutmaster carrying a car, being a total arm, standing in front of a bob wire gate. Yeah, I mean, it's a common frustration. It's something that we run into time and time again. I will tell you that as a younger man, as a Scoutmaster, I encountered that same kind of frustration.

I looked at things and you have this kind of unsettled feeling that some boys are getting away with something And so you decide that's it, We're going to tighten up and you begin making your own rules and doing the things that you just mentioned. Did you experience that as a Scouter at all? No, I really didn't.

We were too busy having fun As a Scoutmaster. We did a lot of campouts. I don't ever remember wanting to clamp down.

You know I'm taking wood badge right from the beginning helped me, and we took the leadership development wood badge Years later I found out that that was the experimental course, because that didn't become official until 1972. I think that experience helped me to be more involved with how the kids were developing. I'm not sure what prompted that, but I don't ever remember being frustrated.

Well, it took me a while to work my way through that. For a lot of us there's a level of hardheadedness that you have to have to volunteer to be a Scout leader, Right?

But boy, it's just so much more fun and it's so much more rewarding. And I think Scouts get a whole lot more out of the program when you realize that, as you say, you're not trying to guard against them getting something they don't deserve. You're working at making sure they get all they deserve Right, And you do that because that keeps them in there. There's a hook of being rewarded for your accomplishments And I certainly didn't know that then.

I mean, I think a positive reinforcement is something I've come to understand, like in the last 15 years- Certainly not 40 years ago, And you would see the kids advance and see them develop. Take a kid out on Friday night and you would bring a different boy back to his mother on Sunday night. They just changed that fast at that age.

Anything that kept them in the program long enough for that change to happen was worthwhile, Besides which we were having fun. It is a blast, isn't it? You can't be a Scout leader and not enjoy those kind of activities. I have my rules for life, and rule number four says no man ever matures past 12. And I've never had a woman disagree with me on that.

You know the really best Scoutmasters or guys that didn't get to eight. The other thing that helped me through that was seeing the effect on my boys, My teenage boys. I got the same nonsense in any parent gets when you said, hey, son. But then if I said Mr Patrol Leader or Mr Senior Patrol Leader.

Now, all of a sudden we have a conversation, and that was enlightening. If you could go back to that man who was a newly minted Scout leader, with the perspective of years, I'm sure you've aided a lot of people and counseled a lot of Scouters over time.

But what do you tell that guy? Maybe somebody is a little down and discouraged. Maybe things aren't working quite the way that they think they ought to- And you've got the ear of a number of people just like that right now.

What do you tell that guy? I tell them to obey the Scout law. And the most important point of the Scout law is the Scout is cheerful.

You know, if we can teach kids anything, it's to enjoy life with a smile. Anything else that happens is just icing on the cake.

As an early Scout leader, I think I came to an epiphany realizing that the Scout law was not only something I'm teaching the kids, but something that I ought to be working toward too. I adopted the Scout as cheerful and worked at that, and it's been with me ever since. The only thing I can say that would be different is: I came by it naturally. My mother was a naturally cheerful person. Toward the end of her life. She was paralyzed for the last 11 years of her life and yet she was the life of the party in the nursing home.

As much as I'd like to give myself credit, I think it was in my genes. All I had to do was have it awakened, You know, be careful about it, have fun, enjoy what's going on, enjoy your life.

Yeah, that's kind of contagious, isn't it? Yes, yes, Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone.

And the other thing I was able to do is I was able to let the kids run the troop, And I came by that by accident, you know, and I saw how well it worked. I was still the assistant Scoutmaster and one of the kids came to me and he said: we want to go on a canoe trip.

The Scoutmaster, Mr Levitt, can't go when we want to go on a canoe trip. And he says: if we want to go, you have to go with us.

And I said: well, okay, but you're going to have to organize it because I'm really busy at work. You're going to have to take care of it.

And this kid says: okay, Mr Daily, he hires canoes and he arranges for transportation and he arranges for the food and he arranges everything, And we drive 100 miles away from home to go on this three-day canoe trip and everything went like clockwork. Isn't that interesting. I was a little kid and at the time I was a general manager in the business I was in. I could get one of my supervisors at work to be this responsible and this resourceful.

Wouldn't that be neat? And so that's what I started preaching.

I would say: what do you want to do? How do you want to do it?

Where do you want to go? So we ran a boy run troop. Coming from that experience, as I played other roles, I relied on just having that kid. He, incidentally, went on to sell insurance and was a million-dollar roundtable guy, Whatever that would they have. Many times over. That showed me those two things: What the kids wanted and being cheerful about it.

Those two things really helped me, not only in scouting but in life. So while they're important- all the rules and the regulations and being a world-class outdoorsman and stuff like that- is secondary to the attitude to which you approach all of this. Yeah, exactly right, You don't have to be a woodsman.

It's nice if you know one where you can say, hey, what do we do now? One of the things that I'm very curious about.

I passed the 50 barrier about four years ago, Okay, So you've got a couple of decades on me. I see that age and experience in scouting seems to be a sword that can cut both ways. I've seen guys who've been around for a few decades and they seem to become kind of grumbly, cane-waving old complainers, Yeah.

And then I meet guys like you. Like you said, you really never grew past being 12 years old. No, no, absolutely not.

And so is there a secret there? Is there anything that a guy in my position can do so that he doesn't end up being one of those cane-waving old complainee guys? Yeah, the scout won't. The scout is careful. Oh, come on, That's too hard, That's too hard. There's not a pill you can take or anything like that.

I don't think so. No, Although God knows, my doctor has me taking enough pills.

What I think I get from your book and from your experiences is that this is all really pretty simple. There's just a couple of things to really focus on and the rest of it seems to follow.

I think that's true. I used to tell scouts and I'd tell myself: you get up every morning and you have a choice: You could enjoy life or you could not. I went through a period of my life, about 54 months, where I had eight different jobs, and years later I came across this three by five card that I carried in my pocket during that time, And on one side it was not my fault.

And you turn it over on the other side and it says: and I am nine foot tall and I can walk through walls, And I remember standing in front of the mirror in the morning reciting that so I would go forth with a cheerful attitude, And I think that's what you have to do. So being cheerful isn't something that you're walking along one day and it just jumps on your back. No, you have to work at it. You do actually have to work at it, because every morning it doesn't roll around and you feel fantastic.

Well, exactly right, And that's a hard thing to teach. I used to tell the kids exactly that.

Why did you decide this morning to be whoopee? Well, I don't know, Mr Taylor.

Well, okay, I really do appreciate you spending the time with us. Darnell, You're an inspiration to me personally and, I'm sure, to many, many other scouts, and we look forward to hearing from you again. I appreciate you calling and talking to you and I appreciate what you and thousands of other scouts do to try to make the world better for the young boys.