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.
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.
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