I enjoy researching and sharing Scouting history because I believe it helps us understand where we are going when we know where we have been. It also shows us that Scouting has always been evolving and change is not a bad thing, but a necessary thing to stay relevent in a changing world.
This is a story I don’t have to research because it is my Cub Scouting adventure. I am a second generation Cub Scout. I was only in Cub Scouting for about a year from 1966 to 1967 in Wheaton, MD during 3rd grade. If you are thinking “Bear”, you are wrong. At that time, Cub Scouting was aligned by age rather than grade and 8 year olds were Wolfs.
I remember standing on the stage where the pack met with a few other new Wolfs and a full audience of parents looking on. The Cubmaster made a very big deal about earning Wolf, praising all the work that went into it. It is that feeling of having done something important that stuck with me all these years. When my middle son joined Cub Scouts as a Tiger in the early 1990s and I became Cubmaster, I knew that rank advancement needed to be a “really big deal” because of that experience.
Then on to Bear and Lion I would go (or so I thought). That’s right, in the mid-1960s the cub Scout ranks were still the same as the original… Wolf, Bear, Lion… with the addition of Webelos, which was added in 1941. Webelos was just a half year program and, in the 1970s, became Arrow of Light.
Now, I mentioned I was a second generation Cub Scout. You see, my dad was born just 6 days before Cub Scouting was born. So, when he turned 9 in 1939, he joined Cub Scouts. The program was just 3 years then with only the 3 ranks… Wolf (9), Bear (10), and Lion (11). When my grandson was graduating Cub Scouting in 2022, Pack 170 allowed me to invite my dad to our Blue & Gold (via Zoom from Nashville) where he shared his memories of the very early days of Cub Scouts. His favorite story was of a baseball game with dads on one team and Cub Scouts on the other. His dad (my grandpa) tagged him out at second base. They didn’t get cut any slack. The dads won. Still, it was a lasting, core memory for my dad and that Blue & Gold became a core memory for me.
I invite you all to share some of your own core Scouting memories.
