Today marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scouts of America. For the past century, the Boy Scouts of America has been a premier organization for teaching boys to be good men. In addition to camping and outdoors skills, boys are taught leadership, character, citizenship, and service to others.
I have many fond memories from my scouting days with Troop 15 at the First Presbyterian Church. And I’ve always taken pride in attaining the Eagle Scout Award. Eagle Scout is the highest award presented by the BSA, a worthy accomplishment only 5% of Scouts attain. The award represents many years of dedication and service as well as commitment to the values of Scouting. The capstone of earning this rank is the Eagle Project, which requires that the Scout “…plan, develop, and give leadership to others in a service project helpful to any religious institution, any school, or your community.” People can say that someone “was” a First Class Scout in their youth, but once a man earns Eagle, he always IS an Eagle Scout – “Once an Eagle, always an Eagle.”
In the Air Force, I graduated from three survival schools, and all seemed a breeze after my time in scouting.
Happy birthday BSA!
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fantastic post….
I just hope my boys can say the same when they reach such accomplishments.
Hi Steve,
Enjoyed reading your post about scouting and your time in Troop 15. I’m the current Co-Scoutmaster of the troop and thought I’d drop you a line. We currently number about 40 active scouts and things are going well. Make sure to check out our troop website at http://www.troop15yea.com and feel free to drop by a meeting anytime. We still meet at First Presbyterian downstairs at 7pm on Mondays.
In fact, we have a group of older scouts we call X-Treme 15 which primarily focus on leadership training. Once a quarter we have an outside guest speaker come in and talk to the boys about different facets of leadership. If you would have any interest in doing this, let me know. We’d love to have a successful alumnus come back and share a little about their leadership experiences. You can reach me at my email address, bwheelbarger@sbcglobal.net or on the cell at 308-9717.