Scoutmaster Podcast 266

I'm Dwight Wiest, Scoutmaster with Troop 17 at Yakota Air Base, Japan. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now for you, Scoutmaster, This week we're going to start with a riddle from John Dyer. He said the joke at the start of the podcast is one of the best parts. Oh, I'm still having a good time telling those jokes to my scouts.

I wanted to send you this riddle: What's black when you get it red when you use it and gray when you throw it away? Hmm, I have to give that some thought And I will tell you the answer, folks, after we've gone a wandering for a little bit.

So this is podcast number 266.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

What's the answer to John Dyer's riddle? What's black when you get it red when you use it, gray when you throw it away?

You probably figured it out by now, but it's charcoal. There you go, It's yours to use and be fuddle and confuse and horrify your scouts. Let's take a look at the mailbag here Heard from Gary Miller in Emmett, Idaho. He said I just wanted you to know I finally caught up with all the podcasts.

Thank you so much for all you do Well. Thank you, Gary. My congratulations to anybody who makes it through all 266 podcasts. Good for you. I heard from Martin Ornberg, who is an assistant council commissioner with the Greater Alabama Council. He says I was turned on to your podcast by Randall Cox in April of this year And we're both unit commissioners and we live in Huntsville, Alabama.

I am also the council champion for commissioner tools And I'm discovering most scouts know about my scoutingorg since they took their youth protection training there, But they may not be familiar with the newer site, my dot scoutingorg. The new site allows all scouts to see what positions they're registered in, Print membership cards and change and update their email and their phone or their address. They can also see their training and view announcements and calendars native to my dot scoutingorg And I have prepared a PDF info sheet that shows you exactly how it works And thank you, Martin, We've made people aware of it. You may be used to my scoutingorg But there's another site that is my dot scoutingorg. It's got another dot in it And Martin has a helpful guide that he created in the way of a PDF document And I'll have a link to it in the post that contains this podcast over on the blog This past week had a couple of posts that relate to the theme that's been going on with our source code of scouting. One of them was a post of a very early Green Bar Bill article.

It might be the first one that he wrote in Scouting Magazine in 1927 called a troop revolution, And I recommend that to you highly. You want to make sure to check that out.

Another post that I put up this past week posed the question: why do Scouts go camping? There was a lot of useful discussion about that on Facebook too.

So when you get the chance, make sure, if you haven't read those posts already, get over to scoutmastercgcom and check them out. The live chat over on scoutmastercgcom was pretty lively this week. Watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed or just stop by scoutmastercgcom, Check out the chat feature, see if we're on there live chatting, And we've. We've had some pretty big groups check in with us these past couple of weeks, In addition to all the folks I call my frequent fliers who check in frequently on the chat. We heard from Mike Waite, who's an assistant Scoutmaster in Pennsylvania. Glenn Dardy is a committee chair of Troop 17 in Gibstown, New Jersey.

Michael Cotter, who is with PAC 41 in Columbus, Ohio, Arthur Doncey, who is an assistant Scoutmaster in Egg Harbor, New Jersey. William Schmidt, who is a Scoutmaster from Troop 204 in Cary, North Carolina. Atia Santos, who is a Scoutmaster in Espirito Santo, Brazil. And Keith Kangry, who is a Scoutmaster with Troop 2 in Picayune, Mississippi. It's great to be able to get together and chat a little bit, And sometimes the discussion is is deep and meaningful And sometimes it's just kind of hanging out with your scout buddies.

So make sure to stop by scoutmastercgcom and check that out. Now I want to let you know that everything at scoutmastercgcom is there to help scouters, but to keep everything freely available, I depend on people like you to become backers.

It's an unusual idea, So let me explain it for a moment. If I was sending you a paper magazine or newsletter, you'd expect there to be some costs associated with that, right? I'd need to pay printers and writers and postage and all of that. What happens these days is a little more ephemeral. It's all in bits and bytes. Right, I don't send out a printed newspaper or a newsletter.

I put posts online and I have a podcast. It's similar, because somebody spends their time producing the content and incurs the expenses of publishing it online. And backers are the folks who make a one time voluntary subscription payment, And the money that we get from them covers the expenses of producing and publishing what you find on scoutmastercgcom, including what you're listening to right now.

So here's what I would like you to do: Go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link at the top of the page and you'll find a number of options that will make you a scoutmastercgcom backer, And I want to take a moment to thank Agnes Monzingo, who became a backer since our last podcast. Go over to scoutmastercgcom this week. Become a backer. I'll make sure to thank you personally in our next podcast.

Well, on this week's podcast, we've got one big feature, and that is the final installment of a three part series on the scouting source code. This final installment is a little bit longer than the first two And I think it's plenty of information to fill up the remainder of this podcast. I'll have answers to lots and lots of backlogged email questions next time around in podcast 267. But I'm excited about the concept that there is a source code to scouting And I'm very excited to share it with you.

So let's get started, shall we?

So we've been following the story of Green Bar Bill Hillcourt, with the idea of getting to what I've called the source code of scouting, the DNA, the thing that makes scouting what it is, The focus that we should all know by heart and that we should be paying attention to. If we could come up with that right And everyone agreed that this is where we're headed, This is our aim, This is what we do, Then we'd be better able to serve the scouts that we serve, correct? Let me get you caught up. This three part series is based on a recording that I found in the Internet archive that has. There's really no way for me to give it any better attribution than it There it is. It was just kind of sitting there.

Everything that I can figure out with this recording indicates that it was in the late 1980s. It's an interview A scout is conducting with Green Bar Bill and he has told us the story of how he became a scout before there was all of this organizational stuff happening in scouting, because he got a copy of Scouting for Boys in 1910. He put a patrol together and part one of this explains exactly how that all happened. He traveled to the United States. He became involved with the Boy Scouts of America, and he ended up being the voice of the Boy Scouts of America. He had written all of the major reference materials for the Boy Scouts of America based on his understanding of scouting.

This source code idea is not to turn back the clock and not to make us a bunch of stodgy old traditionalists who are basically just conducting, you know, some kind of historic reenactment of the first Brown Sea Island encampment with Baden Powell. That's not our aim, That's not what we're trying to do.

But what were the principles underlying the whole idea that Bill took on when he was a boy, at age 10, and then elucidated in all the writing and all the work that he did over his lifetime? Why is it still relevant today? We're a century later, you know.

Why is it still relevant? Because if we agree that it's relevant and we get a hold of that source code, that's pretty powerful.

That's something that we can really take and run with right To introduce today's installment of this story OK, and to kind of wind it up, And because I really love the history of these sorts of things. Before I play this, though, here's a couple of things that will help you understand it better.

Bill is now married. He actually married one of the secretaries at the BSA offices. Her name is Grace And they are living at the Schiff Scout Reservation in New Jersey And Bill has established a troop- troop number one in New Jersey And he's using that troop kind of his his lab- to develop things. Anyway, that'll just help you understand a couple of things in this story. Let's let Bill explain for a little while his relationship with Baden Powell, the founder of Scouting. He knew Baden Powell In 1935, Baden Powell and this wife who was the chief girl scout.

They took a trip around the world and they had planned to be at the First National Jamboree we had in 1935. The one that was canceled because of the polio outbreak in Virginia.

And then he came out to the Schiff Scout Reservation. So I had Baden Powell and Lady Baden Powell in my house And we had a wonderful time with breakfast and so on. But then what happened was that we went to the Jamboree and Holland in 1937. When we got out there and out that the whole hotel has been taken over by the British Jamboree contingent staff, Next morning we, as we opened the door- How's another one of these complete coincidence of meeting the right people at the right time, Lady Baden Powell and Baden Powell coming up the corridor. They had just arrived from England and they just come to the hotel And Lady Baden Powell saw them, saw us, and said: Oh, it's Bill and Grace.

And he said: Well, have you had your breakfast? No, we haven't had our breakfast.

Well, you just wait a while until we get ourselves settled. So the two hillcourts had breakfast with the two big powers.

So, and on the basis of that, of course they are right. So he came to the point of getting so close to Lady Baden Powell that when I wanted to take Baden Powell's books and transform them into World Brotherhood editions for starting scouting up again around the world after the World War, he gave me a permission to just take Baden Powell's book and edit them And they are now the official versions of the Baden Powell Scouting for Boys and Asian Scoutmasters.

So there's the basis of a very close relationship between the Baden Powell's and the hillcourts. And Baden Powell passes away in 1941, just a few years after this meeting. As Bill explained, he becomes the editor of the official publications of Baden Powell's works after the Second World War, And I know this is unraveling a little bit like a mystery. But look at all the connections. One of the original scouts in 1910 in Denmark becomes the voice of the Boy Scouts of America, has a relationship with the founder of Scouting that is close enough to allow him to edit his works.

So where is the source code? Where exactly is it expressed?

Well, Bill has an answer for that And it comes in his answer to this question. What do you think Baden Powell would say?

What was his point in doing all that? Well, I think what he would do is he would pretty well have page nine in mind, because that was completely based upon Baden Powell.

And what trouble writing that page and any other page, Because I wanted on one page to be able to say: well, this is what Scouting is all about. This is the wonderful life you would have in Scouting.

You will learn a lot of different skills, You will meet good friends and you will have a chance to even learn leadership and so on. And we're going to need real leaders with that kind of a spirit in the future, and even more than we have ever needed them before. In order to do that, you have to show the example of that, because you have to take on the role model of becoming a good scout, living up to the scout oath and the scout law and following all of the principles of Scouting.

If you get yourself really involved in all of these things- and that's the important thing, getting yourself involved- Don't be a passive person there and then step in and help other people at all times. You see, that's another part of the scout idea, because he believed in all people getting together and helping each other in a real friendship.

So I think he will stick to this general idea. Of course, that's right out of it now.

So now we know where the source code is. It's on page nine. Page nine of what you ask.

Well, I'm going to tell you, but think about this Again, remembering all the connections that we've made over this three-part series. We get to the question of what was Baden Powell up to?

Why did he do all this in the first place? Well, Bill says it's on page nine.

Here's a guy who's got this tremendous amount of writing that he's done over his lifetime And he says this was the most challenging page I ever wrote, because he wanted to boil it down to the source code of Scouting. To better explain how page nine came to be, we need to understand what happened in the early 1970s that brought Bill out of retirement, where he donated a year of his time to rewrite the Scouting handbook. What you're going to hear is Bill speaking in a video, actually, that I've shared on the blog before And I'll have a link to that video in the post that contains this podcast, where he's visiting with some Scouts and Scouters in Florida in 1987. And he explains what happened and how he ended up coming up with page nine And, by way of explanation to preface what Bill's going to say, give you a little context here.

So in the early 1970s, the Boy Scouts of America initiates a study of Scouting that has some what will become pretty much disastrous results And Bill tells us a little bit about that and his reaction to it. It had to be brought up to date. That was a big thing in those days And it had to be relevant.

So they came up with a suggestion that we should change it completely. There's too much emphasis about the outer doors, The people in the National Architectural Development stuff, that we started lowering all the expectations or whatever first class Scouts should be. He didn't have to be an outdoorsman, As a matter of fact, when we started the Skill Award. You only had to take three Skill Awards for ten to put three Skill Awards in a second class. Three Skill Awards, You could pick your own.

And I insisted that we should have at least hiking and for second class and we should have camping for first class, because this idea of becoming first class without having a camp was rather silly. That's why the membership went down from six million to more than a half million. Then I started to wonder: is the Boy Scouts sales going down Because my last handbook that came out up until 1970 was selling 600,000 copies a year. In seven years it had dropped to about 340,000.

And the same is going down because the membership is going down? Or is it the other way around, that the membership is going down because a Boy Scout handbook doesn't tell the story about how much excitement you can have as a scout?

So I decided to put a year of my life on the line and I suggested to them I'll write you another Boy Scout handbook for your job. That Boy Scout handbook came out on the 8th of February 1979..

Will you open the page? What edition is it?

What printing is it? Sir?

I believe this one is the ninth edition, And will you see how many have been printed on that particular edition, No ninth edition. Three million four million fifty thousand.

How many? Three million four million fifty thousand.

We have printed more than three million copies of this since this book came out. Will you turn to page nine in all of your books When you go home? I don't want you to do it right here, But the thing that's happening out in your camp.

We have a training group there of 64 men from all over this whole region And there are 17 leaders, including the National Director of Boy Scouting, the National Director of Training, the National Director of Research. They're part of the training group out here because the Hillcourt has been yelling about the fact that Scoutmasters should be trained to make every single promise on page nine come true in the lives of your kids.

So that recording. There was a lot of noise in it and I did my best. I'm not an audio engineer, obviously, but I did my best to clean it up a little bit and it may be a little difficult to understand.

So let me reiterate: This study happens. The Scouting program changes radically because they want to update everything and they think, oh, this outdoor stuff is old hat, Boys aren't attracted to that, And so we're gonna change things around and we're gonna make it more theoretical, We're going to try and make things more palatable. We're gonna get rid of a lot of this outdoor emphasis.

So Bill volunteers a year of his time to rewrite the Scout Handbook in the late 70s, and the product of that year is the ninth edition of the Boy Scout Handbook. And on the mysterious page nine- that's where it is- It's in the ninth edition of the Boy Scout Handbook And, as we've learned through all the connections through this series, there's the source code of Scouting.

So what is on page nine? What did the voice of the Boy Scouts of America, the guy who knew Baden Powell, the guy who became a Scout just about as soon as anybody in the world could become a Scout And who wrote about Scouting for his entire life? What was the most challenging thing for him to do was to reduce it to one page, and it's page nine of the ninth edition of the Boy Scout Handbook.

So what exactly does that page say? I'm gonna read it to you right now, because it's a quick read, and it's titled Your Life as a Scout. You're an American boy and before long you'll be an American man. It's an important to America and to yourself that you become a citizen of fine character, physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight. Boy Scouting will help you become that kind of citizen. But also Scouting will give you fellowship and fun.

Yes, it's fun to be a Boy Scout. It's fun to go hiking and camping with your best friends, to swim, to dive, to paddle a canoe, to wield an axe, to follow the footsteps of the pioneers who led the way through the wilderness, to stare into the glowing embers of a campfire and dream the wonders of the life that is in store for you. It's also fun to learn to walk noiselessly through the woods, to stalk close to a grazing deer without being noticed, to bring a bird close to you by imitating its call. It's fun to find your way, cross country by map and compass, to make a meal when you're hungry, to take a safe swim when you're hot, to make yourself comfortable for the night in a tent under the stars. In Scouting you become an outdoorsman. But Scouting is far more than fun in the outdoors, hiking and camping.

Scouting is a way of life. Scouting is growing into a responsible manhood, learning to be of service to others. The Scout Oath and the Scout Law are your guides to citizenship. They tell you what is expected of a Scout. They point out your duties. The Scout motto is: be prepared- prepared to take care of yourself and to help other people in need.

The Scout slogan is: do a good turn daily Together. The motto and slogan spell out your ability and your willingness to serve. Your life as a Scout will make you strong and self-reliant. You'll learn Scoutcraft skills that will benefit you as you grow and in time, you'll develop the skills of leadership as well.

So pitch in, swing into action In your patrol and your troop. You'll have some of the best times of your life. I can't put it any better. I doubt anybody could. What a wonderful challenge and what a wonderful description of exactly what Scouting is, The DNA of Scouting, the source code of Scouting. Scouting is fun in the outdoors, but it's more than just that fun.

It is a way of life that you'll grow into, a responsible human being. That's the source code, That's what we need to be thinking about, That's what we need to understand and we need to apply as Scouters to serve the youth that we're serving. Wherever you are in the world, it's gonna work. However, things have changed and morphed and gotten different in our cultures and societies, the source code is still going to work. However much training and policy and procedure and organizational craziness there is out there, the source code is still going to work. That's what Scouting really is.

Now take that, take that page nine, take that source code and make it a reality. That's what Bill said. He wants Scouters to be trained to make those things a reality in the lives of their Scouts. He understands and he explains to the Scouts that, yes, this is going to be a lot of fun and it's challenging and it's gonna be great, but there's an ulterior motive, because it's a way of life that helps you grow into a responsible human being. There's no secret code. There's no step one, two, three.

For Scouters, The challenge is to take that page nine and make it a reality in the life of your Scouts. And it's simple. It's very, very simple And I'm reminded of something that Baden Powell said: it's like swinging a scythe or a golf club: Very, very simple. Anybody can do it, but it takes a lifetime of practice to get good at it.

So that's our job, that's everything that we do. Get good at the source code, get good at making it happen in the lives of your Scouts. That's the only thing that ends up really mattering. How to test if what you're doing as a Scouter is advancing the aims of Scouting is to read page nine.

Are you making that happen? Then you're successful.

Are you realizing that ulterior motive in the lives of the young people you're serving? Then you're successful. Scouter. That's the source code. It's as important as it is simple, And it's a huge challenge for us to see in that simplicity exactly what we're up to and the way that Scouting works. Listen to this 266th edition of the Scoutmaster podcast