Scouter Blog

There is an age-old question that once again has been raised within the Scouting Memorabilia hobby. The question is whether a collector piece is more valuable as a whole, than as the sum of its parts.

Recently, several antique patch blankets have sold on the auction sites and discussion among collectors has been fierce. Some hold the position that a patch blanket represents the sum total of a person’s scouting experience and thus take exception to the very idea that someone would come along and purchase the blanket (or jacket, or uniform) with the sole intention of removing the patches and using them to fill holes in a collection and perhaps selling off the remainder.

Others suggest that the buyer has a right to do with his property as he wishes and can deconstruct the collection in anyway he sees fit. Others have likened deconstructing a patch blanket to removing a stash of old patches from a shoebox and placing them in your own collection.

I have an interest in vintage Scout Uniforms and find them all the time with one or two patches, or sometimes all of them removed. You can almost always see the holes left behind by the stitching where a patch was once proudly secured.

I don’t advocate that we should commit to leaving every piece of memorabilia intact, because I know full well the thrill of finding that one patch you need to fill a hole in a collection. And I’m not really talking about the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and even 90′s uniforms floating around – there are thousands of them. In fact, I tore one apart last night. But the patches were in the wrong place.

What I am referring to are the uniforms from the 1910′s, 20′s, 30′s and 40′s, of which, there are fewer and fewer around.

I am sometimes haunted by the guilt of knowing that I may have defrocked a proud scout’s prized possession, his uniform – the one he worked so hard in depression times to earn the few dollars he needed to purchase it, or the one that he so proudly opened on Christmas morning in 1934, because he was signed up to go to a National Jamboree in 1935 that never happened. Perhaps that very scout was lost at sea during WWII, and his mother held onto his Boy Scout Uniform as her fondest memory of her little boy.

Look, it’s one of the greatest thrills you can have as a collector to go through a box of uniform parts from the 30′s or 40′s (or earlier, if you’re Mitch Reis!) I’ve had that thrill a few times. It’s also a fact that the number of these pieces that exist is a finite number. It can never increase, but only diminish. At some point in history, the last old uniform will be gone.

All I ask is that you please think about the history of an old uniform before cutting it up. Yes, I know that those boys from long ago are dead and gone, but I can recite all the words to “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, which tells us that “Dragons live forever, but not so little boys.” The 12th Scout Law commands reverence, which I think not only includes reverence toward God, but also to considering and respecting those who walked this path before us.

Tags: boy scout, boy scout camp, bsa, collecting scout uniforms, mitch reis, patch blanket, patch collecting, scout patch, scout uniform, Scouting, scouting memorabilia

I confess, I’m as guilty as the next guy.

For years, I have been making fun of the immediate run up in pricing of Scouting memorabilia after (or sometimes during) events. I have tried to avoid the hype surrounding certain Jamboree Shoulder Patches (JSP’s), NOAC Flaps, Two-part patches, and other “Collector” issues. For the most part, I have avoided collecting these items because of the market volatility.

As recently as a month ago, I was laughing at a friend of mine, who is also a memorabilia dealer, when he told me he was going around to Scout Shops and buying up the remaining Continue Reading »

Tags: 2010 commemorative, boy scout, boy scout camp, bsa, csp, jamboree, jsp, noac, patch trading, rank patch, scout patch, Scouting

Why shouldn’t electronic publishing of a trading or collecting manual be a natural extension of the countless hours of  research you have put into your collecting manual or trading reference guide?

One of the concerns most people share is protecting Intellectual Property rights.

First, the most basic concern is preventing people who buy your book from copying it and sharing it with their friends. My initial response would be, “What prevents them from doing that now?” I have seen photocopies of pages or entire books of most every book in the hobby floating around at shows and Trade O Rees. Some of them ONLY exist in Continue Reading »

Tags: advancement program, boy scout, Boy Scout Advancement Program, boy scout camp, Boy Scout Handbook, boy scouts of america, bsa, csp, Eagle Scout, flaps, jsp, oa flaps, order of the arrow, scout patches, Scouting

The genre of Scouting fiction became wildly popular with American boys almost immediately after the birth of the BSA in 1910, and was one of the most profitable genres in publishing during the period 1910-1930.

Ernest Thompson Seton and Daniel Carter Beard, who were two of the founders of the BSA were avid writers, illustrators, adventurers, and naturalists. Both Seton and Beard had written Continue Reading »

Tags: boy scout, boy scouts of america, bsa, daniel beard, Daniel Carter Beard, Ernest Thompson Seton, franklin w dixon, hardy boys, herve willets, pee wee harris, percy keese fitzhugh, roy blakely, scout fiction, Scouting, westy martin

The Boy Scout Handbook 3rd Edition, 11th Printing, (1930)

In the early 1990′s, I was the newly minted camp director at Camp Rainey Mountain, BSA,, the Boy Scout Camp of the Northeast Georgia Council in Clayton, Georgia. During the third or fourth week of camp, I took a day off and drove up to Dillard, Georgia to meet some friends for lunch. The Dillard House is an institution around the north Georgia mountains, but that’s a different article.

On this particular day, after lunch, I didn’t feel much like going straight back to camp, so I stopped in at a little antique store in Mountain City, GA (halfway between Dillard and Clayton, and barely noticeable as you zoom by.) It was in that store, on that day, that my life changed paths forever.

On a dusty shelf, in the back corner of the store, I found a dusty old blue book with a cracked cardboard cover and a picture that I had seen many times hanging on the wall of our Scout Office. The picture on the cover was a Norman Rockwell illustration, showing a Boy Scout in silhouette with the faces of historical figures in the background.

Of course, by now, if you know anything about old Scouting memorabilia, you may  have guessed that the treasure I discovered that day was a third edition Boy Scout Handbook, this one was the 8th Printing from 1928 and it was the first one I had ever seen. I thought to myself, “Wow! A sixty year old Handbook. How cool is that?” I paid the shop owner the six dollars she wanted for the book and headed out to my car, satisfied that my “collection” was complete – who needed more of these?

I got back to camp that day and shared my discovery with our camp cook, a guy I had known for years and still keep in touch with today. He said, “Six dollars? You got ripped off. If you want to waste your money on Handbooks, fine. Now, let me show you something really collectible.” And with that, he pulled another dusty, cracked, broken-spine little book out of a box on his desk and said, “If you’re ever in some antique store and find some of these, buy ‘em and I’ll double your money.”

Well, that book turned out to be Archibald Lee Fletcher’s The Boy Scout Rivals.

I asked him to let me hold the book, and he screamed, “Too fragile. People COLLECT these, nobody HANDLES them, much less READS them!” And that was how I was introduced to the genre of Boy Scout Fiction. Thanks, Mark Keefer.

If you have read my previous blog articles, or if you have visited us over at Big Rock Publishing (www.bigrockpubs.com), or have been to one of our shows or historical displays, you already know that I am an avid Scout Book collector. I’ve been collecting these “little books” for almost 20 years now, and have bought, sold and traded thousands of them. Ironically, I have never sold any to Mark, who promised to “double my money!”

Over the next few articles, I want to share with you what we’re doing over at Big Rock Publishing, and about the Boy Scout Book Project, where we are releasing reproductions, reprints, and ebooks of the more than 350 titles in the Boy Scout Fiction genre. Look for www.boyscoutbookproject.com to be launched soon!

In the meantime, if you’re a fellow collector, or if you just have a question about Scout books, feel free to contact me by commenting here. And please add us to your RSS feeds, or join our site above.

Todd Kelly aka BigDawg243

Tags: Archibald Lee Fletcher, boy scout, boy scout camp, Boy Scout Fiction, Boy Scout Handbook, Boy Scout Rivals, bsa, clayton, dillard, Dillard House, GA, mark keefer, mountain city, Norman Rockwell, Northeast Georgia Council, the dillard house