Remember when there was a real Boy Scout Week?

[RememberSchiff]

Boy Scout Week in February. Celebrated the birth of Scouting within our local communities.

- Placed on the program calendar and permission sought with store owners for window displays, write an article for local paper complete with photos. Publicity, publicity, publicity! Nope, not even a check-off on the lastest Most Excellent Unit Six Sigma Universal Annual Quality Award or whatever it is called.

- Saturday the day before official start, set up window displays around town. Nope

- Started on Sunday, Scout Sunday.  Nope, nope. That's SuperBowl Sunday, nothing more Holy than Football and that's the Holiest Day of Football.

- Wear scout uniform to school. Even Catholic schools would allow us!  Nope, nope

- Saturday, remove window displays and do some town clean-up service projects.

 

The only remnant I see around here is adults arguing whether Scout Sunday, excuse me Scout Sabbath is on the weekend before Super-Bowl Sunday or the weekend after.

 

Maybe the new tradition will be National asking scouts to wear their uniform while watching the Super-Bowl on Sunday?

 

What if the Ground Hog came out of hole and saw Boy Scouts in the woods?

 

My $0.02

 

 

[scoutldr]

Not window displays, but we used to have displays/demonstrations in the mall. We would attend church as a unit, sitting in the front pew wearing uniforms. We would wear our uniforms to school on meeting days. Scout Sabbath is the Jewish version of Scout Sunday, as I recall. Does anyone still do an annual Scout O Rama, where you would sell tickets to the public for a buck to come see you demonstrate scout skills? It was an annual Council event.

[Eagle94-A1]

In my council,we do Scouting for Food. Saturday before  the official Scouting week, we put out flyers. Scout Sabbath is spent collecting the food, and bringing it to local food pantries.  We made the switch for two reasons way back when. 1) To do a service project during Scout Week and 2) we found the food pantries in our area needed the food most in February.  Lots of groups do food collecting in the Nov-Dec time frame for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And sometimes they have a bit of food left over for January. But come February, they are very low on supplies.

 

My troop does put up a window display at a local buisness and does Scout Sunday. Part of that is tradition. Part of that is it is part of the point system used in our council camporee.

[NJCubScouter]

I remember some of that. I do not recall store window displays. I do recall wearing my uniform to school, at least as a Cub Scout (which would have been mid/late 60's). As for Scoutldr's post, we had no displays in the mall, because there was no mall until slightly after I aged out as a Boy Scout. I do remember a Scout-O-Rama (or Scout-O-Ree or whatever) for which we sold tickets, it was held at Newark Airport. I'm pretty sre I have a neckerchief slide from that one in my "Scouting box." I don't recall either the pack or troop ever doing anything with Scout Sunday or Scout Sabbath (the troop was probably about 40% Jewish), it may have had something to do with the fact that our CO was a public school (back in the days when you could do that.)

 

Our troop now does Scout Sunday at the church that is our CO. But otherwise there is no recognition of "Scout Week."

[RememberSchiff]

We had 4 boy scout troops and 3 Cub Packs in town. Each had a store window display during scout week. Our troop usually had either the Florist shop window or the pharmacy but definitely not the prime 4 corners 5&10 store. Catholics!

 

All displayed their unit flags and neckers. Cub Packs displayed Pinewood Derby cars and den projects. Troops displayed scout craft (lashing projects were common), camping photos, merit badge books, and some merit badge projects (my Electronics Flip-Flop breadboard). 

 

We were permitted to paint (Tempera?) the inside of store windows. If the owner permitted, we added lights for campfire effects or Morse code signaling. Took some planning as we wanted to upstage the bigger troops in town, particularly the Catholic troop. Righteous battle.

 

Only Christmas rivaled Scout Week's window decorations. Community Scouting what a concept.

[TAHAWK]

Uniforms at school (late 1950's).

 

Rally in college stadium on Scout Saturday.  (Which troops would fail to get "Patrol" ribbon?)

 

John Birch Society picketing Scout HQ (racial integration; trick r' treat for UNICEF; World Brotherhood Merit Badge)

[qwazse]

....

 

All displayed their unit flags and neckers. Cub Packs displayed Pinewood Derby cars and den projects. Troops displayed scout craft (lashing projects were common), camping photos, merit badge books, and some merit badge projects (my Electronics Flip-Flop breadboard). 

....

 

I remember setting up our klondike sleds in the bank display window. So much fun playing "mannequin" when you saw your friends walk by ...

Edited February 4, 2016 by qwazse

[CalicoPenn]

Late-60's to late 70's

 

Every unit did a window display at the town shopping center - 5 packs, 4 troops, 6 girl scout units (yeah - they participated in Scout Week too).  Sometimes, packs, troops and girl scout units (troops?) would share a window if they were from the same chartered organization.  The local department store also had a Scout Uniform shop so they would do up their window displays with Scout uniforms - they had found a uniform collector somehow and would set their windows up as a "History of Scouting Uniforms" with the latest and greatest displayed last. (One year, some prankster (and yes, inside job) reset the Girl Scout and Boy Scout manikins (which came from the "teen shop") in the middle of the week as sharing a hot embrace and kiss - took two days before anyone complained). 

 

Packs promoted Scout Sunday but unless they were sponsored by a church, didn't attend together - I don't think any of the local church's congregations wouldn't have appreciated our Pack attending as one group - we fluctuated between 80 and 120 boys, add parents and siblings and you've got a few hundred people to deal with.  The Troop was sponsored by a church men's group so we went to church as a unit - if parents came, they sat elsewhere.  The church is non-denominational and the pastor was well acquainted with the diversity of religions in the unit so he would always plan that weeks services accordingly (he would leave out hymns and prayers that referred to Jesus and stick with those that mentioned God in deference to our Jewish Scouts, for instance - and they did attend).  The sponsored Troop (and Explorer Post) would take the first 4-5 rows of pews on the right hand side (those that regularly sat there were always glad to give them up that day).  We didn't always use all of the spaces but any Cub Scout or non-unit member in Scout Uniform was welcomed to join us too.  The sponsored Girl Scout units would take the first 4-5 rows of pews on the left had side.  The pastor really made a big deal out of the day.

 

The "District" Pinewood Derby would be held the following Saturday in the "indoor mall" portion of the shopping center (one of the strip-mall owners came up with the idea to connect the bank (a separate building), the department store (a separate building) and the by building an indoor pedestrian courtyard that also took up 6 of the strip center's shops and call it a mall to take advantage of the mall craze).  The "District" Pinewood Derby started out as a get together of the 5 in town packs to race against each other on each other's tracks (3 of the 5 packs had their own - the other 2 borrowed).  It wasn't unusual for the towns 5 packs to get together on competitions - we had a Cub Scout Olympics as well.  The pinewood derby morphed in to a real District Pinewood Derby when one of the DE's decided it wasn't right for just part of the district to have a big event like that - he tried to get us to open the cub olympics to the other town too but it overwheimed the organizers so it just fell by the wayside.

 

It was also kick-off to Scout-O-Rama sales - and we sold a lot - always a highlight of everyone's year.  The last Scout Show was in 1988.