Our official WB NE 3-188 Photographer, John Morgenstern, recently donated a little now-half-century old booklet to our Boy Scout Museum, Ideas and Stories for the Scoutmaster's Minute, published by the Boy Scouts of America in 1956. I mention John by name, by the way, because he is one old-school photographer now on a mad rush to use up his remaining stock of 35 mm Kodachrome film before the local drugstore refuses to develop it anymore. If you have a Scouting event that needs photographing within a 50 mile radius of his home (provided he still has film), he's your man.Actually, John is a seasoned Scouter with more than 40 years of Scouting as a Scoutmaster, Jamboree contingent leader and Wood Badge staffer whose first experience with a camera was with a Brownie Hawkeye at the age of 15 on a campout. He has photographed Scouts at Jamborees, Council Dinners, Wood Badge courses and other Scouting events but now the technology has passed him by. John says "I will quit taking pictures when the film...or when I (whichever is sooner) run out." The snapshot and SLR cameras have served him well over the years but he refuses to go digital.
John's booklet consists of 67 stories or short vignettes "gathered and tested" by the veteran Scouter Victor Reinholz, mostly based on the principals of the Scout Oath or the tenants of the Scout Law. Author Reinholz suggests that the reader, "... find an idea that suits your needs, but do not just read them to your boys. Take the idea and express it in your own words." Good advise, we think.
A little "kitchen chemistry" illustrates several of the stories; a glass of water, a few pebbles, and a piece of carbide show the efflorescent quality, the inside difference, of a Scout who shows The Stuff a Fellow's Made of. The use of potassium permanganate crystals to turn water black in A Scout Is Obedient to show what happens when you keep bad company might raise the collective eyebrows of parents and Homeland Security today. A Scout is Clean begins with "Have a lump of coal and as many of its by-products as you can, such as moth balls, perfume, phonograph records, bleach, plastics, nylon, lead pencil, aspirin, sulfa, saccharine, creosote" to equate a lump of dirty coal and its useful by-products with the refining process of living the Scout code. "When we have the courage to stand up for what is right, to be clean, only then do we begin to really amount to something," the Ol' Scoutmaster said.
Are these little stories dated, not relevant to Scouting today? Yes, of course, and no. True, they don't mention the trappings of today's technology like hi def television, cell phones and John's bugaboo, digital cameras, or deal with the myriad of society's ills that plague our youth today. But they do serve as an important reminder that the principles of the Scout Oath and Law remain true, that the qualities of character, fitness and citizenship development in young boys are as important today as they were to Scoutmasters like John Morgenstern 50 years ago.
Thanks, John, for The Scoutmaster's Minute and a snapshot of Scouting a half century ago! We can't wait another minute to see what develops in the next hundred years!
--WB Scribbler
A little "kitchen chemistry" illustrates several of the stories; a glass of water, a few pebbles, and a piece of carbide show the efflorescent quality, the inside difference, of a Scout who shows The Stuff a Fellow's Made of. The use of potassium permanganate crystals to turn water black in A Scout Is Obedient to show what happens when you keep bad company might raise the collective eyebrows of parents and Homeland Security today. A Scout is Clean begins with "Have a lump of coal and as many of its by-products as you can, such as moth balls, perfume, phonograph records, bleach, plastics, nylon, lead pencil, aspirin, sulfa, saccharine, creosote" to equate a lump of dirty coal and its useful by-products with the refining process of living the Scout code. "When we have the courage to stand up for what is right, to be clean, only then do we begin to really amount to something," the Ol' Scoutmaster said.
Are these little stories dated, not relevant to Scouting today? Yes, of course, and no. True, they don't mention the trappings of today's technology like hi def television, cell phones and John's bugaboo, digital cameras, or deal with the myriad of society's ills that plague our youth today. But they do serve as an important reminder that the principles of the Scout Oath and Law remain true, that the qualities of character, fitness and citizenship development in young boys are as important today as they were to Scoutmasters like John Morgenstern 50 years ago.
Thanks, John, for The Scoutmaster's Minute and a snapshot of Scouting a half century ago! We can't wait another minute to see what develops in the next hundred years!
--WB Scribbler
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