Good Turn

For big names, at least, the Boy Scouts of America deserve some sort of merit badge. Among the 32 million alumni are Cabinet Members Orville Freeman and Stewart Udall, Actors James Stewart and Henry Fonda. Vice President Hubert Humphrey and U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg rose from tenderfoot; so did the latest Gemini spacemen, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland are old Eagle Scouts, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk was once knot-tying champion of the Atlanta Council.

Its formidable roll call notwithstanding, Scouting today suffers from an ill image. The very name--Boy Scout--is practically a synonym for sissy, goody-goody, square. "Be Prepared" has degenerated to a Tom Lehrer double-entendre; the descendants of Lord Baden-Powell are dimly imagined by contemporary cynics to be a rustic army of bug-eyed idealists. Scripture that commanded pious respect when the Boy Scouts were chartered by Congress 50 years ago now seems laughably quaint. "If you notice a Scout badge on a boy's coat lapel," the Boy Scout Handbook still bugles, "give him the Scout salute. He may need your help."

"Skills & Muscle." What needs help is Scouting itself. As the U.S. has urbanized, Scouting has continued to flourish in suburbs and middle-sized towns, and to languish in big-city slums where boys are often most troubled. One recent study showed that one out of three suburban boys belonged to the Scouts, compared with one out of seven boys in metropolitan poverty pockets. Not surprisingly, Scouting has been disproportionately white and middle class. According to another survey, 15% of all Scout-aged boys (8 to 17) came from families with less than $3,000 income; yet less than one out of ten of them were actually Boy Scouts.

While membership has grown 38% in the past ten years (latest total: 4.2 million), Scouting still reaches only 25% of all Scout-aged boys. More discouraging was a survey revealing that among adults, 59% of the nation's poor knew little of the Boy Scouts; often they had never even heard of the organization. Among Negroes, the percentage was 64%. "What we have to do," says National Council (and IBM) President Thomas J. Watson Jr., "is adjust without changing fundamental Scouting aims." To Pittsburgh-bred Joseph A. Brunton Jr., 63, chief Scout executive for six years, this means developing "skills and muscle" necessary for expanding into untapped neighborhoods.

Middle-Class Appeal. Some of that has already begun. In 1963 the national council sent a staff member to Miami to organize Scout groups among Cuban refugees. Today 1,044 young exiles are Boy Scouts. The national council last year dispatched 16 professional organizers, five of them Negroes, to organize new Scout groups in blighted big-city neighborhoods, as well as in three impoverished rural communities.

Generating interest among blase slum kids--and their parents--has not been easy. An organizer in Newark had to go door to door and hold 25 public meetings to find enough adults to volunteer as Scout workers. In Philadelphia, confronted by parental apathy, an organizer learned that neighborhood youths had been swiping tools off Bell Telephone trucks. He staked out the company garage, caught several of them in the act, and made them the nucleus of a new troop.

Another objective of Scouting's new look has been to broaden the base of Scout sponsorship, long confined largely to churches and civic groups. Because of national council initiatives, Scout groups run by public-housing authorities have increased since 1960 from 210 to 704, those sponsored by settlement houses from 250 to 380. There are now 39 Scout groups at federal Job Corps camps, 14 at New Jersey's Camp Kilmer alone. As a "middleclass institution," says Job Corps Official David Gottlieb, Scouting appeals to Job Corps boys who "want to make it."

Lazy Gents Post. In revamping their sluggish Explorer program for older youth (14 to 17), national leaders concluded in 1959 that high-schoolers were vitally interested in careers; the Scouts were soon coaxing business and industry into sponsoring "specialinterest" posts. Explorer membership has since increased 20% to 316,000, and nearly half of all posts have largely abandoned hiking and camping to concentrate instead on such businesslike specialties as engineering, banking and merchandising. Houston's Explorer Post 997 is sponsored by Esso Production Research Co., whose scientists are helping Charles Haskett, 16, construct a laser.

A three-year-old surfing post in Coronado, Calif., brings in oceanographers and water pollution experts to talk to its 100 members, is credited by local authorities with sharply reducing vandalism and litter on the beaches. Chicago's Law Enforcement Post 9004 consists of ten members of a gang called the Lazy Gents. All have police records, and their advisers are two police detectives. "They're a tough bunch," says Detective Arthur Leidecker, 25. "They won't follow any program." Even so, Leidecker and his partner have made favorable impressions. Since the post was formed last fall, six gang members have taken part-time jobs, and a few have expressed a budding interest in becoming policemen.

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