Experience was humbling

Every time, I am humbled.
Every time I attend an Eagle Scout ceremony, I’m reminded of my own scouting experience and that indisputable fact that — for whatever reason — I didn’t measure up.
As a Cub Scout, I had a ball. My mom was the den mother, and the other Cubs were buddies of mine from Judge Haynes Elementary School, guys like young Frank Kenyon, Don Starr, Neil Frank, and the unforgettable Al Conkling.
We learned what we were supposed to learn from the scout handbook. We made plaster of Paris castings of the different ranks — wolf, bear, and so on — so we could take them home and hang them on our walls.
For one ambitious project, we built crystal radios, working at a round table on the enclosed back porch of my house. We were able to get a signal, but we soon found that the best we could do was the voice of Glen West coming from WPGW. The 50,000-watt voice of WOWO was beyond our capabilities.
When it came time to move on to Boy Scouts, we tended to go to the troop related to the church we attended. So the Methodists in our Cub group were more likely to end up in Troop 202 at what is now Asbury United Methodist Church, back when it was First Methodist. And the kids from Presbyterian families went to Troop 201 at First Presbyterian.
(I hope I haven’t reversed those designations. Troops these days move from church to church so much you almost need a scorecard to keep track.)
Like every other boy, I entered as a Tenderfoot.
I still held that lowly rank when we had our first “camporee.” It was at Frank Merry Park, west of Dunkirk, and our troop lacked the requisite pup tents. Because Wendell Williamson of the family connected to Williamson and Spencer Funeral Home was the troop’s scout leader, we went to the “camporee” and bivouacked in a tent usually used to provide protection from the weather at a gravesite.
It was after the “camporee” that I rose to the rank of Second Class scout, which technically was an improvement over Tenderfoot but sure didn’t sound like one.
The next step was First Class. After that, I read in my scout handbook, a whole string of merit badges lay ahead if I turned out to be diligent.
Alas, I was not diligent.
I hovered in Second Class, stuck by some sort of personal inertia. The key to becoming First Class was, as I recall, learning Morse code. That was, apparently, so that we could tap messages on our cell walls after being taken as prisoners of war.
But no matter how hard I tried (and I confess that I didn’t try as hard as I should have), I couldn’t make it stick. Sure, I could recognize SOS. But discerning dots and dashes may as well have been mastering the many cases of nouns in Hungarian. I could not do it.
The high point of my Second Class scouting experience came on another camp-out, this one at the scout cabin at the Jay County Fairgrounds. There was little to no adult supervision as I recall. My great accomplishment on that occasion was smoking my first cigarette.
There is no merit badge for that.
So now, when I go to Eagle Scout ceremonies and marvel at the maturity and perseverance and tenacity of the kids who earn that honor, I am humbled. I am simply blown away.
It may be that the people who best understand what that accomplishment means are those of us who didn’t measure up.[[In-content Ad]]