I love it when these new websites that picture patches come up. I can pour over them for hours, I love to see stuff I’ve never had a chance to look at before.

Bill Lahman from Florida has been working on a great one for all the different era’s of Region insignia. Roy posted a link to it further down in the WebLog if you wanna take a look.

I never collected Region items really but I’ve always liked them and always payed pretty close attention to them over the years. I’ve been able to help Bill a little bit and it’s been a real pleasure to share what small knowledge I had with him.

This is one of those areas in our hobby that was red hot years ago but very few people really know much about today. Back in the 50’s 60’s and even early 70’s if you had all the Region patches you were a big time collector. A lot of them were restricted to professionals only so were super hard to get ahold of. The first photo page of the first book on collecting Scout badges (The Wabaningo Emblem Handbook) doesn’t picture the all powerful OA patches, it pictures region stuff. That’s how important it was to collectors back in those days.

In a collection Roy just bought there were three photographs from an early professional Scouters conference (probably 20’s vintage). In all three there were Region armbands visible of which I have never seen any!!! Apparently Bernie had a Region 2 one and somebody out in CA at least knows what the Region 12 one looked like but there was a Region 6 one that had never even been mentioned anywhere. Just goes to show you that what we know about vintage insignia isn’t all there is to know. This stuff is all out there guys, we just have to pay attention, do our digging, and root it out.