Happy to Find this Place

[QuartermasterJC]

Greetings, 

 

A little bit about myself…I joined the Boy Scouts in 1992, attended the National Jamboree at Fort AP Hill in 1997, and made the rank of Eagle Scout in 1999. I'm originally from New Jersey, where I participated in the scouts. I spent a decade living in New York City, then two in Texas while I attended Texas A&M University, followed by three years in Milwaukee, WI, but now I'm back in New Jersey.

 

A few years ago, I found myself conducting research at the National Boy Scout Archive in Irving, Texas. I'm a former journalist and went to the archive to examine the scout newspapers published at the first National Jamboree, which was held on the National Mall in Washington DC in 1937. After three days at the archive, I was stunned by the remarkable wealth of scouting material, documents, photographs, and all forms of marginalia that've been lost in the clutter of history.

 

I felt slightly disappointed that no virtual archive existed on the Internet for collecting and centralizing a hundred years of scouting heritage. Recently I started my own blog for the purpose of contributing to and expanding the Boy Scouts' virtual presence: www.quartermasterarchive.com

 

I joined Scouter because I wanted to find and converse with people who appreciate the heritage and history of the Boy Scouts. I'd like to invite you to visit quartermasterarchive.com. I'm sure the discussions here will provide the inspiration and insight that I've been looking for.

 

Thanks for having me.

 

James C.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

[SSScout]

Welcome to the virtual crackerbarrel!  (don't let anyone try and tell you this is a campfire.  Heat is bad for electronics).

 

I hope you will consider signing on as a MBCounselor for Journalism.  There are few of us left who actually remember what it meant to ACTUALLY Cut and Paste...

 

Light Table? Wax roller?  Letraset? Photosensitive?    

 

It's like mentioning cuneiform to some youngsters....

[Stosh]

Welcome to the forum.

 

It's really a campfire, the heat at times can be pretty intense.    The people here tend to be quite passionate about scouting!

[QuartermasterJC]

SSSscout, 

 

Unfortunately by the time I landed a paying job in journalism it had already gone online. Before that, however, I volunteered in the news room at a radio station that was still using reel-to-reels and quarter-inch magnetic tape. Lot's of cutting and splicing happened there.

[NJCubScouter]

Welcome to the forum QuartermasterJC!

 

I also am a former journalist - former as in my college newspaper and summer jobs in the mid-to-late 70's and a few years full-time in the early 80's, back when there were newspapers. And I remember all of the things SSScout mentions, though a bit vaguely at this point. It was the period while computerization was taking over, and the computerization that did exist would probably not be recognizable today. I remember this one machine in the production shop at my college newspaper that (I think) printed the headlines, if you wanted to change the spacing between the letters you had to fool around with these toggle switches that worked in binary (and I am not a computer guy), and with no monitor, you just gave it your best shot, with the knowledge that you were probably going to have to try it again. There were a couple of other machines there that stopped working if you looked at them wrong. I did not spend most of my time there, I was usually in the news office tapping away at a manual typewriter. By the time I was reporting for a living, I was working on a computer, or rather, a terminal connected to a computer that took up most of a wall. I suspect that all of that equipment - which was fairly new at the time - ended up in the scrap heap of history not too long after I moved on to another career.

Edited September 24, 2015 by NJCubScouter

[QuartermasterJC]

Welcome to the forum QuartermasterJC!

 

I also am a former journalist - former as in my college newspaper and summer jobs in the mid-to-late 70's and a few years full-time in the early 80's, back when there were newspapers. And I remember all of the things SSScout mentions, though a bit vaguely at this point. It was the period while computerization was taking over, and the computerization that did exist would probably not be recognizable today. I remember this one machine in the production shop at my college newspaper that (I think) printed the headlines, if you wanted to change the spacing between the letters you had to fool around with these toggle switches that worked in binary (and I am not a computer guy), and with no monitor, you just gave it your best shot, with the knowledge that you were probably going to have to try it again. There were a couple of other machines there that stopped working if you looked at them wrong. I did not spend most of my time there, I was usually in the news office tapping away at a manual typewriter. By the time I was reporting for a living, I was working on a computer, or rather, a terminal connected to a computer that took up most of a wall. I suspect that all of that equipment - which was fairly new at the time - ended up in the scrap heap of history not too long after I moved on to another career.

NJCubScouter, 

 

I took News Reporting 101 in the spring of 2001. Print media hadn't yet entered its death spiral but it was on the horizon. In 2004, I got my first paying reporting job and the newswire was entirely online by this time. No print at all. This company was a start-up, backed by British venture capital. It sold to to Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, for hundreds of millions of dollars. Pearson flipped it again several years later. I'm pretty sure I missed the Golden of Age of American journalism.  

[SSScout]

Linotype, justification,  centering,  pica, typeface,  base, river....