BY JEAN W. YEAGER
EAGLE SCOUT, GOD AND COUNTRY AWARD RECIPIENT AND AWARD-WINNING ESSAYIST
This
is a story of America of the 1960s told through the lens of the Boy Scouts.
Part of the tale is memoir about a 14-year-old Life Scout, who traveled by
train with a troop from Denver to the National Jamboree in Valley Forge, on to
New York City, the 1964 World’s Fair and back.
We traveled through the
polluted America of the ‘60s as Silent Spring had only been published in
1962. We departed with the “Brown Cloud” of air pollution in Denver, were
attacked by Earwigs in Valley Forge despite massive use of DDT, we circled New
York City on a “Hudson River (sewer) Tour” and came home across the Cuyahoga
River at night which made it easier to see that it was, in fact, so polluted it
was on fire.
This story also tells of
segregated Boy Scouting and the synchronous history of the Jamboree and the
Harlem Race Riots which both started the same day. It also tells of how our
Troop was protected by a Distinguished Eagle Scout, Percy Sutton, New York
Representative from Harlem, who arranged chaperones for us from Malcolm X’s
mosque while we were at the Hotel New Yorker.
The Jamboree was led by
WWII veterans who were anxious to impart their view of American Patriotism to
50,000 young men and guests. The Jamboree was only a few months pre-Vietnam and
Military/Scout leaders were already worried that cultural change was afoot
which is one reason they picked symbol-laden Valley Forge for the Jamboree, and
Lyndon Johnson spoke to we Scouts about un-named sacrifices to come. We
Colorado Scouts headed home knowing we lived next door to N.O.R.A.D. so the
Cold War was very real to us.
The lens also spotlights a secret side of
Scouting about which little is written or published. The Order Of The Arrow
Lodge conducted its first national Pow-Wow during the Jamboree with some 15,000
members in attendance. It is said that the O.A. and Scouting are like
two brothers – one public, one spiritual. Such Brotherhoods are not uncommon in
American life and are a part of the story.
This tale would not be
complete without the goofy teenage boy antics like shooting pool in Chicago at
“Shorty’s Nickle-A-Rack”, “Bowling For Rats” at the Hotel New Yorker and,
sitting down in the front row to ogle the high kicking Rockettes.
I have striven for this
lens to swing between the pre-1960s consciousness of Kerouac’s “On The Road”
and the post-Vietnam irreverence of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear And Loathing
In Las Vegas.” This tale is told in the Mark Twain style of “Rabbit Sausage”
Creative Nonfiction.*[1]
[1]
MARK TWAIN was once asked if his “non-fiction”
work was “True”. Twain replied that he had once asked a German Sausage Maker if
his Rabbit Sausage was 100% Rabbit? The Sausage Maker replied, “Vell I
do cut it mit yust a bit of horsemeat!” “How much horsemeat?”
Twain asked. “Yust von to von - von rabbit
to von horse!” The same can be said of this book.
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