Boy Scouts in the rearview mirror
3 dots, 4 dots, 2 dots,1 dash happens
Be Prepared
— Scout Motto
Boy Scouts of America Troop 41 in the old hometown didn’t boot me out. And I didn’t quit in a huff. Didn’t cuss or call anyone names. Just quietly stopped going.
Not for any serious reason, such as being sexually abused by an adult leader, which more than 82,000 scouts later would say happened to them.
In the 1950s, we knew nothing about this festering secret locked up tight in the popular organization’s national headquarters. The Boy Scouts was widely considered red, white and blue, apple pie and 4th of July Norman Rockwell America, as patriotic and wholesome-seeming an organization as any normal lad could hope to swear an oath to.
I quit anyway.
“Anyone who doesn’t memorize Morse Code for all the other 22 letters of the alphabet can’t go camping with us on Friday,” had been Uncle John’s edict at the regular Tuesday night meeting. “And the same rule applies to all future camping trips.”
We already all knew four letters of the code and he knew we knew them because of a little rhyme made up by one of the scouts and often shouted in unison like a ballgame cheer:
“Three dots, four dots, two…
