Scouting in the 50's

Scouting in the ‘50’s

Cub Scout to Boy Scout. My mother was Den Mother, then my father was an Assistant Scoutmaster. I never liked the uniforms; I felt self-conscious in them. I never had the enthusiasm for scouting that most of the other boys had. In Cub Scouts the games were fun, and we were learning things. Some of the values and structured experiences began to take.

The transition from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts never occurred to me as any sort of road to adulthood. Manhood seemed far away to me. But the transition from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts paralled the transition to puberty. At our Scout meetings we had competitions, worked on merit badges, took first aid lessons. ( I especially remember tourniquets.)

Central to the Scout experience were camping trips. The days were filled with learning in- ground cooking techniques, leaf identification, tent maintenance, earning merit badges and knot skills. Evenings began with meals, campfires and maybe a little astronomy. For all the herding, teaching, planning and cooking the dads had to do, they got their revenge by sending us out for a bucket of steam, a left-handed monkey wrench or a short adventure snipe hunting.

Bedtime brought the inevitable sexual exploration. Boys would masturbate alone, in small groups or not at all. We for sure had to discuss penis size, and the more outgoing boys paraded their manhood for all of us to see. Who to partner with for a good wank? Quiet pleasuring or manly moans? There was some homosexual activity, but you couldn’t easily figure out what it all meant since in the 50’s homosexuality wasn’t talked about..

The big event of the year was a multi-week camping trip through the Southeast. We saved newspapers to recycle to pay for our trip since most of our families were fairly poor. For many of us, this would be the fartherest we had ever been from home. We stayed at Boy Scout Camps and YMCA camps where we could hike and swim. In the YMCA camps we were required to swim nude. We didn’t mind though; we had already gained some intimacy in the tents and sleeping shelters. We hunted frogs and cooked their legs. Hiked the mountains, swam in the cold streams.

As lackluster and mediocre a scout as I really was, Scouting has its impact on me. I still don’t like uniforms and am not a camping enthusiast, but it turns out that I’m a practitioner of most of the Boy Scout virtues: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent.