BSA Troop 451, Lewisville, TX

Once again, or stalwart troop members were up well ahead of the reveille call, preparing to face another day of excitement and success at Camp Geiger. Each day, some of our Scouts are designated to serve as our table waiters. Meals in the dining hall are served family-style and we sit eight-to-a-table. Our Table waiters have the duty of laying the table, ensuring that each camper has a place setting (fork, knife, and spoon), napkins, a plate, and a glass (well, the 'glasses" are made of the far-more-durable polycarbonate plastic but you know what I mean). They also fetch the food to the table and ensure the serving utensils and pitchers of 'juice' and ice water are on the table as well. In order to discharge their duties, they report to the dining hall twenty minutes before mealtime. Supervised by three Scouters, the Scouts get the tables ready for the rest of our troop to ensure an agreeable dining experience. Once the tables are laid and the food in place, we r...

Your Scouts and Scouters started the day off right. Most arose before reveille and donned their class B's in preparation for breakfast.  Four of our Scouts, however, headed to the dining hall bedecked in their sharpest class A's. Austin Reid, James Morales, Robby Paul, and Will Harris had the signal honor of hoisting our troop flag over the Cloud L. Cray Flag Plaza in honor of our being awarded "Sharpest Unit" honors the previous evening. In this, they joined the staff flag squads. The U.S. flag, of course, was raised first, as befits its due respect. The flag of the state of Missouri followed, and then the Venturing Crew 311 (the crew for Camp Geiger Staffers), Lastly, our Scouts raised the Troop 451 flag. They dispatched their duty with dignity and pride. It is great to be a part of such a great troop! Mondays bring French toast fingers and link sausage with which to assuage one's pangs of hunger. After nearly a whole day at camp and a good night's s...

Sunday, June 16th, 2019 Your Troop 451 Scouts did a great job of settling into our home for the week, Sioux Lookout campsite, where we have stayed 5 of the previous six years. It is a lovely location, if a mite windy at times. A salient benefit is that it is close to the Flaming Crow Trading post, which is always a popular site for the boys. One new feature of the campsite this year is toads. Yes, TOADS! Everywhere one looks, small toads are in evidence, crawling and hopping through the grass, over dirt, and across the roads. These specimens are perhaps an inch long (range 0.75-1.25 in, S.D. = +/- 1 .237). An exceptionally wet Spring has led to this amphibian abundance for which we may well be grateful. Toads eat a lot of insects and the other notable difference between this first day at Geiger and previous years was an abundance of tiny black flies. Whether the flies bite or not, I cannot say. They do, however, possess quite an arsenal of annoyance factors, especially buzz...

Sunday, June 16th, 2019 Your humble correspondent begs the indulgence of the loyal audience. Having been awake continuously since 7:30 AM Saturday, he finds he lacks the stamina to post a properly polished paragraph or three this evening. Look for updates tomorrow, both to your Troop 451 Blog and to our Troop Smugmug folders. I can report that a good time has been had by all of our Scouts. More anon!

Saturday Night, June 15th, 2019 Off to Camp Geiger! What would summer be without a week at summer camp? Less fun, for certain. A lot less! For our Troop 451 Scouts, our annual trek to Missouri to experience summer camp at Camp Geiger is surely a high point of the hot weather season of the year. For our 2019 sojourn, we gathered at First United Methodist Church, Lewisville, our Charter Organization and the home to Troop 451, at 9:00 PM Saturday for a scheduled 9:30 departure. Each Scout and Scouter packed and brought a sack lunch for Sunday and the large ice chests provided to keep them cool were soon filled with food of wide variety, some homemade and some store-bought. It's all good. The sack lunch is needed because the first meal served in the dining hall at Camp Geiger each session is Sunday dinner. Most other troops (but by no means all) who come to Camp Geiger call home locales considerably closer to St. Joseph than is North Texas. As a result, arrivin...

All things change.  For me, April 1st marked the end of a significant chapter of my life. For the previous four-and-a-half years, I was privileged to have the honor of serving our great Troop 451 as Committee Chair. In that role, I was blessed to work with many dedicated volunteers whose commitment of time and effort, doubtless, exceeded my own. To mention just a few such great folks, of the many wonderful volunteers who served our Scouts while I was Committee Chair, Shannon Anderson continued to serve as our treasurer for the first half of my tenure and her excellent efforts ensured that the troop maintained the enviable financial foundation she worked so hard to establish earlier. Cynthia Arroyo Richards then stepped up and continued the tradition of professionalism and sound financial management. Stephanie Stapp Tyson took on the role of Advancement Chair before I became Committee Chair and continued that throughout almost all my term, carefully training her replacement...

Saturday, January 19th, I awoke at my usual hour and sometime thereafter I thought to text our Scoutmaster, Steve Kral, with wishes for a safe trip as our troop headed to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area to camp over the long weekend. I mean, if you cannot join them, you can at least wish them well. I sent my wishes for safe travels and mentioned that I was sorry not to be going since Karen would not be home and it was her expected presence that inclined me to forgo the trip. Just a minute later, Steve called to tell me that there had been a few last-minute cancellations and that if I really wanted to join them, there would be room! I had a couple of minor errands to accomplish before I left but by 11:00 am, I was ready to leave for Enchanted Rock. Or, so I thought until I remembered that I did not have my mess kit. As it turned out, I spent 20 minutes hunting for that because it was not in its usual place. When I finally did find it, it turned out to be very nearly where it sho...

Properly tended, cast iron will not rust nor will it emit the retchsome reek of rancid oil. Why anyone would consider cooking food in a vessel coated with rancid oil, I cannot conceive. Another consequence of the old Troop 451 method is that the iron, predictably, rusts. This time, while we had no rusty iron to remediate (a first, I think!) we did find most of the iron reeking of rancidity. Yuck! The proper care is trivially simple. Clean the vessel in whichever way you wish. Detergent and steel wool will NOT harm a properly seasoned piece of cast iron. This because of the nature of the chemistry involved in seasoning. Like so many real-world processes, this too can be understood by the application of scientific understanding. The root problem is that iron metal and oxygen gas (O2 in the air that we breathe) combine readily in the presence of water. This is an energetically-favorable reaction that occurs spontaneously and water acts as a catalyst in the process. The end product i...

On November 16th, 2018, Troop 451 once again presented the Tonkawa District Youth Leadership Training at Hills and Hollows Scout Camp in Denton, Texas. This training supplements that now-standard Youth Leadership Training (YLT) that all Scouts should attend, typically within their first year. In the past, leadership training had three phases, YLT, Brownsea, and National Youth Leadership Training (NYLT), known, in the Longhorn Council, as "Twin Arrows". "Brownsea" was intermediate-level - more advanced than YLT and less intense than Twin Arrows, it was long the prerequisite for that more-advanced training. Named after an island in Poole Harbor, England, where Lord Baden Powell first held leadership training campouts for his original Boy Scouts, Brownsea was long a staple of the BSA leadership training mission. For reasons unfathomable to this long-time Scouter, a few years ago, Brownsea was eliminated in favor of taking Scouts directly from YLT to NYLT. Many in t...

It is with a very sad heart that I write in memory of a friend and mentor. We are all the poorer for the passing of a great Scout and Scouter, Tom Moore .  General Thomas Joseph Moore passed away on Friday, September 28th, 2018 at the age of 80. His Scouting career spanned 70 years and two continents.  A Scout's Scout Tom joined the BSA in September of 1947 when he was 9 years old. He started as a Cub Scout with Pack 66 out of Fort Bliss in the Yucca Council.  Tom’s Dad, like Tom himself, was a military man and Tom grew up in many different locales. In 1950, he moved to Norfolk, Virginia and became a member of Pack 59. As a Webelo, he earned Cub Scouting’s highest award, the Arrow of Light. He then bridged to Troop 59, also with the Tidewater Council and earned his Tenderfoot and Second Class Scout ranks. In 1951, he headed overseas and continued Scouting with Troop 43 out of Salzburg, Austria, with the EUCOM Council. In Austria, he earned the ranks o...