THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The criticisms of the Boy Scouts for caving into the “gay” lobby – and marching in “gay pride” parades and so forth – seem to me to be valid.  I nevertheless have a somewhat different view of these recent occurrences.

When I was in the third, fourth, and fifth grades at Toland Way school in Highland Park, an old suburb of Los Angeles in 1963, 64, and 65, my schoolmates and I undertook many of the activities that the Cub Scouts undertake on our own – exploring the local free country in the hills and arroyos, learning to shoot a twenty-two calibre game rifle, learning to swim at Hansen Dam and at various YMCA and public-parks swimming pools, learning what goes on in a railway shunting yard, walking a good length of the Los Angele sRiver right through Downtown, building model planes and cars, and other boyish activities.  When I was a junior high school and a high school student, first in Malibu at Malibu Park Junior High and then in Santa Monica at Santa Monica High School, I similarly undertook a wide array of outdoor activities with my pals the Cunningham brothers and associated friends.  We hiked the mountains, learned how to free dive in the kelp beds off Point Dume, and participated in spontaneous baseball and volleyball, and basketball games.  I went camping with my parents in the Sierra Nevada Mountains from the time I was ten until I was a junior in high school.  In my senior year, I participated in a one-hundred-mile bike-ride from Santa Monica to Desert Hot Springs, near Palm Springs.  (After three days camping, we were fetched home by pick-up truck, I admit.)

In other words – with occasional help and guidance from parents – my chums and I organized our own free time and gained all sorts of knowledge and lore entirely unaided by any organization. Indeed, on one or two occasions my father, well-motivated, tried to persuade me to join the Scouts and the “Indian Guides” (a Scout-like organization), but I always resisted.  I disliked the uniforms, I disliked the meetings, and I preferred the company of my friends.  Was I petulant?  Maybe.  I nevertheless turned out well enough.

My point is that I have always been slightly suspicious of the Boy Scouts and other, similar organizations.  I could not have articulated my reasons when I was a child, or even when I was a teenager.  I can articulate them now.  Scouting, whatever its founding premises, is now and has been for a long time a large, doctrinaire organization.  In an age of totalitarian conformism such as the one in which we live, the capture of the Boy Scouts was inevitable and it was made more so by the fact that the Boy Scouts is a national organization with a bureaucracy that mimics every other bureaucracy.

An attractive alternative to Scouting has always existed: The self-organization by boys of their own activities.  Such self-organization should be discreetly overseen by adults, and especially by adult males, but it should remain as free as possible.  A correspondent of mine who also contributes now and then to The Thinking Housewife reminded me recently that sandlot baseball was a vital institution as late as the 1970s, having since been replaced by the tedium of organized youth-leagues.  If you were to object that self-organizing activities that are as free as possible are now regularly harassed and curtailed by bureaucratic probosci, I could only agree with you.  But it is much easier for the probosci to harass an organization that is large and in place than it is for them to harass spontaneous activity.  (For the same rason, police forces more easily control organized crime than they do flash-mobs.)  I say that the spontaneous activity – and let us also qualify it as creative, constructive, and character-building – is better than the rigorously organized activity.  Reasonable people may differ.

—- Comments —-

Laura writes:

The spontaneous, unorganized activity Mr. Bertonneau loved as a boy and teenager required things that are relatively scarce today. For one, it required other boys who were also not in organized activity. Secondly, it required the presence of at least some adults at home and present in the background. Finally, it required boys who enjoyed playing outside and weren’t hooked on electronic games.

Mary writes:

Lovely reflections from Thomas Bertonneau. My siblings and I were self-organizing, too, and I could and would happily write pages of happy memories if I thought it would be interesting to anyone but me. We know we grew up in the heyday of the truly free childhood and often lament its demise.

He wrote: “An attractive alternative to Scouting has always existed: The self-organization by boys of their own activities. Such self-organization should be discreetly overseen by adults, and especially by adult males, but it should remain as free as possible…”

Without realizing it he is describing scouting itself; the Boy Scouts are structured around self-organization. It is one of their stated goals to be “boy-led” and when followed properly they are just that (not to be confused with Cub Scouting, which is mostly, unfortunately, den mother-led). The leaders stand back and watch as the older scouts run the meetings all on their own; organize, lead and instruct the younger boys; plan the camp-outs; set up camp; plan the menus, start their own fires, cook their own meals, clean up; run presentations, perform their own entertainment; learn survival skills, do tons of public speaking; etc etc. etc. The boys rise in rank and earn more responsibility as they go. It is a quasi-military set-up, thoroughly masculine, wholesome, and is great preparation for life. The leaders mentor the boys and make sure they don’t set each other on fire. Many boys quit scouting when cars and girls enter the picture. But many more boys absolutely thrive in scouts. It’s actually very beautiful to witness. Not to get sappy or anything. Is it perfect? Of course not.

I guess with the latest developments questioning the necessity of groups like the Boy Scouts is valid. The Chronicles blog did a bit on this topic as well. But my observation is that the men who don’t think much of the scouts either had a bad experience or had the great good fortune to grow up with fathers who hunt, fish, camp, etc. and who could pass this down to their son(s). I’m not sure about this, but I wonder if scouting wasn’t from the beginning meant to be an organization for boys who didn’t have such an advantage: boys who had no father in the home, or whose father worked constantly out of need; or whose father was a retiring intellectual who read in his study and never set foot outdoors; or was an alcoholic; a boy who had no brothers or worthy friends in his neighborhood; who through circumstance had no access to wholesome pastimes. For these boys these latest developments are a travesty.

Nicholas writes:

I quite liked this piece. I was also self-organizing. When I looked back on my childhood until recently, I always thought of myself as never being able to stick with anything. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true. It’s not even so much that I disliked outdoor activities. I didn’t. Most Saturday nights were spent playing with the other boys in my neighborhood and getting into (fairly innocent) trouble. I enjoyed tromping around the woods, but didn’t care for uniforms or authority figures very much at any point in my life. In the absence of other boys to play with, I spent a lot of my time reading books. Almanacs and books filled with unusual history were favorites of mine. One summer I ran a fantasy baseball league all on my own.

I tried the Scouts briefly. For one, I was turned off by the constant references to “God,” but I also never really clicked with the other boys in my troop the way that I did the boys in my neighborhood. We spent all our time crafting (something that I never had any skill at — even cut and paste efforts look like a disaster when I do them) rather than doing exciting outdoor things.

In any event, this just got me thinking about my noncomformist childhood and how I’ve come to embrace it rather than feel like I missed out. I didn’t.

Mary writes:

In light of circumstances it makes me kind of sad to stand up for scouting but here goes: crafting is done in the Cub Scouts, which is run mostly by the mothers and in my opinion is not necessary for success in the Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts do lots of things but the cut-and-paste crafts that Nicholas mentions are not on the list. They do wear uniforms, for about 90 minutes a week. Scouting is not an everyday-including-Sundays activity like sports can be. It is generally one meeting a week and one non-mandatory camp-out a month; summers are off unless the boy chooses to do a week-long camp of some kind. All of this is to say that scouting does not eat up all of a boy’s free time and family time; it does not preclude a boy from pursuing any number of other pastimes, including reading and daydreaming and tromping around in the woods.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

Nicholas writes: “In the absence of other boys to play with, I spent a lot of my time reading books. Almanacs and books filled with unusual history were favorites of mine.”

The remark by Nicholas reminds me of a particularly formative self-organizing activity of my mid- and late-teenage years.  When I began to attend Santa Monica High School, I took advantage of “being in town” (Point Dume, where I lived, was remote, rural, and without cultural amenities) to frequent the half-dozen second-hand bookshops in walking distance of the campus.  I often pursued this activity after school and made use of the late-leaving school bus to get home; and I often did it in company with one or the other of the Cunningham brothers.  We were chiefly interested in science fiction paperbacks and back-issues of science fiction magazines, but the simple fact of being in a bookstore brought us into contact with other, more serious forms of literature.  A bit later on, the three brothers and I would sometimes organize Saturday trips from the Cunningham Music Studio on Sixth Street in Santa Monica to Hollywood, where there were twenty second-hand bookstores and a large retail bookstore that offered foreign paperbacks of authors like H. P. Lovecraft, who were difficult to find in affordable editions at the time.

This activity was literate – it was also distinctly urban, in strong contrast to our hiking expeditions into the mountains above Zuma Beach or our inveterate model-building (chiefly of WWII fighter- and bomber-airplanes).  We learned a good deal about the civic geography of West Los Angeles and Hollywood on those book-buying expeditions.

Concerning the Santa-Monica book-buying expeditions – by the time I was a senior, I often skipped the last two periods to “do” the book stores.  One of the frontiers of the campus was the Santa Monica Freeway, which one crossed by using a pedestrian bridge whose near end was actually on campus.  It was a known route for truants.  The vice principal and the dean of boys sometimes stationed themselves there to catch delinquents red-handed.  One day, after a ninety-minute excursion to our usual destinations, one of the Cunningham brothers and I were returning to campus with our loot.  At the campus-end of the pedestrian-bridge, with his arms crossed over chest and looking exemplarily martinet-like, we saw standing the dean of boys.  We approached him looking abashed and he spoke to us sternly, asking what was more important than attending class.  We opened our brown paper bags full of books.  He examined them for a moment in stony silence and then burst out in a loud, uncontrolled laugh, telling us in so many words to go back to school and sin no more.

Paul writes:

I think scouting was a great organization for some boys. The problem I had with the Cub Scouts was the same problem I had with most organized sports, insufficient vigorous physical activity: too much standing around at practice. I loved learning how to march with my toy rifle on a real Army barracks, which I lived across the street from, but the other activities were not physical enough for me, so I gave it up.

I wanted to learn many of the things scouts learned, but the learning and the physicality were just too slow for me. It was a worthy organization, but it was lame. I was advanced. That is not meant to brag but to propose that scouting is a great tool for the average boy and the boy of below average physical and social abilities. It is like a fraternity, which is a place where boys can socialize without being a natural socializer, someone able to attract friends on their own.

I’ll bet scouting has molded many boys into adults that have surpassed me in many different ways. I never looked down on scouting. I admired them for their knowledge, patience, and discipline. The Boy Scouts have turned away from Christianity and accepted homosexuality. I hope someone starts a new organization devoted to scouting.

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