Scoutmaster Podcast 278

I'm Brian Bluyn and I am a cup master with PAC 3285 out of Rockford, Michigan. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me And now the old Scoutmaster. Hey, everybody, this is Clarke Green.

It's summertime and so our next few podcasts feature on-core presentations from our archives, And this time around I want to play an interview that I conducted with Mike Malone, who's the author of a really fantastic book called 4%. It's a history of the Eagle Award And, as you may imagine, Mike's an eagle scout, so he knows what he's talking about.

It has a long tenure in scouting and produced a incredibly well researched and very compelling book about eagle scouts. As always, this podcast is only possible because of the generosity of the folks who become ScoutmasterCGcom backers. Go to ScoutmasterCGcom, click the support link at the top of the page. You'll find out how you can become a ScoutmasterCGcom backer. We'll be back with our regular schedule of podcasts in a few weeks.

Until then, let's get started, shall we? Michael S Malone is one of the world's best-known technology writers. He was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting And you've read his articles and editorials and publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fortune and The New York Times. He's the author and co-author of nearly 20 award-winning books. Mike is, all importantly, an Eagle Scout and currently an assistant scoutmaster of Troop 466 in Sunnyvale, California.

Now, in this centennial year of 2012,- the centennial year of the Eagle Scout- Mike turned his considerable talent as an investigative reporter and writer, as well as his extensive experience as a scout and adult volunteer, towards a book that no doubt will stand, at least in my humble opinion, as the definitive history of the Eagle Scout Award. It's called 4% and subtitled the Story of Uncommon Youth in a Century of American Life.

I think it's not only an authoritative history of the award, but it's kind of a meditation on the meaning and the spirit and importance of it, And I'm certainly honored to welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us, Mike.

Well, thank you, Clair. So in the first chapter of the book, you call the Eagle the PhD of boyhood. Yeah, I heard that along the way somewhere a few years ago and I thought it was a brilliant metaphor for what Eagle Scouting is, that it's a combination of learned skills combined with a final culminating event, which is the Eagle Service Project that has to contribute to the larger world. And if you look at it that way.

It really is like a doctorate and there's nothing comparable to it in American boyhood There never has been. And it's really the apogee of being a teenage boy in the United States And it's been that way for 100 years now. What I really enjoy about the book- because it's a great read, because it's a fantastic story. Just the story of how this award came to be and who has received it and what they went on to do is just a fascinating story.

And I think in one wise the history of the award itself is a history of the Boy Scouts of America. We were talking just a little bit before we started the interview here that that history has its ups and downs and its bumps and its troubles. That's one of the things I really appreciate about your work. It doesn't dodge any of those issues. It's very honest.

Did you struggle with any of that? Yeah, when I set out to write this book, I'm a lifelong newspaper man Journalist. I'm a fourth generation newspaper man.

In fact I'm sitting here editing some copy from my 21-year-old son who is now a fifth generation family newspaper man. So it's in the blood And it was very hard for me to even contemplate the idea of whitewashing this story or turning into a hagiography of the March of Great Men. That's just not my style.

I think the story is much more interesting when you capture awards and all, And it's not like Scouting has a lot of awards. I mean, it's an inspiring story all the way through And, yeah, there have been some missteps and trips down the wrong path a few times, But all in all I think those other things, those darker things, actually make the entire story much more spectacular, much more amazing.

It's an awe-inspiring story? Yeah, it really is, And those bright moments are offset by the not-so-bright ones. Let me tell you the genesis of this book, because it's kind of unusual. I had taken a group of scouts from my troop back to Northern Virginia. Two of the boys were restoring a Civil War battlefield and cemetery, which sounds hugely ambitious And it was, even though these are the two smallest battlefields and federal cemeteries in the United States- Balls Bluff.

But it was quite an experience doing this And as part of it we were going to be in the flag ceremony in our Civil War uniforms at the National Jamboree And we also marched in the Centennial Parade of Boy Scouting down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC And I think there was 20,000 scouts in that parade. It was quite a parade. It was the first one of this kind since the first jamboree before FDR. I was in the contingent at the very end, which was Eagle Scouts, And each of us was asked to carry or wear something that represented our career.

So I had the notebook, you know. I had the satchel over my shoulder with the press card.

But I looked around me and there were guys dressed as department stores, Santa Claus. There was a guy from Bermuda who was a diplomat. There was a military officer and he was wearing the full Hurt Locker bomb demolition outfit- which was pretty tough because it was 100 degrees that day- Just a panoply of distinguished middle-aged and older men showing the wares of these remarkable careers that had followed becoming Eagle Scouts. And we started down that parade. I was afraid a few of us weren't going to make it in that heat. There were 80-year-olds with us marching at the tail end of this massive parade of Boy Scouts.

We turned the corner and started heading down towards the Washington Monument And as we did, the loudspeaker shouted out ladies and gentlemen, America's Eagle Scouts. And the roar that came up from the crowd. There was probably 50 or 60,000 people lining that mile of avenue there, The roar that came up for these Eagles, And looking at these old guys with bad hips and blimping and all that, and we all stood a whole lot straighter and marched in formation And I suddenly was struck by the relationship between Eagle Scouts and American culture And that story had never really been explored And I just had to write the book at that point It was an insane idea because I was buried in a new startup technology company and writing other books and teaching college. But I just had to write the book because I realized nobody else was going to do it.

There were no real plans for the 100th anniversary of Eagle Scouting, so I decided to do the celebration myself And the result shows the passion that you had for it. Yeah, it's kind of a book that wrote itself. I tore through this one. Some books are very painful to write. Spending three years writing about Steve Jobs once was not the happiest time of my life, But writing this book my fingers worked by themselves. If we asked everybody who the first Eagle Scout was, they'd probably come up with Arthur Eldred.

But there's a lot more to that story and there's a lot more nuance and depth to it. First tell me about the time that Arthur was a scout and what was going on at that point in the history of the BSA. Yeah, let me preface that by saying we all know it's Arthur Eldred.

But 15,, 20 years ago I think, if you asked people who the first Eagle Scout was, nobody would know. I don't think the BSA was quite certain And that was a fact from basically the 20s until the 90s that people didn't really know about Arthur Eldred until I think it was Boy's Life or Scouting Magazine went out to find who it was And even then they got the wrong photo. For a number of years there was this square-jawed kid out of a poster who everyone thought was Arthur Eldred. And finally they found real photos of the guy and he looks just like every other Eagle Scout you've ever known in your life, Kind of skinny, smart-looking as eyes and a bit amused having to pose for the photograph. You can really empathize. I mean, Arthur Eldred is us, except he's kind of more than the rest of us given his career.

He got his Eagle in 1912, and you have to understand that Scouting didn't begin as a monolithic organization. It flows out of multiple organizations, the Daniel Boone Society, various other groups. It starts out as basically a fad among teenage boys. They hear about Boy Scouts in England and they start their own groups and they turn into troops and they turn into these sort of ad hoc organizations. There were about four or five different Boy Scouts organizations in the first decade of the 20th century. They were all over the place.

And if you ever want to read the whole history of it or read the Scouting Party, which is the story of these early days and the clashes of egos of the different founders and all of that. So Arthur Eldred was a boy living on Long Island. His father had died. His mother was concerned, like mothers today, that without a dad he would get in trouble. He had an older brother who was quite a bit older who sort of stepped in as his surrogate dad and helped rape him.

And this older brother looked around and saw these emerging scouting groups and thought, well, why don't I build one of these groups and with Arthur in it, and that'll give structure to his life? So he went out and actually set out to join another Scouting organization, one that's long gone now, but it was much more of a militaristic organization. They carried guns around, they marched and they were sort of like preparing boys to join the army. It's not a bad thing to do in 1910 given the clouds forming over Europe.

But he had trouble getting permission to start the organization or something and instead he said, okay, well, there's this other outfit at the headquarter down in Manhattan, Why don't we join up with them? And that was the Boy Scouts of America.

So they started this troop out on Long Island and the boys did the usual stuff. They didn't have a lot of money. They sort of pooled their dough to buy uniforms. Some of them didn't have uniforms. It was very, very casual. It was sort of closer to Baden Powell's dream of what scouting was than what we think of today of 60-member scout troops meeting in a church gymnasium with a trailer full of stuff, going camping and all that.

And this was boys meeting in the evening like in a barn or something. And Arthur, at the time there was very few documentation on how to be a Boy Scout. There weren't really any ranks at the time. It was all in development.

And so when the first Boy Scout handbook appeared, boys across America- there was probably 100,000 boys across the United States who were involved in the organization at that time. They gobbled up that book because it not only showed them all the scouting skills, I mean, they had been dealing, working with Baden Powell's old book and various other books about the outdoors.

Now they had an official book and they went at it, They consumed it and began earning the various ranks. And the ranks were kind of what they are today, up until first class.

So you had 10% class first class And then it all kind of went crazy because there were merit badges, but there was only about 15 merit badges and they were divided in two different categories. There was sort of like an outdoor category and then there was the home and citizenship category And you either earned the star or the life. They weren't sequential, They were kind of in opposition.

And then there was this thing called the Eagle Scout Award And this was the first time these boys had ever seen it And they didn't. Boy Scouts didn't give a lot of information, They just sort of said you had to have a certain number of merit badges. And they had a drawing of the Eagle Medal And it was very different from what we think of as the Eagle Medal. It was a straight ribbon with one color, monochromatic. They didn't know what color it was. It was a black and white book And an eagle in flight flying sideways And that's all they knew.

And there weren't really enough merit badges to get to the Eagle yet Available, but Boy Scouts promised they'd have more. So that's kind of where things stood.

So all across America boys were earning these ranks. Well, Arthur Elder was one of these singular characters And he sort of is the embodiment of what we think of as that overachieving Eagle Scout. Eagle Scouts are inevitably- I've mentored about 50 of them. I know you have mentored probably at least that many. These kids are focused and they go for it. And if scouting is said you have to have 150 merit badges, we still have Eagle Scouts because these are the kinds of young men who are goal-oriented and they'll do it.

Whatever it takes, However many hours and how much blood, sweat and tears, they'll get there. Well, Arthur saw the number, the 21 merit badges, which was even true then- and went out and got as many merit badges he could possibly get.

And then, when scouting finally announced the next set of merit badges, he went out and got those. And he got them at a pace that is unprecedented and will never again be equal At one point, as near as I can figure, when he had about 17 or 18 merit badges.

He had more merit badges, I believe, than all the other Scouts in the United States. So it's sort of like Babe Ruth.

You know, Babe Ruth in the early 1920s one year had more home runs than the entire rest of the American League. Well, that's kind of what Arthur Elder was like 15 years before that. He just simply fell in love with getting merit badges and he got them all.

Well, now he had a problem because no one knew what he was supposed to do next, including the voiceouts from America. So it said, you know, they said: well, you have to have approval for all of this from your local leaders.

So he ran around and got letters of recommendation from all the local civic figures in his town in Long Island and he sent those in. Well, at this point Scouting was rocked on its heels because it had not expected this to happen.

Scouting has a tendency to announce these major new initiatives and then is surprised when these over-achieving voiceouts earn these things long before the institution's prepared for them. He finishes the Eagle, he notifies Scout headquarters in Manhattan and all hell breaks with him and he goes. Oh no, we weren't even expecting an Eagle for five more years and this kid comes along and he's got it.

What are we going to do now? They invite him down to New York City and they give him a border review. And obviously this is the institution saying we better make sure this kid is actually for real because we're going to have to announce him as the first Eagle Scout in history and we hope he's presentable.

So they bring him down and they put him into a border review with the founders of Scouting- all of them. We wear medals named after him, like the Voice Award, and all the rest of these guys, these legends, and somehow he went into this border review and came out alive. It must have been very much like a Star Chamber. I don't think any Eagle Scout- I'm sure no other Eagle Scout in history- had to face a border review like this one.

Well, is this? Am I right?

Do I remember reading that Ernest Thompson Seaton is on this board and Dan Beard? Yeah, I remember Ernest Thompson Seaton and Dan Beard hated each other because they had invented the two founding organizations that became Boy Scouts that, in fact, the Brits had copied. The original book on the outdoors was the one that Baden Powell lifted from to create the original Boy Scout handbook.

So these middle-aged men sitting there facing Arthur Eldred had all sorts of access to grind and feuds against each other and everything else. To my mind, as impressive as Arthur Eldred's achievement- earning all those merit patches- was surviving that group may have been his. That may have qualified him more than anything else. He must have been an amazing negotiator.

So he walks out, the very first Eagle Scout. Well, now Scouting's got another problem. Nobody ever made the medal. They've got a drawing. That's literally all they have. All they have is the drawing and the Boy Scout handbook.

And so And so Boyz has to send a note to Arthur Eldred saying the medal isn't ready yet. Can you wait until fall?

So what's Eldred going to do? Fine, Yes, I'll wait until fall.

Well, while he's waiting, he goes off to Boy Scout camp with his troop And in the middle of his camp, swimming in a lake, one of the boys starts to drown. Eldred goes in after him, along with another scout, to save the kid.

Well, as often happens, as they teach you in life-saving, as you remember, people that go in to save people sometimes get into the stress themselves. So Arthur goes in, he saves the kid that's drowning.

But now he's got the other kid who's starting to drown and so he saves him too. So we have this amazing character who earns more merit badges than anybody in all of Boy Scouts combined. He then survives this star chamber with the founders of scouting for his border review. Then, while he's waiting to get his award, he earns the honor medal for life-saving twice.

And this is all in the course of, you know, a summer. So Arthur had a pretty good year. Come fall they finally give him the Eagle Medal and it's completely different than the one in the book. Thank goodness, because we end up with.

You can see the medal even now it's in the museum, in the Boy Scout Museum in Texas. They give him the medal that looks almost exactly like the one we all wear now.

So that's Arthur Eldred, a remarkable man, And goes on and stays involved all the way up through the 30s and sits on boards of reviews. Yeah, he becomes a very you think.

Well, he's going to be like Neil Armstrong. You know he's going to do a few things, but in a sense, once again he embodies what being an Eagle Scout is. He becomes this responsible, trusted citizen who sits on various civic committees.

His job is on these various industrial boards, you know, for quality and that sort of thing, just live a solid, honest life of a good citizen and gets back involved in scouting and his son becomes an Eagle Scout And there's a picture of Arthur in his 50s, you know, with gray hair and giving the award to his son And the line of Eldred's ever since has earned Eagle Scouts. I think we're fourth or fifth-generation Eldred's now with Eagle Metal. But after he earns the medal in 1912, he just sort of fades from scouting history until 50, 60 years later they begin to.

You know, like a lot of institutions, they don't start thinking about their history until they have some major milestone And scouting and it's 50th anniversary, really begin to think about its past and start to try to document it and discovered it had lost a lot of its records And it took a while to find it was Arthur and then it took even longer to actually find a photo of him. Every honor he gets he deserves. He's an amazing person.

Well, he kind of invented the Eagle, you know. In some ways, I mean, and what he did he was just as much an inventor of it as anybody else, it seems. Oh, absolutely Yeah. Oftentimes these individuals.

They force institutions to respond to them and in doing so they drive the definition of what something is. I'm going to break in from just when I was giving an update on the stuff adult leaders say T-shirt. If you haven't heard about this, go over to scoutmastercgcom and follow the link that says a T-shirt just for us. It's a Kickstarter project and we're doing really great.

We have 13 days left to go. We're 40% funded, We have 35 backers and I wanted to say thank you to all those who've backed the project on Kickstarter and all of you who have sent in ideas about exactly what should go on the T-shirt. It's been a lot of fun and let's keep it going. The project closes in a little less than two weeks and I can't offer any more T-shirts after that.

The only way to get one is to make sure you get over and make a pledge, and there's a link to get you there at scoutmastercgcom. So thanks very much once again, folks, for participating, and let's get back to the interface. Arthur's story of going on kind of leads into the idea that by the 1920s these boys who were earning Eagle Scout, they would become 18, they would age out of the organization.

But there was some response to that and it resulted in an organization that used to be very well known, but I don't know that anybody really knows about it anymore- the Knights of Dunamis. How did that all come about? And you're talking to one of the last surviving Knights- Really There aren't many of us left.

I got my Eagle very young and I became a Knight of Dunamis, I think when I was 16 or 17,. Stayed until I was 21,, and that was the early 1970s, And it was basically an organization to take Eagle Scouts and to organize them and use them to perform service to Scouting and to the community, Not really from the time you became an Eagle, but usually from the time you left your troop and you joined a chapter and ultimately there was about 50 chapters or 100 chapters around the United States, several thousand members.

I was a chapter president in San Jose in the late 60s, early 70s and we did everything from honor guard in the Cinco de Mayo parade to putting on children's Christmas shows in hospitals, to holding probably 100 Eagle Court of Honors. We would preside over them with our robes on and all that.

So it was really a remarkable organization that did a tremendous amount of things. Amazing organization. It's what really made me think of myself as an Eagle Scout. But by the 1970s and 80s it was fading. Scouting gave it one last chance and by then it was too late.

And so I found myself at the 1973 National Jamboree In Pennsylvania standing in front of about 10,000 Eagle Scouts announcing the death. I was a part of the program. I announced the death of the Knights of Dunamis and the founding of the National Eagle Scout Association. And you're still involved in that. Yeah, I'm the president of the local NISA chapter, Much more structured than the Knights of Dunamis was. I missed the old Knights of Dunamis and my hope is that NISA, as it develops, will become more like that, more service-oriented, become an institution itself.

And I think the first really good step was the creation of the Adams Award, which is that award for the best Eagle project in the United States. That's a pretty recent thing, yeah, Yeah, it's just three years old And, remarkably enough, my oldest son earned the first Adams Award. He won the award for the Western Region. He actually got a bunch of Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs to buy a 50-foot shipping container. He filled it full of about three schools worth of supplies and sent it off to Children's Town, AIDS Orphanage and School in Zambia where we had visited, And the container itself was turned into a library. This is a glimpse of what 21st Century Eagle projects look like.

There's a good section of the book about these awards and things which are really new and not a whole lot of people really know about. But what was the genesis of the Eagle project? You didn't always do a project to become an Eagle Scout.

No, and in fact you know you always ran into these old Eagle Scouts. I was much tougher back in the old days.

Nobody had as hard as we did getting our Eagle. There's a little bit of truth to that. Earning an Eagle in the 1920s or 30s or 40s was actually not that difficult, except for one merit batch- Bird study. Nobody got that merit batch. There are thousands of elderly men who will tell you that they never got the Eagle because they couldn't pass bird study. But in terms of the overall requirements, modern scouting is much more difficult and that has to do with the Eagle project.

There was a feeling that because scouting was growing so fast during the baby boomer era that a lot of kids were getting their Eagles but not really getting deep into scouting, so there was a requirement for participation in community service, and they still exist. Then, in the early 60s, it was decided that no, that wasn't enough. What we wanted the Eagles to do was to take all the skills that they had learned and to apply them in some organized way that required them to have a plan, a project and exhibit the skills of being a leader, especially dealing with adults. And that was the beginning of the Eagle service project.

We got their Eagle in the late 60s and they said- I don't really remember, I think we painted some benches at the park and that was a very successful Eagle project back in the late 60s. But we have 300,000 teenage boys each year performing or creating real, honest-to-goodness social enterprises, doing social entrepreneurship and changing the face of this country. And because these tend to be discreet, comparatively small events that get coverage in the local paper but no one puts it all together and says good lord, these Eagle scouts are the single most important force of- I don't know what you call it- social improvement in the United States at any given time. You quoted in the book the figure 10.5 million hours.

Is that right? Yeah, 10.5 million hours a year on Eagle projects. And if you add it up over the history of Eagle scouting, we're looking at about 100 to 150 million hours of civic contribution by Eagle projects, which makes it the largest service project by youth in history. There's simply nothing like it. Just amazing what these kids are doing nowadays. Yeah, from the small to the big, they all add up into this incredible force.

Yes, they absolutely do. Yeah, it's just amazing.

Now we recently marked the passing of Neil Armstrong, who's got to be probably arguably the most famous Eagle scouts. Yeah, it's Neil Armstrong, And I'm in a weird position of I think I'm the last person to have worked with Neil Armstrong, Really. Yeah, because when we had the book in draft, we had access to Dr Armstrong And I asked him. I said: I've written this chapter about you, but I'm not sure it's accurate.

Would you check it out? He was famously prickly about not dealing with the media, not doing any publicity. At one point I made the mistake of asking if he'd give me a jacket quote and I got it immediate. No, I don't do that, But a few weeks.

You know we're coming up on deadline. It's going to be close. 24 hours later he sent me back three pages of email correcting every little detail.

So I'm sitting in my house emailing back and forth with Neil Armstrong- which was pretty mind-boggling- And then I realized a week later, when it was announced that he'd gone in for heart surgery, that he had literally finished editing his chapter for me like 48 hours before he went to the hospital. I assumed he was coming out. Oh my gosh, Or I can't believe that he would have devoted the time to this If he thought it was that serious.

So I put a little note on the bottom of that chapter. It's quite an amazing thing And once again, sort of an eagle scout being helpful. The book has just dozens of different stories about eagles who went on to distinguish themselves in various ways, And some of them used to be pretty much household names And you bring them back to memory, and one that I wanted to ask you to talk about a little bit is Paul Cyple. He's a very interesting guy And you could argue until Neil Armstrong comes on the scene. The shiny example of what an eagle scout is was Paul Cyple for 40 years, The middle era of scouting. He's the man, He's the guy.

You read this and you look at your own When you put on your eagle medal, you think, wow, am I worthy to wear the medal to that, Neil Armstrong and Arthur Eldridge and Paul Cyple. Cyple is sort of the ultimate eagle scout. When you think of an eagle scout he's a great big guy: big, toothy grin, affable and friendly with everyone.

A natural leader earned his eagle, I think when he was 18 or 18 and a half. You were on your way to eagle. You were allowed to go on and finish it after your 18th birthday. It was already accepted into college.

I think he had 30 merit badges. He had done a lot of 50 milers. He was the real deal. Commodore Perry is going to go to the South Pole. He publicly announced that he was going to take one eagle scout with him to Antarctica. He was going to have a national competition.

Cyple hears about it and applies. The list is swiddled down to 10 or 12 boys, All of them super overachievers from around the country. The story is covered in every paper in America. It's a very big deal. Cyple shines above all of these other overachievers and Perry agrees to take him. The plan is he's going to go along and he's going to go on the ship, sailing down there and working the galley.

By the time they get to Antarctica he's already moved out of the galley, He's up on deck and he's starting to take care of the animals. He turns out to be incredibly strong and more capable than the professionals that Perry's brought with him. As a result, he ends up being Perry's number two guy within about two months. He's just this amazing guy and everybody loves him because he's such a nice guy Over. He's Perry's protege and when he comes back he goes to college and he's celebrated and fetid and all that. Perry goes down again and is going to fly over to South Pole.

He invites Cyple to be his guy, to go with him down there to do it, And so Cyple slowly becomes. Especially as Perry gets older, Cyple becomes the world's leading art explorer And he not only begins to explore Antarctica but also the Arctic. And when World War II breaks out, he's doing scientific research and they ask him to investigate different kinds of weather systems and environments for soldiers to fight in, What kind of uniforms they need, and all that. And while he's at it, he invents the notion of windshield factor.

So whenever you hear windshield factor, he's in front of an NFL football game or something and he just becomes one of the greatest applied scientists America has ever produced. For long as I've been involved in this guy- no doubt as long as you've been involved- there's always been a lot of discussions that tend to turn into arguments about what constitutes an eagle scout. Yeah, People can get pretty exercised about it. You've had an interesting perspective of that question.

Is there an answer? There's simple answers and there's complicated answers. The simple answer is: being an eagle scout is a state of mind. One of the amazing things about the eagle award is it's the only award of childhood that stays with you your entire life. You go in the military. You can wear your eagle medal, a special version of it.

When you're 90 years old and you die, your paper in your obituary is likely to mention the fact that you were an eagle scout. It's not going to mention you were varsity football or anything else you did as a kid. It's going to attach to you your entire life and to be cognizant of that fact and to live up to it is to be a true eagle scout. That's the simple answer. There's a more complicated answer and you've dealt with it a lot in your blog. A lot of the people writing in commenting- especially people asking for advice- a lot of people write in and say we've decided not to let this boy become an eagle because we don't think he's worthy.

That's that whole messy business of do you fit the stereotype of an eagle scout, And that one always bugs me and I think it bugs most eagles. I've found that people who are adults, who are eagle scouts, are usually a lot more flexible about scouts becoming eagles.

I think you don't really become an eagle scout when they put that medal on you. I think it's something that you grow into over time.

As I think I've written to you in the past, Nobody gets to eagle easy. You become an eagle. If you earn the eagle and you're serious about it, you become an eagle. You may finally become an eagle when you're 30. You may do it when you're 15.. But if you live the eagle life, you become an eagle.

That's a really good way of looking at it and maybe it'll help inform people who get a little exercised about this in a while. I'm weary of that.

We've put enormous stress upon these kids, That sort of unwritten rule that your eagle project now has to change mankind forever. That's an awful lot to put on a teenage boy. Boys are ready to do their eagle project when they're ready to do their eagle project, and not a day before, Not a minute before. They're terrified.

They don't want to deal with adults, They don't want to organize anything, And then one morning they get up and decide I'm going to do it, And then they're focused and they pull it off. Was there anything in writing the book that you discovered that changed the way that you look at this at all, or that you just were unaware of and you thought was something pretty incredible?

I think the thing that struck me the most was that eagle scouting stands apart from Boy Scouting. It's a classic example of being of scouting, but not necessarily part of scouting.

Once you start on the trail of the eagle beginning when you become a life, you enter into a different reality and you move down that path, and that path has been taken for 100 years by what? Five to six million boys ahead of you, And it's a fraternity And it's filled with like-minded people, all of whom have decided that they're going to go for something that's bigger than anything they've ever done in their lives and that's going to challenge them in ways they can't imagine. And I was struck by that continuity, that eagle scouting really is a thing unto itself When you have this group of people that are these kind of overachievers and who did something this big at such a young age.

They're going to cut their own path for the rest of their lives, So you can't control them: Former members who are still officially members, who are presidents of universities and Nobel Prize winners and Medal of Honor awardees and members of Congress. They're a heck of a lot more powerful than scouting itself And I love that about it.

And when you go to an eagle court of honor and they form the eagle court, inviting everybody from the audience to come up, they're going to rise of all ages, from their 20s to their 80s and you know, it's colored their entire life. Everywhere you go, you're going to run into an eagle scout and he's going to be the guy who's in the position of greatest responsibility. And that's an amazing thing, It's a powerful thing, and writing the book, I felt enormous pride in this fraternity that I was part of and felt compelled even more to be an eagle scout. Like an eagle scout. My prediction is it's going to become the default thing that you get for a new eagle scout.

Well, thank you very much. Let me ask you this question, since I get asked it regularly.

Right now the book's available in a Kindle edition and I know it's doing very well. When are we going to get the regular good old fashion hardcover edition of it?

Well, I can't commit to a precise state, but I know that the publisher is creating an index for it right now and we're working with Nisa, with Bill Steele, in hopes that we can get the photos that we want to put in the book. So I can't make a precise commitment or even a precise date, but I think pretty soon. I would love to see the book available for Christmas, But it is going to happen one way or the other. If I can help it, it will. If I can help it, it would too. I've got a shelf of books and I don't know how to file on the shelf an electronic version of a book.

Well, I still think. When people have asked me whether or not they can get it in a hard copy, I tell them that it's still a great gift for a new Eagle Scout, because that's usually what they're asking. They want to get it for somebody who's just becoming an Eagle. Yeah, they all have Kindle's and iPads.

Anyway, They'll figure out how to read it, even if we can't. Well, I'm watching the time here. I've kept you a bit longer than I said at first.

It's so much fun to read your blog. I turned to it before anything else in scouting.

Oh well, thank you, And I think your comment section is brilliant. You get a lot of interesting people that are very committed to scouting. Yeah, that's probably the best part of doing it, And I constantly take your outdoor lists, like the survival kit you did the other day, and I email it out through our troop Yahoo Group email. I'm glad to hear people find stuff useful. Oh, there you go. That's good.

Once again, the book's 4%- The Story of Uncommon Youth in a Century of American Life, And we've been talking with Mike Malone, the author. Thanks very much for joining us, Mike. Thank you, Clark, and best to all of your loyal readers.