My oldest grandson has just joined the Cub Scouts, and hearing about that inevitably woke up some dormant memories in me, not only of when I served as a Scoutmaster for his Dad but also of my own experiences as a boy. I was a part of scouting for a lot of years, and I've even kept some of the memorabilia from those days. Most of those old badges and cloth emblems - called "patches" by scouts - are over fifty years old, but still look pretty good for their age. (Unlike me, but I suppose I'd look nice too if I'd been kept carefully packed away in a drawer — or maybe not.) My recollections include not only musical memories - as always - but also a remembrance of one of the most embarrassing incidents in my life, but more about that later.
When I went away to summer camp for the first time, I was 11 and had just graduated from Cub Scouts to the real thing — I was a full-fledged Boy Scout, albeit a Tenderfoot, the rank assigned to rookies. It was a pretty exciting time for a kid who had spent very little time away from home, and if I felt a little wistful as I watched my parents driving away, I was soon fully occupied by all the activities that counselors had devised to keep a couple of hundred pre-teen boys entertained and occupied. I can only imagine the ingenuity that must have required.
As you would guess, it was a quasi-military setup, starting with the tents we were occupying, which were war surplus and actually pretty roomy. They contained four metal cots and were semi-permanently erected on top of wooden platforms, so it wasn't exactly "roughing it", but it was pretty exotic to us.
We also learned to pay attention to the bugle calls, from morning reveille to nightly taps and everything in between. One of the bugle calls we quickly learned to recognize was the one that called us to the mess hall, where we sat at long tables to eat our meals and if it was our turn, act as waiters and kitchen help. The mess hall was also where evening assemblies took place, when we'd sing a lot of timeless camping songs, such as "On Top Of Old Baldy", "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", and "I'm Happy When I'm Hiking". (And later in our tents, we'd sing "99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall" and feel very grown up.)
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