Margo and I moved to Huntsville as a newly married couple April, 1978. I was engaged as a general contractor building a skateboard park about which I have written before. My first summer in Huntsville was involved with moving hundreds of truckloads of dirt and rock, building an access road across what had been a muddy vacant meadow, and sculpting the ground into the giant forms of bowls and undulating surfaces of the park. It was the kind of work that attracted visitors and onlookers.
One day a gentleman named Mike showed up and introduced himself as a local executive with the Boy Scouts of America. He was excited about the construction of this very comprehensive youth facility and wanted to brainstorm ideas for cooperative efforts involving the park and the Boy Scouts. Naturally, I shared with him my very fond memories of Troop 72 in Schenectady, New York, I also shared my experiences as a scout administrator on the Gulf Coast during the previous few years. Then he surprised me by asking if I'd be interested in becoming a volunteer leader in Huntsville. I responded that I'd have to talk to Margo, as anything I might get involved in would have to be a joint effort.
When I presented the idea to Margo, she eagerly got on board. Margo had a cousin, Missy Reed, who had been a recognized Girl Scout leader for many years. Every year, she would bring a busload of New Orleans Girl Scouts to the Mississippi Gulf Coast where they would all camp out at Margo's house. Girls slept on the floors of every room, having overflowed the available beds and couches. They would spend these weekends exploring the many attractions of the Mississippi Gulf area, eating S'mores, singing around a campfire, and generally having a blast. Margo had always enjoyed supporting this great organization. She was ready to be a Boy Scout volunteer.
Our first assignment, after we acquired the necessary uniforms and acccessories, was to try to revive an ailing scout troop at a Baptist church in Northeast Huntsville. Membership had been dwindling and there had been significant turnover in the adult leadership of the troop. I described to Margo how Bill Clancy and I had spread the Boy Scout movement in south Mississippi. When we would visit a rural, predominantly black community for the first time, we'd find the pastor of the local Baptist church. If we could sell him on the idea of a Boy Scout troop in his community, we were home free. I suggested we start with the Pastor of this church whose troop we wanted to resuscitate. We discovered that therein lay our challenge. The Pastor was only reluctantly supportive of the Boy Scout presence, expressing his concern that it competed with the church's other youth-oriented activities.
Margo and I did what we could to assist this troop, recruiting more parental involvement and support, introducing more formality in the conduct of meetings, expanding the variety of activities in the troop, and increasing the frequency of outings -- hikes, camp-outs, canoe trip, and the like. Unfortunately, the troop never grew by much during our tenure. It was a constant struggle to keep parents actively participating in troop activities. We finally suggested to the local executive that maybe we weren't the right couple to revive this troop. We had nursed it back to health -- it was now a properly-functioning scout troop, but it was going to require constant care and feeding in order for it to thrive. I don't know today whether or not the troop still exists.
The executive suggested that we might want to start an Explorer Post at our home church, Holy Spirit, on Airport Road in Huntsville. That really appealed to us. The church already sponsored a Boy Scout troop. An Explorer Post would be a natural expansion of that program for older kids. Mike, the scout executive, suggested a "High Adventure" Post, a term that was used for Explorer Posts that might undertake any sort of adventure and not be restricted to one area or another. We got buy-in from the Pastor, Father O'Leary, and held some organizational meetings. In no time, we had plenty of eager volunteer parents and energetic teen age members.
This was a co-ed organization (an idea that took me a while to get used to) so these outings were appealing to the members as social opportunities. That certainly helped our member involvement. One night, the city-wide scouting organization held an event called "Huntsville After Dark." This was an all-night event involving lots of people. We took carloads of kids on a carefully-scheduled round robin tour that involved visits with briefings at the city jail (including the drunk tank), a courtroom, an all-night radio station, a funeral parlor, the central fire station and its dispatch center, the emergency room at Huntsville Hospital, and a HEMSI location. It was an exhausting night but very educational.
Perhaps the most innovative outing we did was to take the entire post to a soaring airport in Eagleville, Tennessee, where every individual got to go aloft in a sailplane with an instructor pilot and spend about twenty minutes soaring. This was an active, innovative group.
Gradually, over a period of a couple years, our parental participation lessened. The youthful members were just as eager to try new adventures, but it became harder and harder to find the necessary volunteer drivers and chaperones. Margo and I got to the point where, regrettably, we felt like unpaid baby sitters. In about 1981, we had to move to Flintville, TN, to be closer to Margo's work in Tullahoma, so we ended our voluntary work with the Explorer Post. At some point later on, the organization folded. We learned many lessons from our experience, perhaps the most important of which is the absolute necessity of parental engagement for a youth organization to thrive.
The good news is that the Boy Scout Troop at Holy Spirit Church, Troop 361, is still a thriving, energetic, active organization.
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