Scoutmaster Podcast 264

I'm Chuck Wolf and I am an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 342 in Raleigh, North Carolina. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me And now the old Scoutmaster.

So Al Taber is the guy who wrote a song that everybody knows. It's called the hokey pokey.

Now I'm told he was a scout but he didn't stay a scout long because he couldn't pass the scout swim test. He put his right foot in and well, you know the rest.

So Bill McFarland gets the credit or the blame for that one.

Hey, this is podcast number 264.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at the mailbag. Sue from Troop 341 in Wanta, New York, wrote to say: I checked out the fundraiser you recommended from country meets. Sounds like a great idea.

Thanks for bringing this info to us. I love reading Scoutmaster CG every time you post. Thanks again for all the great info you provide.

Well, thank you, Sue. Thanks for those kind words And I'm glad we can be useful to you. Melissa Hellman is an assistant cub master and soon to be committee chair, And she said: thank you, thank you. I've been listening for a few months and I decided to start at podcast number one and make my way through all of them. Oh my, as I've said in the past- I don't know if I've said it on the podcast or not- I'm willing to offer an award or perhaps medication for people who make it through the entire archive. But Melissa went on to say thanks again for all you do.

Your podcast go beyond scouting. I've had a few aha parenting moments as well.

Well, we get to be better parents when we become scouts and hopefully being better parents makes us better scouts right. So thank you, Melissa, for being in touch. Wayne Wilcox is a Scoutmaster with Troop 184.. He says greetings from over here in Cobham, England. As always, I enjoyed listening to your latest podcast and you speak a lot of sense. I've made a number of changes in my units based on your advice and comments.

I keep a copy of the Guide to Advancement 2013 with me. I've stopped taking attendance at meetings. I get boards of review scheduled fast and recognize the scouts with their badge that night if possible, And again at a court of honor, and I've stopped getting uptight about uniforms.

And you know what? Our membership retention and retention are rising.

I have now have 48 scouts and six patrols, with four eagles still on the rolls inactive. One thing I found you might want to suggest to folks is our graduation ceremony. When I have an eagle scout who ages out of the troop, I hold a brief ceremony at the last meeting, give a little talk about him to the rest of the troop, present him with a token gift And I tell him that this is the last time he'll wear his maripad, sash and eagle badge and I present him with the eagle square knot for adults. The ceremony seems to mean a lot to the eagle and the troop and to their family. Keep up the good work. If you ever need anything from England or you'd like to visit, we'd be more than happy to host.

Well, thanks, Wayne. I sure appreciate that.

I appreciate the idea And I think the idea of the graduation ceremony is great for guys who are aging out of the troop, Just like you described. It can be very, very simple at the end of a meeting And I'm sure it would be a very meaningful gesture. Heard from Jerry Lawler, who had this to say: my father and grandfather were in scouting And I started off as the troop mascot in 1949.

I became a Cub Scout in 1956 and remained active until I joined the US Navy in 1966 and then returned to being an active scouter in 1970 when I came back from Vietnam. My wife and I have retired to Colorado Springs and I'm still involved. Keep up the great work and I'll spread news about your website.

Well, thanks so much, Jerry, and thank you for your service, And it's always great to hear stories of people who stay active in scouts throughout their lives. I do. I appreciate you getting in touch Now. Last week in podcast 263,, one of the email questions we answered discussed Wilderness First Aid.

David Johnson from Troop and Crew 102 in Las Vegas got in touch and had this to say: while Wilderness First Aid training can be expensive, the Boy Scouts of America has an agreement in place with the Red Cross so councils can recruit instructors and offer Wilderness First Aid certification at a reduced cost. I've been working on this in our own council and I'm making progress and we're getting some instructors lined up for First Aid and CPR.

David, I really appreciate that information And tomorrow I'm going to post about Wilderness First Aid, just to expand on what we were able to talk about in the last podcast and to share what David shared with me about the relationship between the BSA and the Red Cross so that you can start working on that in your council if you already don't have that up and running. I heard from Greg Ostraic on Facebook about last week's podcast.

He said we just did Wilderness First Aid for Seabase and I'm glad we did. At first I was confused as why we would need it for the Florida Seabase, But then I learned it's about being more than 30 minutes away from the emergency response system And some of the things that you do at Seabase definitely meet that description And we are sharing what we adults learned in Wilderness First Aid with our Scouts.

So, yeah, Wilderness First Aid is important and it's important whenever we're going to be past that. Oh, you know that 30 minute window or something. We talked about it in the last podcast and, like I said, I'll post some resources about it tomorrow at ScoutMasterCGcom.

If you go to ScoutMasterCGcom most weekday mornings you have a pretty good chance of finding the chat feature going live And that means that I'll be here at working at my desk and chatting with Scouts all over the world Normally announce those chats both on our Twitter and Facebook feeds, So make sure to keep an eye on those and you can come and join us for a live chat. And in addition to the many frequent fliers who show up at our live chats, we heard from Brian Lerschel, who is a commissioner in the Okanichi Council. We heard from Patrick Gocher. Patrick Hart, who is the Cubmaster of Pac-528. In Post and Kill, New York. Eric Schlossmann, who is in Buffalo, New York, where he is a Venture Patrol Advisor and Assistant Scoutmaster.

Jim Hilliard checked in from Troop 31 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Jeff, who is an Assistant Scoutmaster in Troop 42 and Omaha, Nebraska, was on the chat, as was John Bland, who's the Scoutmaster Troop 404 in Perlin, Texas, And Melissa Davis, who is a committee chair, den leader, day camp director and the mother of four boys.

Boy, Melissa, you got your hands full, So keep an eye on the Facebook and Twitter feeds. Come and join us for a live chat. It's a lot of fun And we talk to Scouters all over the country and all over the world.

Now, before we go on, I want to remind you that if you are a regular reader and listener and the resources we've created have helped you, you can return the favor and help me out by becoming a ScoutmasterCGcom backer. All you have to do is go to ScoutmasterCGcom, click the support link at the top of the page and you can choose any level of support, And some of them entitle you to premiums like autographed copies of my books. And the funds we get from backers go towards the expenses of producing and publishing the blog posts and the podcasts and all of this other stuff and keeping it freely available.

So your backer payments- kind of like a voluntary subscription payment- Go to ScoutmasterCGcom this week and become a backer And I'll make sure to thank you on next week's podcast And keeping that promise from last week. I want to personally thank Lance Tompkins, Hoyt Kondra and Roger Schuman, who became backer since our last podcast. I can't tell you how much it means to be able to keep everything up and running and to make this viable, And it's only done because of your generosity. Thank you once again.

Well, in this week's podcast, in addition to one quick email question I have to answer, I've got something very, very special to share with you And it's kind of defies description. It doesn't really fit into any of the normal podcast segments, So we're just going to go ahead and jump it right into it. Then I've got one quick email question to answer before we sign off for this week. That takes up the rest of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we?

I want to play for you is something that I found serendipitously just sitting on the Internet Archive. If I could do a better job of making an attribution as to where it was recorded and exactly who recorded it, I'd be happy to. But you're going to find that the subject of the recording is a discussion with William Greenbar, Bill Hillcourt.

If you don't know who Greenbar Bill is, well, I don't really need to make an introduction here, because he's going to tell you his own story, And there's a couple of reasons that I want you to hear this recording. The first is, of course, this is really cool. This is this cool part of scouting history that I've talked about before and I've told stories about before.

There are a couple of things that I think are much more important for us to derive from this. Scouting has a century long history of having people who have been very key leaders in the scouting movement and very key leaders in scouting organizations, And there's a big difference between organizations and movements. The scouting movement is is this thing that kind of grew out of Baden Powell's ideas, without a whole lot of organization. It just began happening And organizations came later and organizations do their best to contain whatever it is that the scouting movement is. OK.

So I want to begin talking about something that I, you know. I'm not too sure exactly what to call it. The best thing that I've come up with is the source code for scouting. There are big software programs out there that are open source and they have a source code and you can use the source code for free to create an application.

And I think it's a pretty good allegory for what I'm talking about, because whatever the scouting movement is, you can take that source code and you can apply it in your community and you end up having scouting. And it doesn't depend on an organization, as long as it contains the source code, it's scouting. And we're in this period of our history as an organization in the United States, and we're in this period of history where things are changing and growing and and our organizational structures may be able to respond to those changes and they may not. But the source code of scouting is what's going to work all of the time. OK, It's what's worked for the past century and it's what will continue to work.

Here's the beginning of this story of one man's discovery of scouting. So let's, let's listen to it up to that point.

Well, I'll just tell you about how I grew up and what happened to me, because I was born in Denmark on the 6th of August 1900.. When I was 10, 1910, I got a special gift for Christmas and that was a Danish translational big powers book- Scouting for Boys, And I got very excited about it because there'd been a lot of cyber oil after that particular time. Then I started reading about all of the things that could be doing if I became a boy scout.

I could go hiking and camping and exploring and hiking and finding wild animals and so on. I spent the whole Christmas reading about scouting And then in those days it was very easy to become a scout.

The Danish Boy Scouts Association hadn't been established, So we just sat in a boat and if you want to become a scout, all you do is you get together with a few of your friends, you'll pick up a patrol leader, you'll go out and do scouting. So you just start your the whole thing all by yourself, because it was nothing but really being organized.

So that's exactly what I did during my Christmas vacation. I'd hold with some of my friends and we formed a patrol and we called it the Tiger Patrol- We had to have a fire fancy name for that- And then we got along all right in the beginning, but then there were always things that might happen and jealousy and things like that.

We hadn't quite picked up the scout spirit yet, But we stuck together and said all about the summer vacation, and then you just split up and then you had to start all over again, But I continued doing it. So instead of having a regular Boy Scout experience, that became more along the line of a Loan Scout.

So Bill gets a copy of Scouting for Boys and he starts a patrol and the patrol works for just so long. You know they're 10 year old boys and they last for a few months. But then, as he said, we hadn't really caught the spirit of scouting yet.

So the- whatever it was that caused the patrol to fly apart, you know that happened. And then the next thing that happens is really interesting.

So let's listen to Bill talk about that. So it was quite a while until I finally, around 1915,, 16,, when I was about 15, I got myself established in a real patrol and then eventually became the patrol that formed the basis for the patrol. It was handled because that was the patrol that really lived the patrol life, because we had a very good Scoutmaster. The troop was good too, and we had a lot of different experience.

And that's where I learned about patrol leadership, because he would have us in his home- He was a bachelor and we would sit down and we were for patrol leader. We were discussing the troop program there, and then he would finally say to them: well, I'm going to bed now, You just continue until you get it finished, and we might head on for another half an hour. We're the one who really were running the troop before patrol leader, Which is the way it's supposed to work.

Yeah, So now we know why adults get involved with this program: to help kind of even out some of the vicissitudes of youth. Right, Because they can get things going and they can work things out to a point.

And then they need some experience that they don't yet have because of their years. They're not unintelligent, They're just inexperienced. Then they need someone with some experience to help them work things out.

Now, at this point Bill's a little bit older and definitely has more capacity for working together with people in this type of relationship. What he was doing there is what really cemented the source code, if you will- in his mind. It got him to experientially understand what the possibilities were.

So think about this for a minute. He's 10. He gets a copy of the Scout Handbook for Christmas, Goes out and forms his own patrol and is thinking about all the wonderful things that he gets to do. He gets to go camping and gets to go out in the woods and tracking and all of these great scout skills. But the piece that is missing to his 10-year-old mind is the broader spectrum of what scouting is and that is the development of character through working together with other people. And it takes some years for him to realize this and to get himself into a position, with some adult guidance, where he is actually going to start making that happen And that whole world of that part of Scouts opens up to him.

So it's no longer just the skills and the activities that are attracting him but the broader ulterior motives of scouting. That's kind of my take on Bill's story thus far.

So what happens to Bill next is another interesting part of the story. Let's hear that.

And then it happened that I reached just the white leadership and the white advancement. In 1920, when Ben Powell called the Scout of the World together for the first World Jumper Reef, And in Denmark, where the Scout movement had been established by them for about 10 years, he was decided that every troop should send a representative to that first Jumper Reef.

And I was a lucky one who was picked to go there And that's where I met Ben Powell for the first time, and on his birthday- on my birthday, the 6th of August of 1920,- we proclaimed him Chief Scout of the World And then, because the Danish team had won the World Championship to that first Jumper Reef, Denmark had the first choice of having the second Jumper Reef come to Denmark. And then it was 1924.

So by then I had seen the Scouts of the World and two different Jumper Reefs And that had become a master science in pharmacy. But I just dropped out of the whole pharmacy and became a newspaper journalist for the 1924 Jumper Reef.

So here he goes, He's off to the first World Jumper Reef. As he said, because the Danish Scouts took the top honors at the first World Jumper Reef, they got to host the second World Jumper Reef.

Now what may not be clear from the recording is: Bill was a student studying pharmacology and decided that he would be a journalist for that second World Jumper Reef. So after the second World Jumper Reef, Bill decides in his vast wisdom as a 25-year-old that he's going to do something else, And let's listen to that part of the story.

And then the next year I felt myself getting rather old, I was getting in a vicinity of 25.. And I decided how it could see the world and meet some of these fellows that I had to get down where it had to get started.

So I decided to take off on a trip around the world, which was an absolute lunia idea. I came to the United States after having spent some time in Europe and after having sat down in Liverpool, England, to write a book that paid for my trip to the United States.

And then, as soon as I got to the United States, I got in touch with a person who had been the leader of the American contingent for the Danish Jumper Reef And he got me established in the New York Boy Scouts Camp for the whole summer. So that's how I got to learn about Boy Scouting in America, the best part of it and the worst part of it.

So he starts this big trip. He's going to see the world. He's going to see the world of Scouting, spends time in Europe, spends time in England and ends up in the United States. And that's where I'm going to stop for this week.

We'll continue the story next time around, But here's what I think are the important takeaways: Greenbar Bill- obviously one of the most influential voices in the Scouting movement and in the Boy Scouts of America. We don't have that one influential voice right now And I don't think that we need that personality because we have the source code, don't we?

We have the ideas that make this work And when we put them to work, no matter what organization we're a part of, it's going to work. We're going to have Scouting And we're going to positively affect the lives of the children in our communities with the program that's called Scouting when we apply the source code.

That's where I want to leave us this week. We'll continue this discussion and some more of this recording in our next podcast. Send me a letter, send it by name, Email. That is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. Kurt Seeger is an assistant scoutmaster with Troop 692 in Castlebury, Florida, And he run in to say: I've been a scoutmaster CG fan for about a year. We're taking the time to share your decades of experience with all us newbies. My question is about annual planning and the National Outdoor Awards program. Our annual planning conference is quickly approaching and I was looking for ideas to assist our scoutmaster, to help steer the Scouts towards doing what Scouts do, And in the process I stumbled across the National Outdoor Awards.

What are your thoughts? Have many of your Scouts participated in the National Outdoor Awards program?

How do you feel about using such incentives as goals to build an annual scouting program? Well, Kurt, thanks for getting in touch. I'm glad you're finding what we're doing useful and I appreciate your kind words.

I've looked at the National Outdoor Awards program and I'll have a link in the post that contains this podcast so everybody can get a look at it. Sounds like a great idea And it's one incentive or idea that Scouts could build a program around. But the National Outdoor Awards are really pretty much individual awards. All the Scouts would necessarily be equally incentivized by them And I haven't ever really promoted them to my Scouts. No real reason.

I don't have any problem with the award or anything like that, But let's talk for a moment about the real incentive for doing what Scouts do Basically, you know, because you get to do the things that Scouts do. You get to go camping and do all this wonderful stuff.

Now, there are plenty of advancement-related incentives to it and there's the additional incentive of things like this Outdoor Awards program. But to tell you the truth, I've never really seen my Scouts to get too motivated just by those things.

I think what really gets them going is the idea of going camping and doing all this wonderful stuff, And so far that seems to be enough. I'm not saying incentives are bad, but let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's do the stuff that Scouts do, whether we are incentivizing it with awards and recognition or not, because, hey, it's the stuff that Scouts do.

So this is not very interesting or exciting advice. Right, I'm not real big on that kind of incentive, but I know folks use this type of thing very effectively.

I certainly don't have anything against it, so long as we have the main aim of Scouting in mind. And after I shared that, Kirk got back to me and said: well, thanks for taking the time to answer my question. I thought you might respond the way you did. As a new guy, it's easy to get excited about these kind of programs. That's why I was interested in getting your take on it.

I think the programs are well-intentioned, but I could see how it could easily get us off track. Thanks for your insight and a general reminder to keep it simple and just do what Scouts do, Just for the pure fun and adventure of it.

Well, that's the spirit, Kirk: Let's have fun, Let's do the adventure, Let's do what Scouts do, And the incentives while they're there don't form the central motivation for doing all that. The Scouting spirit forms the central motivation for doing all that. Hey, if you have a question and you'd like to get in touch with me, you certainly can. It's pretty easy to do And I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.