The Scouting Century Foundation’s display of Sea Scout ship medallions and flag ship fleet patches won “Best of Show” at the recent 2009 Dallas Trade-o-ree. We caught up with the Foundation’s Executive Director Sam Fairchild to discuss and review for you the contents of this display. See the pod-cast below.

Sea Scouting is the oldest specialty program within the BSA. It started in 1913 and continues to this day. It has its own highly distinctive and coveted insignia and memorabilia. Some of its most distinctive badges are ship medallions, youth designed badges, for each Sea Scout unit. Also, starting in the early 1930s through the late 1940s there were national and then regional and local competitions for the best ships. The Foundation now holds what we believe to be the best collection in the country. Sam wanted us to be sure to note that Kelly Williams, President of the Krelman Co. originally built the collection and in the past year worked with the Foundation to move it to their holdings.

Here’s our interview with Sam.

 

 Scouting Century Foundation Award Winning Sea Scout display: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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One of the neat aspects of the Calumet Council Memorial Day trade-o-ree is their display section. TOR organizers Jim Scherbarth and Swoop Dellamano arrange for special displays each year from area collectors. Bob Cylkowski provided a display of some of his Far East Council memorabilia. It is probably the most complete collection of these items in the country. I’ve seen some of these patches before but not all of them Further, Bob knows more about the history of these patches than most so we interviewed him so the rest of the hobby can have this information.

Bob also brought his Region 13 patch collection for display. Region 13 was never an official BSA designation for a region which makes it somewhat notorious in collecting circles. The symbol in the center showing “13″ on top of a group of “C”s translates into “Region 13 across the seven seas.” Pretty punny.

 

 Far East Council patches with Bob Cylkowski: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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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.

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Bill Layman is working on a reference web-site for region patches and insignia. Its worth a look.

4/2007 update - this site seems to no longer to be active. We’ve tried to contact Bill to find out what’s up and get no reply. Anyone else know anything more?

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