MY DAD THE SCOUT MASTER

My dad took over as scout master after no other fathers volunteered for the job.  The previous scout master had to resign due to the closure of the Sears store in Willows, where he worked and was offered a transfer to a store in another town.   My dad had never been a Boy Scout and received very little training, if any that I remember.    He was given a brief case with Boy Scout manuals, badges and keys to the Boy Scout Hall in town.  Meetings were held once a month during the school year.  The Boy Scout Hall was an old one room building with some benches, a table or two, some camping equipment and a foot locker containing boxing gloves.    My dad enjoyed boxing and watching the Friday Night fights on TV back in the 1950's.    He was known for getting in a fight or two himself  in some of the local taverns.   Except for planning the next camping trip, he usually never had a formal agenda for the monthly meetings, so he would have us put on the boxing gloves and proceed to spend the evening beating each other up.   

There is only two camping trips I remember.   One was up in the hills west of Willows at a country park next to Stony Gorge Reservoir.   The only high point of that trip I remember was crossing Stony Creek, where we all had to hang on to each others arms as we made our way across the swift current in knee deep water.   We may have been returning from the store in the small nearby community of Elk Creek.  The second camping trip was for a weekend on a ranch, I think was in the foothills of the Sierra's.  Some of the other fathers came along.   This ranch may have belong to one of them or was leased, not sure.    What I do remember, is one night the men got to playing cards and drinking whiskey in the ranch house as us Boy Scouts were out climbing around the hills with no supervision most of the night.   I remember climbing up a cliff as rocks from above were roiling down on us.   It is probably a miracle we all survived that trip.    

For a week one summer some of us went to Boy Scout Camp at Camp Lassen, near Butte Meadows.   This camp was operated by a well trained staff with an agenda, including swimming, canoeing, hiking, camp cooking lessons, earning merit badges and learning how to survive in the woods.   We slept in huts, ate in a formal dinning hall and were supervised from sun up to sun set.    There was no chaos in this camp.   By June of 1959 most of us were leaving grammar school and our days in the Boy Scouts came to an end.