The Collections merit badge requires a Scout to show their collection. Some Scouts left their collections at home. So they had their family either: e-mail them a picture to their cell phone, e-mail a picture to Craig or even fax a picture in. Its a new era of interconnectedness. Although, more than one person commented that they did not see the kids ‘two-thumbing it’ almost at all. They were too busy doing things to be spending time texting. What does that say about school and after school where the kids are sending 100s of texts a day?

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Jef Heckinger, an avid collector out of Rockford, Illinois, was again in charge of the ISCA booth for the Jamboree. This time it was co-located with the Collections Merit Badge. We nicknamed Jef “General Mayhem” as the crowds at the booth were massive (and a frustration to other booth areas that weren’t as popular as ISCA’s).

That is Jef in the center of the sea of scouts overflowing the merit badge booth.

I was nicknamed “Corporal Punishment” for how hard I was working the team when I was in charge (we doubled the number of merit badges earned for all days prior to that point).

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Collector Doug Schwab came by the booth. He is a Board member, and was a VIP guest, from Potomac Council. He showed me the patch they got at the VIP visitor’s center. Each council could designate something like three VIP guests to the Jamboree. At 300 councils that would be about 1,000 patches plus whatever else was passed out. Later in the day I was at the Eagle Lodge TOR and a Scouter who was wearing the patch said he was also able to get one for his wife and daughter. This is a nice, but not rare, patch. I’m seeing ridiculous prices on eBay now for this item. Be patient. It will be found more cheaply later, IMHO.

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When the Jamboree is in session, it is the 9th largest city in Virginia. I wonder where it fits in when all of the visitors are added in? Probably for West Virginia we’ll be the second largest city.

Ron Boller pointed out that Hostess Snowballs were first distributed at the 1964 jamboree. (Ron’s full of trivia – ask him which Presidents from FDR forward were not presented the Silver Buffalo.)

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Collections will easily go down as the most popular merit badge of the jamboree. Over 1,000 Scouts will have earned this merit badges at the jamboree. That means about 1 out of every 32 Scouts at the jamboree earned the badge or about 3% of all of the Scouts (and some Scouts have already earned it). Needless to say all of the staff were overwhelmingly busy pulling double shifts and gave up our days off. Good going to ISCA and Craig Leighty.

Craig Leighty and Paul Ogeron helping Scouts finish Collections merit badge

Scouts working on Collections

And more Scouts working on Collections merit badge

And even more Scouts working on Collections (all of these photos were shot at the same time just different parts of our booth.)

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