From todays Writers Almanac by Garrison Keillor It was on this day in 1910 that the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated as a youth organization in the United States. The idea for the Boy Scouts came from a British Army Officer named Robert Baden-Powell who returned from a war in South Africa to find that the young people in his country had grown soft and undisciplined in his absence. He said, [Young people today are] without individuality or strength of character, utterly without resourcefulness, initiative or guts for adventure. He created the Boy Scouts as an organization and wrote a book called Scouting for Boys that became the Boy Scout manual. An American man named William Boyce was visiting London, England, when he got lost in a heavy fog. A young Boy Scout offered to help him, and the experience inspired him to bring Boy Scouting to America. The Boy Scout program had been popular in England, but it became a sensation in the United States after it was incorporated here. Within four years, there were more than 100,000 American Boy Scouts, and by the outbreak of World War II, there were more than a million. Among the many Americans who joined the Boy Scouts were Gerald Ford, Neil Armstrong, Alfred Kinsey, John F. Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Moore. The Boy Scout Handbook says, A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Feb 2014 17:40:51 +0000
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