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Finally I became a Boy-scout years after everyone else. And they had all been Cub-scouts but I lived on the island removed so I engaged in no extracurricular activities except tree climbing.
And so I had to learn a lot of gobbledygook. A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I liked the clean part. So I got the tenderfoot badge or lowest ranking like private in the army, in the church basement. My mother was so proud in the seated audience of a couple dozen parents.
My nemesis Hegle was probably already an Eagle Scout top tier like a General, and the only one in town. Big on merit badges with a green sash-cloth, badges sewn in. In fact Hegle was that - "why can't you be like the Hegle boy", kid in town, but I don't think I made it higher than tenderfoot. Not long in the boy-scouts, I was kicked out for pushing in the church basement, and had to be ameliorated by recitation of more gobbledygook, in front of a grand inquisitional board on which my nemesis the Eagle Scout sat, in the church basement. Humiliating !
Soon after my suspension, the boy scouts were suspended, since most of the boys were getting too old, born in '42, a big birth year in those parts; so they constituted an Explorer Scout chapter in the church basement. I got some good camp-out weekends out of it, two three times at the Mississippi Palisades, and a jamboree up in Wisconsin was very memorable.
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