Boy Scout Bankruptcy
Back in 1962 I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. At that time it was all about ice fishing, ice boat sailing and other middle-American pastimes. For vacations we would go north up to the Wisconsin Dells (sort of version of Lake George or Franconia Notch with lots of kid amusement areas) or even further north to Lake Superior for a cold, refreshing dip in the icy waters of the greatest of the Great Lakes. All this cold weather activity was pretty new to a kid who had spent six years in the tropics, most recently in a little out-of-the-way valley in Costa Rica where the biggest problems were getting ice cream to not melt and keeping the flies off the baked goods. So when summer was ready to roll around, like most American kids living in suburbia in those days of Sputnik-chasing and Cuba-watching, I had dreams of summer camp.
Now my mother was in graduate school (at the age of 45 no less) and working off a $3,000 per year fellowship. Believe it or not, that was enough to live on for a family of four if you stuck to Swanson TV dinners, drove an old 1956 Oldsmobile (white and teal with roll-up windows and no seat belts in sight). The TV was old, scratchy and rabbit-eared, but there were no cable charges and the internet was so far from our minds that even Buck Rogers and Dick Tracey couldn’t have imagined being so wired as we are today. If you needed to do research, rather than Google and Siri, we used the green and white (I had forgotten how much Americans seemed to like the green and white color combination) World Book Encyclopedia. A real exciting Saturday evening for me back then was watching Have Gun Will Travel, taking my weekly bath, and taking a random letter (like N from the World Book array) to my upper bunk bed (Mom got the lower bunk) and reading myself to sleep.
That all has little to do with summer camp except it sets the stage for how tight we were on money. As it turns out, the YMCA had a summer camp on the western shore of Lake Mendota, a mere 20 minutes from the cookie cutter development in which we rented a house ($100/month for two bedrooms and one bath and an unfinished basement). My dream was to go to summer camp and to become a Boy Scout by learning all there was to learn about the manly arts of camping and canoeing. Unfortunately, my mother very pragmatically explained that there was no money for summer camp so I had better find some revenue source to make that happen if I wanted to go.
The YMCA was way out ahead of the Girl Scouts in our part of town and they developed a program of selling chocolate mints in exchange for discounts on summer camp. It was either that the margins on mints was really good in those days or the marginal cost of summer day-camp was so minimal, that they made a big push on the chocolate mint program. I suspect that some eager young whippersnapper decided that it was hard to sell chocolate mints, so it only took about 100 boxes to qualify for a week of summer camp. I’m sure they figured that kids would buy, say, three weeks of camp and sell their way into another week of camp and that overall camp/mint profit margin would work quite nicely.
Well, they didn’t see me coming. I sold almost 1,000 boxes of mints by dedicating myself to the task and hustling into neighborhoods where there were fewer kids and more older folks who like to encourage young entrepreneurs in ragamuffin clothes (every stitch of clothing I had was strictly Goodwill material). I so overwhelmed the YMCA summer camp system that they granted me the full eight weeks, which was maxing out their summer schedule. I had earned my first summer vacation all with shoe leather and Eddie Haskell sweet-talking. An eight-year-old is just old enough to understand commerce and just young enough to look innocent. It was a mint-selling sweet spot. I may have even picked up a few nickels by short-changing some unaware old ladies while I was at it and drinking them dry of lemonade to boot. Stories of life in the tropics and a few words of Spanish always went a long way. If not for my blonde hair, I might have been mistaken for an illegal immigrant.
So off to YMCA camp I went on the yellow school bus that went rolling-rolling-on every morning and afternoon. There was no choosing activities, the Y knew best how to mold young minds and bodies so we went down a regimented path of arts & crafts, softball, tetherball, lake swimming, canoeing and camping preparation. This was a day-camp so there was no overnighting, which for some reason had a great romantic appeal to me. In fact, they had a program for a four-day canoe trip that did involve sleeping out in a tent with YMCA-issued sleeping bags and everything. This was the program for me, and whatever extra time I had I spent helping out at the prep campsite, endearing myself with my winning mint-salesman personality. As we approached D-Day for departure, we were given parental approval forms to fill-out and get signed. On it was the statement in bold letters that you had to be 10-years old to go. The look of shock and disappointment was too hard to hide (I would fix that lack of a poker face years later on Wall Street). I was undone. I pleaded my case to no avail. They were sorry, but they explained that the good news was that in two years I would be able to go. By my math, that was 2,000 boxes of mints away and hardly worth thinking about. I tried cajoling the counselor, telling him that if I looked ten, why would anyone have to know (I actually looked more like 12 when I was 8)? The YMCA was much too straight-laced to succumb to my tricks. My summer was a bust.
In the Fall I tried a different tack and tried to join the Boy Scouts. I was told I would have to start as a Cub Scout and then graduate to the Boy Scouts. I liked the blue uniform and the yellow neckerchief, so I was in. Two sessions in some kid’s basement having his mother show us how to make gymp keychains was all it took. I quit the Cub Scouts and just wore the cool uniform shirt around like I was a member.
Today I read that the Boy Scouts have declared bankruptcy. Specifically Chapter 11 (very shrewd) to avoid all the lawsuits over sexual harassment. I knew I had dodged a bullet in switching from Catholicism to Presbyterianism, but who knew that I also dodged a bullet by learning to weave gymp? What has become of our world when the Boy Scouts are running away to hide from their predatory failings. The whole damn world is heading for Bankruptcy, I say.