We are heading into Thanksgiving. This came across from the Scouts from a girl Eagle Scout who was the  first-place winner in the Central Florida Council scholarship contest. Worth reading and sharing.

She said,

“Leaders have to make decisions, be problem solvers, face adversity, and follow their moral obligations – all principles of Scouting. … Teaching young girls and boys the values of responsibility, loyalty, leadership, and camaraderie at this age equips them for life in the reality we live in. In the ever-changing society that we are a part of, these characteristics are fundamental for children to possess and carry with them into adulthood.

“The Scout stands for pride, integrity, opportunity, strength, freedom, and the true meaning of being an American, as they embody the flag on the uniform. Scouting instills these values into young Americans who will grow up with respect for their country, only building upon it as they age. … Scouts are our future, and they are equipped with a skill set that gives me confidence and faith in the future of our country.”

Here’s a link to the full essay. Eagle Scout essay contest winner.

Destry was recently at a trade-o-ree here in Michigan held at Camp Gerber. There was a camporee also going on at the camp. He shared that a number of boy and girl Eagle Scouts came through. Destry’s a class of ’85 Eagle Scout. He got to chatting with them. This was the first time he had had chance to talk much with girl Eagle Scouts. He shared that all the Eagle Scouts were impressive but was particularly struck with how impressive the girls were. He noted that many were quite appreciative of the opportunity to be in Scouts/BSA and really enjoyed their trail to Eagle.

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The Silver Buffalo and Silver Antelope awards were the first outstanding service awards issued by the BSA. They were first issued in 1926 and pre-date the Silver Beaver by five years.

This is not much of a collected area because they so seldom surface. The medals have been more documented than the certificates. We do though have a couple of them and thought we would share. The oldest certificate we have is from 1976 for Milton Caniff (of “Terry and the Pirates” cartoon fame).

A more recent one we have is for President Ronald Reagan. Obviously the Honorary President did not sign this certificate as he was the Honorary President at the time.

At the 2020 Dallas Trade-o-ree I shot an interview with BSA graphic artist Michael Feigenbaum. In one of them, we talked about the work he did in re-designing the recognition certificates.

And no where near the same level of significance, here is an example of a modern Silver Antelope certificate.

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A Passing of Note: William A. Kern, M.D. F.A.C.S. 6/6/1933 – 5/24-2019 (published in ISCA’s journal March, 2020).

Scout collector Bill Kern passed in May 24, 2019 at age 85 after a long and debilitating battle with Parkinson’s Disease.

For nearly eighty years Dr. Kern dedicated his life and lived by the Boy Scout Oath and Law. He joined the Cubs Scouts in the early forties, earning the Wolf and Bear ranks, with many Arrow Points while at Pack 19 in Hazelton, Pennsylvania. When his family moved to Frackville, Pennsylvania he joined Pack 591. He was the Den Leader and earned The Lion Award with eight more Arrow Points. He was among the first Cubs to earn The Arrow of Light Award.

He joined Troop 91 and progressed through the ranks in the minimum time earning the Eagle Rank with Bronze, Gold and three Silver Palms. During this time he served as Quarter Master, Scribe, Assistant Patrol Leader, Patrol Leader Assistant, Patrol Leader, and Assistant Scoutmaster. During the war he earned The Mac Arthur and Eisenhower Awards. In addition to serving in The Observer Corp he was a member of the troop band. He was also The Captain, and twice winner, of the First Aid Team at the TRI Council First Aid Meet, which had a great influence in his eventual decision to become a physician.

He was a six year camper attending Philmont Scout Ranch as a Scout and later served on the Camp Staff for two years. He was named Outstanding Scout for his council in 1946 and was elected into The Order of The Arrow and was selected for Senior Patrol Leader while attending the 1950 National Scout Jamboree.

During Bill’s college days at Penn State he was active in Alpha Phi Omega, plus helping with a local troop while also attaining grades to be selected to Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Delta MU, Honorary Scholastic Fraternities. He was also president of the Student Council and Vice President of his fraternity, Kappa Delta Roe. He maintained his busy schedule during his Post Graduate Training and Army Tours as Assistant Scoutmaster, Merit Badge Counselor and was a member of The Knights of Dunamis.

He received his medical degree from Temple Medical School in Philadelphia. Bill served in the U.S. Army, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He served in Germany with the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment, and in Vietnam with the 24th Evacuation Hospital as the Chief Ophthalmic Adviser to the U.S. Surgeon General: 1967-68. He was awarded The Bronze Star during Tet Offensive.

He was a founding partner of Hemet Eye Medical and Surgical Center in Hemet, CA. He was a pioneer in outpatient cataract (inter-occular lens) surgery and glaucoma specialist. In the community he rose to become a 32^nd Degree Mason.

It was in California with his sons Bill Jr. and Howard where he reconnected to Scouting serving with California Inland Empire Council. He received his Brotherhood and Vigil from Cahuilla Lodge 127.

Bill was passionate in many ways including his collecting of Scout patches which he picked up from Howard. The article above mentions his Eagle Scout collection was one of the reference sources for the first catalog of Eagle medals but he also built one of the best OA collections along with California camp patch collections and K of D collections in the country. Two of his sons are Eagle Scouts (Bill Jr., and Howard) and two grandsons are Eagle Scouts (Brandon and William A. Kern,III – B. T.) His spirit and joy of life will be missed.

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From time to time, TSPA handles “named collections”. Actually, we have handled more of these than anyone else. These are collections of such significance that they carry a special place in the hobby based on the collector. Typically these named collections are lifetime or generational collections. That is, collections that span twenty-five years or more to build.

Bil Loeble in his patch room in front of some of the patch plaques from his years as Section Advisor.

We are handling one such collection right now, Bill Loeble’s lettered council strip collection. The patches will speak for themselves but let me share with you some of his background. For as significant as his collections are, what he has done for Scouting and our youth is more significant.

Bill joined Scouts in 1954 and became an Eagle Scout in 1956. He attended Philmont the following year. He served on Camp Shenandoah’s (VA) staff for several years starting in 1958. He was inducted into Shenandoah lodge in 1959.

While attending the 1960 National Jamboree in Colorado Springs, CO he got the collecting bug. His OA trading flap was the Shenandoah 258 F1 which was a one color flap. He mentioned it didn’t trade well when compared to Blue Heron or Catawba and he could only get a few as they were highly restricted. We laughed though that it would be nice to have some of those 258’s back.

He served on the staff of the 1964 National Jamboree. He started with OA patches but in ’72 when council shoulder patches started coming out he added those to his collecting interests. He collected shoulder insignia going forward (CSPs) and backwards (RWS) in time amassing the largest such collection in the country.

Picture of waterfront buddy tags for Bill and his son.

Bill served in multiple leadership roles in multiple councils including Central SC, Indian Waters, and Atlanta Area Councils. He also served in multiple leadership roles within the Order of the Arrow from Chapter Advisor to Southern Region Chairman and member of the National OA Committee. He was awarded his Vigil in Muscogee 221 in Indian Waters Council South Carolina.

Bill has received numerous awards and recognitions over the years but he does not dwell on them. Of note though, Bill is one of the few collectors to have been awarded the Silver Buffalo. The only others that come to mind are Dr. Hal Yocum and Tico Perez. Bill is now a 65 year veteran of Scouting.

And lest you think Bill’s no longer collecting, here’s his patch room today.

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We recently received some patches from a Scouter out of New York. While asking about his involvements, an Eagle Scout and 1960 National Jamboree participant, he mentioned he served on the Boy Scout Service Corps for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Less and less we come across participants let alone staff members from the World’s Fair so I asked him about his remembrances. Here’s what he had to say (nice piece of personal history about his guiding Vice President Nixon btw):

Working the fair was a great experience. I think I worked a week or two mainly weekends and holidays (it was during the school year) before they rotated in other than local scouts to man the pavilion over the summer. Our principle jobs were to demonstrate scouting skills (I remember demonstrating a lot of first aid), give directions, help with lostchildren, and escort dignitaries. I do remember taking the then King of Burundi around and the then former Vice-President Richard Nixon, whose foot I stepped on. I was kidded for years about that.

I went to the 1960 National Jamboree,  went to Philmont in 1962, worked the Scouting pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, and I was an Order of the Arrow member (Horicon 246). I grew up in  southern New York State, Washington Irving Council, and was a  counselor at their Camp Read. I was later active in the explorer  program.  I always felt that scouting was tougher than the   peacetime Army.

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With the aid of my more video savvy nephews we’re getting caught up on some video’s we’ve taken. This one is with Hugh Mauldin from the 2009 NOAC. Hugh is a founding member of Alibamu Lodge 179 headquartered in Montgomery, AL. Hugh earned his Eagle rank in 1941. The video’s a little long but THIS is our history. Scouting exists because of Hugh and others like him before him. If it is to exist in the future, it will be up to us to carry on the legacy of service to the youth of our community.

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I write articles for the International Scout Collectors’ Association, ISCA, journal on trends in the hobby. In thinking about an upcoming article and reviewing market conditions in different areas of the hobby prices are holding up or appreciating in some areas but not others. A common thread between the two, in my opinion, is where there has been and continue to be active collecting guides for active areas of the Scout patches.

One of my current thoughts is about major impacts on our hobby that are standing the test of time. One of those is the focus on first flaps. I recently posed some questions to one of the principle authors, Dr. Jeff Morley of California, about the first book on first flaps. When did you begin this focus? Why? What other things when  doing the research that the hobby should know or remember?

Dr. Morley responded:

Hi Roy,
I started collecting first flaps in earnest in the mid 1980’s right after I
completed Green Book II. The information was incomplete and sometimes vague
as there was no picture guide and all we had to go on was a listing in the
Arapaho guide that, as you remember, was fairly good but lacked the
detailed information to make a positive ID on many of the flaps.

After the 1988 NOAC, I had reached a “wall” in my first flap collection. I
was down to about 20 needs (as far as I knew from the info that was
available at the time). So I made a decision to invest in placing ads in
local papers soliciting the first flaps that I still needed. I was not the
first collector to pursue this approach as Gene Berman had been placing
some very limited ads in communities where he was looking for specific
things (like the 214x) but he had never gone after first flaps. At the
time, my effort were very successful and produced some unexpected results.
First and foremost, by 1989, I had located and acquired all 20 of my
remaining needs, the last being the 311 Koo Ben Sho. However, in the
process, I also got a lot of new information from the people that were
contacting me, much of which was either new info or contradicted the
prevailing thoughts at the time of what constituted the “first flap”. The
former arrowmen that I came in contact with were simply members form the
1950’s that had received the flap, they were not leaders, arrowmen that had
continued on in the program or collectors. They were just your average Joe
that received a flap and knew the one or two years they were in scouts and
in the OA.Their info was very factual and not influenced by “folklore” that
had developed in the hobby by the 1980’s. I still have all of my research
correspondence from the late 1980’s with the orignal arrowman rom the
1930’s-50’s that contacted me with information.

My close friend and patch/OA historian extraordinair, Bill Topkis became
very interested in the first flaps in the late 1980’s and by 1990, was
helping with the patch research and information. The original difficulty
ratings for first flaps was developed by both Bill and I as a result of us
both determining what were our last fast flap needs and comparing our
independent collection lists.

So it turned out there were some new discoveries of what the first the
first flap from a lodge was and in particular, which variety was the
“technically correct” first flap. The hobby started to see OA collecting
more in terms of “varieties” in the late 1980’s, I believe largely as a
result of Green Book II (published in 1985) which began cataloging
California OA patches as issues and varieties. Also, what started to become
clearer as time went on was that in some cases (like lodge 96, 146, 189,
237 and others), the first flap issued by a lodge was for an event.
Previously, event patches were not considered actual lodge issues and were
not listed anywhere. But the truth was, like it or not, they were the first
flap shaped patch issued by that lodge and they were the first flap worn on
the uniform from those lodges.

As a result of these efforts, Bill, our friend and past Malibu Lodge 566
chief ,Tom Gould and I talked about how great it would be to publish all
the information we had acquired on first flaps and so in 1991 we started on
the original book. After it was published in 1992, the book became very
popular and at times, controversial. In some cases, local folklore in a
particular lodge considered their first flap to be different from what we
listed. That promoted vigorous discussion and more research. The results
improved the listing. Sometimes Bill and I were right and the folklore was
corrected. Other times, we had a few of the first flaps listed incorrectly
and we were corrected.

The final evolution in the first flap project developed when Dave Thomas
asked if he could collaborate with us to republish First Flaps in a large
glossy color book. Dave was instrumental in taking the information to the
next level and I believe that First Flaps in Color is now considered in the
Scout Collecting hobby as a classic and one of the seminal books in patch
collecting along with the Wabiningo Lodge Emblem handbook, Arapaho, Blue
Book and others.

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There is a web site that creates and posts top ten lists across numerous topics. Destry just sent me one of the top 10 famous final photographs. Now we don’t typically blog about other web-sites and this one does not on first glance seem relevant to our blog about Boy Scouts and collecting but look at #7 – Jeffrey Miller – one of the students National Guards killed at Kent State University in 1970. Its a Pulitzer Prize winning picture. For our younger collectors, they may not be connected to the events but for those of us with more age this event and this picture captured a traumatic era in the USA.

Now for the connection to Scouting. Jeff was an Eagle Scout. He was collector Bernie Miller’s son.

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My dad, Keith Albert More, passed way on December 7th, 2009. This past week I’ve said more than once that dieing is part of living but that doesn’t make it any easier. His obituary is here.

The eulogy I gave on Friday is below. This covers more than Scouting but it helps, I believe, to give a flavor to his background. He’ll certainly be missed.

Dad came to Michigan to work on his PhD. His research involved proving what at the time was a recent theory by Watson and Crick that DNA was a double-helix. While sorting fruit-flies by the color of their eyes during the day he seemed to have developed a certain social reputation on campus at night. He set that aside as life intervened, my mom’s and then me, that lead to his being one of the first dozen or so members of the new Bendix Aerospace Systems Division here in Ann Arbor. He seemed to really enjoy nuclear physics and was attracted to it. The Division eventually grew to employing over 1,000 people.

It was a little different growing up in a home where your dad couldn’t talk about his work because it was classified. During most of his career he carried “top secret” clearance or higher. When he could talk about his work it was about mass spectrometers, forward looking infrared radar or the use of inverse Fourier transforms in interferometry. Not light stuff.

His work did provide us with some interesting experiences such as directly witnessing the Apollo 11 launch. Somewhere in dad’s stuff he was presented with one of the Pioneer Plaques designed by Carl Sagan for dad’s work on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft the first man-made item designed to leave our solar system. My brothers and I are proud to have a dad who designed an experiment placed on the moon.

Dad was a do-er. My brothers and I learned construction at dad’s side as he built our house. Whether it was facing the sandstone that reminded him of his Kansas home, pouring concrete, laying brick or planting hundreds of seedling pines obtained from the DNR. Often to the classical music of WJR’s Karl Haas Adventures in Good Music. As a side note, the first and only time dad spanked me was when I was 5. He came home and found me pushing his classical records across our cement floor. I don’t remember the spanking but I never pushed another record across the floor and I still enjoy classical music.

As he was building our home US-23 was being developed. The construction crew cleared a stand of walnut trees. Dad wanted to use some for stairs in the house. The crew would only sell him all of the trees. Since it was only $100 he took them all. Even though we had solid walnut stairs and landings, solid walnut book shelves, and did the library in solid walnut planks there was still walnut lumber left over when he sold the house 22 years later.

Tod remembers the story of the electrical inspector telling dad that dad’s grounding of every outlet was a waste of wire. It wasn’t. Dad was just 20 years ahead of the inspector and what is standard today. My dad did not back off of tasks even if they were big or hard so long as they were right.

Dad had a passion for sailing. We’re not sure how he got the passion in Kansas but he did. While in high school he built his first boat with a friend in the family’s stone barn. It went well until they realized it wouldn’t fit through the door. Somehow they did get it out and took it to Wichita to sail. When he came to Michigan he got a sailboat. He had to turn over his boat after I came along but he did design our in-ground garage to be large enough to be able to build a 44-foot boat and get it out.

My brothers and I remember his involvement in Scouting. Actually I got involved in Scouting through my friend Bruce. It wasn’t something my dad pushed on us. I found out he was an Eagle Scout long after I had joined. Jeff pointed out one of the special things about our dad was the time he would give to take us on camp-outs and trips. Scouts require at least two-deep adult leadership on outings but often it was hard to find enough dads to be able to take us on campouts. I remember my dad in his early 40’s ‘recruited’ my Uncle Tom and the two of them took the older Scouts of the troop on an 80 mile, week-long backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail in the Smoky Mountains.

The next year the Scouts decided we wanted to do a week-long canoe trek along the Au Sable river. Rather than rent or buy canoes, dad researched how to make our own canoes. He located canoe plans from the Michigan Canoe Racing Association. He cut the templates of the optimized, hydrodynamic design. To make these canoes meant ripping hundreds of 20 foot strips of ¼” inch redwood that we then glued together. Somewhere in the Ann Arbor News archives is a picture of Bruce and me in our uniforms explaining to visitors at a Scout-o-rama how we made these canoes. People were fascinated and didn’t know that you could make your own canoes.

Dad instilled in us a sense of exploration. We traveled to most of the fifty states whether for work or pleasure. He developed in us an appreciation of wine with most dinners. I remember going with him to Dr. Meadow’s garage and the Vins de France group that would direct import wine for the club in order to save some money on great wine.

Basically as soon as Jeff and I could handle cards we were ‘recruited’ to be a foursome for bridge with my mom and dad. Often at family gatherings it was ‘Hi. How are you? Where are the cards?”

While talking with my aunts and uncles in the past few days I found out things about my dad I never knew. My aunt told me that after dad took the Naval Reserve exam my grandmother got a call from Washington. They told her that Dad had gotten the highest score ever and they were interested in what he was going to study in college.

He loved two women in his life. My mom who died at what I now realize is the incredibly young age of 52 and Flora. He told me that after having a great relationship with my mom he sought another and found it with Flora. Blending families sometimes isn’t easy but we did. I am thankful for the love and happiness that Flora brought to him these past twenty years.

Dad was a simple man and a complex man.

He was a child of the depression who taught his sons the value of thrift.

He was a modest man of the mind who loved life and a good apple pie. Actually any apple pie. And I recently found out his brother George’s humus and sister Mary’s pita chips.

He infected my brothers and me with optimism.

Today there is another angel in heaven. Hoist the sail. Open the wine and get out the cards.

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