Scouting in our Family

The Boy Scout and Girl Scout movement began in the US in 1910, just a few years after it started in England. In 1934, when my mother was 10 years old, my grandfather enrolled her in the local Girl Scout troop that met at their church, Mill Plain Union Church, in Waterbury, CT. When they discovered that he had knowledge (self-taught) in things like plants and electricity, the troop included him as a badge consultant (see https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/stories-from-my-mother-1-my-dad.html).

My mother stayed with the Girl Scouts – first as a troop member, then as a leader. When she graduated from high school and moved to Hartford for hairdressing school, this involvement stopped. Shortly thereafter, WWII began, and after the war she and my dad married and moved to Wolcott where they purchased a home which they lived in together for the next 60 years. I was born a few years later, the first of five children, and about the time I started going to school at Alcott School, they enrolled me in the newly formed Cub Scout Pack, my sister in the local Brownie Troop, and my mother re-engaged in the scouting movement. She would remain involved for the next several decades, and, of course, all the rest of the family would be as well.

Early Memories

Our local Cub Scout Pack met at Alcott School and encompassed the entire northern part of the town. The den that I was a part of was run by the mother of one of my classmates, Jay Pikiell. Although the Pikiell home was quite small (the living room being perhaps 10x12), it was large enough for we rambunctious young boys to gather and get our initial exposure to scouting.

A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

I still remember the Boy Scout Law which I learned over 60 years ago.

[Picture of myself and my sister, Beth, in our Cub Scout and Brownie uniforms]

 

I worked my up through the various levels – back then they were Wolf, Bear, Lion – and got my Webelos badge as well (also back then the consonants in word were W/B/L/S for Wolf/Bear/Lion/Scout, but they have also changed). I then entered Boy Scouts. My sister had her “fly up” ceremony the following year when she moved from Brownies to Girl Scouts.

[Following picture has our family in 1956 with myself, Beth, my brother Chuck, and my sister Dawn, together with the MacBroom children – the oldest, Andrea (Andy), was my age. Mr. MacBroom was a good friend of my father’s at Scovill, and was in my parent’s wedding. They were also involved in scouting in Wolcott, but in different troops as they lived at the far southern end of town, and will show up again later in this story.]

 

[Here are some pictures from my sister’s fly up ceremony in the parking lot of Alcott School. The red and white 1957 station wagon in the background is our family car.]

 

Boy Scouts

The boy scout troop was for the entire town. We met at Frisbie School. One of my fondest memories of my time in boy scouts was when several of us were working on merit badges for hiking and outdoor cooking. Our parents dropped us off at the Grand Junction (on Woodtick Road near the Atwood property). At the time this was the access point for the Connecticut Blue Trail. We followed the trail, hiking eastward into the woods, then north along the edge of the New Britain Reservoir, then along the top of the escarpment a bit farther before taking the steep path down the escarpment into Southington to the trail end near the south end of Lake Compounce.

At that time there was a camping/picnic area along the west side of the lake which is where we ended our hike. We had been put into teams of two and each team shared a pup tent. After setting up camp, we had to go into the surrounding woods to gather sticks and other material for building a fire – each team also having been assigned a cooking fire area in one of the circles made of stones scattered around the picnic area. We had each brought our evening meal (hamburger, potato, and carrots, all wrapped in aluminum foil by our mothers earlier that day). Our task was to start a fire using only a piece of flint and a strip of steel. But that’s not an easy task! Some of the teams got theirs going, built up a good fire, then put their food in the coals to get it cooked. But our team (and several others), despite over a half-hour of trying to get a good spark to light the materials we had gathered, were not able to get a spark to “catch.” The leaders eventually took pity on us (after observing that we really were trying!) and allowed us to use the bed of coals that one of the successful fire-starting teams had produced.

We all slept well that night in our tents. In the morning the leaders started a fire (using matches) for cooking a breakfast of fried eggs and bacon. After packing up our tents and sleeping bags, ensuring that all fires were totally dead (having a lake just a few feet away across the tracks for the amusement park train was helpful), and making sure that the entire picnic area was picked up and there was no trace of our having occupied it, we walked the short distance along the shore, through the amusement park (which is not open in the early morning), and met our parents in the parking lot just beyond it.

 Here are a few pictures of me during this time – one in my uniform, and one of our patrol doing a winter hike]

 

While our patrol was active, the leadership of the troop at this time was becoming very ineffective. Thus, at one of our patrol meetings we all realized that we were getting nowhere. So, we voted as an entire patrol to withdraw from scouting to pursue other things. But this left me in a little bit of an awkward situation. For one of my service projects, I had been assisting a local Cub Scout Den which met a short distance away on North Street (just a 5-minute walk). As I was no longer a scout, I could not be the den assistant. However, the den mother appreciated my help and I liked helping the younger kids in their advancement in scouting. So, she, with the approval of the Cub Scout Pack leadership, had me appointed as the “Assistant Den Mother.” (At the time, all Cub Scout Packs were led by women as they were home in the afternoons after school when the dens met.)

My father, because of his involvement (through my mother) on helping with such things as setting up the Girl Scout camp each year (more on that below), had recently been elected to the Girl Scout District Council which gave leadership to the Girl Scouts in a large part of the county. So, he had a membership card for that purpose and was a “card-carrying Girl Scout.” This led me to reason, “If my father is a Girl Scout, then it’s ok for me to be an Assistant Den Mother.”

 

Other Family Members

I’d like to briefly touch on the involvement of the rest of my family in scouting.

My mother, in addition to her involvement before she was married, was a Girl Scout leader in Wolcott from shortly after I was born and continuing for a few decades. Sometimes she headed up a local troop, sometimes she volunteered at the district level, sometimes she was the Girl Scout cookie chairman for the entire town, and sometimes she had other roles. Being the cookie chair was always interesting, as after all the troops in town had sent in their orders, the truck delivering all of the cookies would come to our house. We would have to park our cars outside as there would be hundreds of cases of cookies to unload into our garage. We would sort them into piles for each troop, and then have to help load the cases into the car/pickup truck for each troop when they came to claim their cookies.

In 1976, as part of the bicentennial of the nation, my mother was recognized as a “hidden heroine” by the Wolcott Girl Scout Troop and was featured in the newspaper receiving the “rare Connecticut Trails Council pin” for all her contributions to scouting.

[Here is a copy of that newspaper article]

 

My father’s involvement was principally in support of my mother’s work. I’ll include his picture below as part of my writeup on Camp Sequena.

My other siblings were also involved – in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies, and Girl Scouts. Most of the pictures I have of them are marching in the annual Memorial Day parade in town.

[Here are pictures of my mother, my brother Chuck, and my sister Dawn]

 

For the 1966-67 school year (while I was in college) our family hosted an exchange student from Norway, Ingrid Klykken. She had also been involved in the scouting movement there, and we involved her here in meeting with some of the US Girl Scouts in town.

[You can see her here meeting with a Brownie troop as well as in her Girl Guide uniform sitting next to my mother at a Girl Scout gathering]

 

Camp Sequena

The Connecticut Trails Council of the Girl Scouts owned a large tract of land near Otis, MA, which they used as a summer camp ground. There was a Revolutionary War-era farm house, a large barn (used for storage of the tents and equipment), and camping areas scattered in the woods that contained raised wooden platforms for tents. Besides my mother and sisters going to the camp during the summer, our entire family would often go up for a weekend in the spring/fall to setup/take down the tents. In the spring we also had to clear out any trees that had fallen during the winter that were blocking the trails or lying on the tent platforms.

[I’ve included several pictures of these activities below: my sisters helping take down a tent in the fall, my mother and Mrs. MacBroom clearing cobwebs out of one of the latrines (I told you I’d get back to her!), my father and I clearing a fallen log (what red-blooded teenaged male wouldn’t like to spend a weekend in a girl scout camp!), and my father warming up next to the fireplace in the farmhouse after a cold late spring day of working outside (note the long underwear also drying out on the fireplace screen).]

 

It was not until many years later when doing some research that I discovered that the Camp Sequena property had 345 acres and had been purchased by the Girl Scouts in the 1930’s and had subsequently been sold to a developer in 1972, not too many years after these pictures were taken. But of interest was that before its use by the Girl Scouts it was the home of one of the first nudist colonies in the US (https://moam.info/otis-nudist-colony-was-one-of-nations-first-otis-wood-lands_5a2fb2461723ddc8b42a1708.html).

Participation in scouting had a positive impact on our entire family.

Playing the Flute

While I now often express myself musically through singing, that was not always the case. I didn’t learn to sing in parts until I was in college, but my flute playing goes back much further.

I am quite happy to admit that I am not very artistic. As I frequently say to others when I see those who are, “They have more ability in their little finger than I have in my whole body.” But for my appreciation of the artistic side of things, I have to include Mr. Pontecorvo in my list of favorite teachers.

When I started school, it was in first grade at Alcott School. There were no nursery/preschools those days and the only kindergarten was a very small private one at the far end of town. Since the schools were still quite small and there was not yet a high school in town, there was also very limited art/music available. And instrumental music was non-existent.

In 1958, with the new high school being built, the school board hired an instrumental music teacher, Mr. Pontecorvo. He divided his time among the various elementary schools. Because no one owned instruments, they had a plan of “rent to buy” where the family could make payments of so much a month and at the end of the plan they would own the instrument.

Because my mother knew how to play the piano and wanted her children to have some exposure to music, my sister and I had been taking piano lessons from my aunt. But my Aunt Dot was a hard taskmaster and I was not enjoying it at all. I was only at the point of picking out the melody one note at a time with my right hand and trying to play a chord with my left one. This instrumental plan from the school was a way for me to “escape” my aunt and I jumped at it. I chose to play the flute – perhaps because most of the boys went in for things like trumpets and drums and I wanted something different. The other flute player that first year was my classmate, Jeanne Wilson.

Lessons were held weekly by instrument, i.e. all the flutes together, in the only available space in the school – the boiler room. It sometimes got pretty toasty during the winter months. That first year there was only Jeanne and I, then the following year we were joined by Bev Williams who was a year younger than Jeanne and I. We practiced in that boiler room for three years until Jeanne and I moved to the high school in the fall of 1961.

(An interesting historical note about this. Because the instruments that Jeanne and I ordered were obtained together by Mr. Pontecorvo, we had identical flutes with consecutive serial numbers. My mother had saved the receipt for my flute. More than a half-century later I came into possession of the receipt and the warranty when my mother passed away and I discovered that the flute – that I still had – did not match the serial number on the warranty – it was off by one. At some time during the several years that Jeanne and I were both playing the flute and we had them next to each other, we had inadvertently gotten them switched. So, for all those years I was playing her flute and she was playing mine!)

In high school the weekly school lessons were replaced with the opportunity to join the high school band. For the first few years we had no uniforms and just appeared in dress pants/skirts, white shirts, and ties. Later the school got uniforms - gray flannel trousers (for the boys, the girls had gray flannel skirts), white shirts with a skinny black tie and a tie-pin, and scarlet blazers – the school colors were scarlet and gray). We were primarily a concert band as the school was not large enough to have a football team, but we did have a small group that played as a pep band for basketball games, and we also marched in the town’s annual Memorial Day parade.

The band met twice a week during the “activity period” – the last period of the day on Tuesday and Friday. And as it was also for the high school which served the entire town (Alcott only served the kids in the northern tier of town), there were other flute players – some of whom only played for a few years, others who were there every year. The ones I can recall, besides myself, Jeanne, and Bev (a year behind us), were Mike Truziewicz (a year older than myself, Colleen Malloy (a classmate whom I am still in touch with), and Elise Marcil.

Here is a picture from a Memorial Day parade in eighth grade – from left to right are Jeanne, Colleen, Mike, and myself. Elise had leg problems and was not able to march.

 

The friendships made in band made us pretty close. Here is a picture of myself with Colleen, Elise, and Jeanne at our 50^th high school reunion!

 

My senior year I decided to expand a little bit and purchased a piccolo at a music store in New Haven. Our band teacher then featured me in the spring concert by having us play John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. It was somewhat scary having to stand up by myself and play it from memory with the eyes of the entire audience upon me!

During my high school years, I also private flute lessons for a while. One year I had a music teacher in Waterbury who lived off Long Hill Road. (An interesting event from that year – my mother was driving me to my lesson after school in our 1957 Ford Fairlane station wagon. At the light at Lakewood Rd, the car in front of us stopped quickly and my mother didn’t react in time and rear-ended him. The hood on that car was hinged in the front, so the impact caused the hood to fly open toward the front and blocked our view. This was in the days when the Pine Drive-in was still in operation and there were not many other businesses in the area, so I had to walk/run down the road to the gas station across from the drive-in (it was an ESSO gas station in the years before they became Exxon) and call my dad at work to come out and help. Needless to say, I didn’t make my lesson that day!)

Later on, I was going to a music teacher who lived in Cheshire off of Mountain Road. (Another car-related story – that was the year I was learning how to drive. I had passed my driving test at the high school, but in a car with an automatic transmission. My mother insisted that I had to learn how to drive a stick shift before she would let me get my license. Our car by then was a VW Beetle. My driving lesson each week was driving to/from my flute lesson. The intersection of Mountain Road with the Waterbury-Cheshire Road was the bane of my existence. You had to stop on a slight incline as you waited for traffic to clear and then pull out. And my mother’s requirement was that I be able to stop on that incline, then manage the gas, brake, and clutch with enough skill that I didn’t roll backwards while doing so. It took many weeks to meet her approval!)

As an undergraduate in college at Michigan State University, I wanted to continue my musical exploits. MSU had a well-known marching band, but I was not eligible to play in it as membership was limited to brass and drums (I was a member of the marching band for two years – but one year in their flag unit and one as an assistant manager). So instead I joined the “activity band”. We met three times a week in the Music Building at 8AM. Grading was based on attendance – and the door was locked exactly at 8AM so if you were late your grades suffered. I did make friends with a pretty flute player sitting next to me and we actually dated a couple of times.

One summer I also was invited by a friend from our former high school band to join the pit band for the Waterbury Parks Department musical which they put on each year. The music that we used had been rented from a Broadway show so we couldn’t even put pencil markings in it. And my book was for “first wind”, which meant that some songs were written for flute, some for clarinet and some for alto saxophone. While that may have been fine for the professionals playing on Broadway, it was beyond my expertise as I had no training in other instruments, nor did I own any others. So, because the flute is a C instrument, the clarinet is a B-flat instrument, and the alto sex is an E-flat instrument, that meant playing the flute parts as written, transposing on the fly a full-step in one direction for any clarinet parts and transposing on the fly a step-and-a-half in the other direction for any saxophone parts. It was a real test of my musical abilities to do so, especially when the part went from clarinet to saxophone from one page to the next and you couldn’t even pencil in the key that you were supposed to be playing in!

After college, my playing was somewhat sporadic. I briefly played in a small group at our church. But in my 30s, all that came to an end. I had always had a small jaw and a receding chin. But it, along with the lack of access to fluoride treatments when growing up, meant that I had dental problems. One of the eventual consequences required a jaw operation to cut off my lower jaw, move it forward to correct my bite, and screw it back together. A side effect was that one of the nerves that is connected to my lower lip on one side was stretched and I lost the feeling in part of my lower lip. This meant that I no longer had the necessary embouchure for flute playing and so I had to stop permanently.

By then, I had come to enjoy singing (bass) and still had a musical outlet. But I’m grateful for all the years that I was able to play and enjoy the flute. That introduction to music led to a life-long love of music. Thanks to Mr. Pontecorvo for bringing the instrumental program to the Wolcott school system!

Philosophy of Writing

I have a friend on Facebook, Robert Perry, who has many things in common with me. Although we have never met face-to-face, we grew up in the same small town of Wolcott, Connecticut, we both moved away when we pursued our further education, and we both enjoy writing. He is several years younger than I and so we have no friends or significant experiences in common. However, through genealogical investigations we are distant cousins of each other, having several ancestors from New England/Connecticut history in common. But we have very different writing styles and philosophies – even when writing about the same or similar topics.

Many of my writings take the form of what I call “Genealogy Stories.” Focusing on a particular character, or set of related characters, in the history of Wolcott or of Connecticut, or other ancestors of mine or my wife’s, I tell the story in a way that incorporates both the genealogy of that individual, but that also includes the greater context in which that genealogy exists. This can include historical events (what else was going on at the time), geological information (where it was taking place), societal context (what life was like at the time), etc., and usually more than one of these types of context. So, while the main theme is that individual’s life story and the significant dates in their life (birth, marriage, children, death), it’s never just a series of facts, but trying to put that individual in the context where all those things happened.

I also tend to list a number of references about where I found that information, thus encouraging others to continue to read these other references for themselves. And if the individual is related to me, I will also mention that relationship to show how we are often personally connected to others beyond our immediate sphere.

Because there are so many facts given in these stories, I am conscious of breaking my writing up into easily managed chunks by using small-to-moderate sized paragraphs and the white space between the paragraphs to allow others to read the story without getting too confused by the amount of information. I generally keep the story somewhat short – about 3-5 pages in document format – because my purpose is to encourage others to appreciate the context (history/geography/etc.) and make the story more “real” and not just a series of dates and events.

I have chosen to present these stories in a blog for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps them all together and in a place where people can find them. And second, because that medium allows me to preserve most of the formatting in paragraphs, etc.

I don’t have thousands, or even hundreds, of followers, so I post links to these blog entries in social media. And I have learned that because our society is so visually focused, that putting one or more relevant pictures in the blog will cause the picture to show up in the news feed and help encourage people to then click on the link to my blog (although I did not do this the first few years, so my older postings remain just textual).

In contrast to my style of writing, Bob relies on a much different one. His is deeply personal and written from that perspective. As an example, when he wrote about the 100+ year old statue of the horse on the Waterbury green, it was in the context of his seeing the statue as a small boy, wondering why it was there, and eventually making his way to the local library where a kind librarian helped him find the information he craved about the horse, its owner, and why the statue had been built.

 

He writes in long, descriptive sentences filled with colorful adjectives and nouns, and lots of commas to separate the many phrases of his rich explanations. While my writing has an educational slant to it, his is very emotive and seeks to draw the reader into the environment of the story and to feel personally connected to it.

He then posts the relevant picture to an album on his Facebook page and copies what he has written into the accompanying post. In doing so, most of the formatting is lost and the post is one long string of words below that initial picture. But while that would be harmful to my writing style, for his it is not. Rather, his readers find themselves getting lost in the jungle of descriptive words and long, run-on sentences and thus even more drawn into the world that he is presenting. Overwhelmed by the beauty of his descriptions, they relate to this world in an intimate fashion and see everything through his eyes.

Both of these styles of writing are useful, but they come from different philosophies of writing. I want to draw people in by showing how all these stories are part of the larger context in which we all live. Bob wants to draw people in by getting them to relate personally to the story. In a sense, one is outside-in, and the other is inside-out. But we both want to help others learn about and appreciate our history.

Bob put it this way:

“How to tell the stories of our ancestors, the many other Americans who gave us our great country and the progress of America so as to generate not merely interest but appropriate and strictly truthful regard for the legacy enjoyed by all of us, whether their lineal or much more broadly cultural descendants, has become a chief concern of mine. These stories, surprisingly only some of which have been written about at all even after centuries, almost in every case need to be made interesting for those now alive, who too often have been taught an unnecessary hostility to them if they consider history relevant in the least.”

I am a big fan of his writing, and he is a fan of mine. The world needs both of our philosophies.