When I Was a Girl Scout

For several years I was a card-carrying Girl Scout. It came about very naturally: my daughter told someone that her father would be all massively thrilled to drive a truckload of gravel for them up to the Girl Scout mountain camp.




Naively, I thought that complying this one time would close the deal. How little I was clued in to the world of volunteers! I missed that “one time” by eight years!

California state highway #2 is a two lane, tightly winding, rapidly climbing forest highway through the Angeles National Forest with La Canada at one end and the San Bernardino Mountain Range at the other. Along the north side is, de facto, the western end of the Mojave Desert. At the base of the “Angeles” are the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles, and smog--perpetual, ugly, brownish, and smelly. The drive up from the San Gabriel Basin past the television relay towers to a mile above that crud is actually worth dragging a load of gravel some forty-five miles.

Anyway, it became evident shortly that The Girl Scouts of Pasadena had gotten themselves a new patsy. At least, I wasn’t alone. I was shortly inducted into a committee that met to fix things -- things at the camp, things in town -- and especially to bargain with local pooh-bahs for providing stuff, and inventing ways to do things... lots of inventing. I never dreamed those little girls needed so much stuff to sing “Make new friends ....”

By then I'd been "advanced" from just driving "Jimmy," the supply truck up and down the mountain, to random chores in the camp, which gave me general use of the Jeep, a WWII relic that everyone in camp hungered to ride along the camp's steep slopes. 


To be authorized to sign whatever for the Scouts, I had to be an official member. So, for years I carried a card. That also put me on the automatic “to phone” list -- everyone’s. Among all the Pasadena Girl Scout troops, and even a few Campfire Girl groups, I became referred to as “Uncle Bert.”


The camp director was a helplessly hooked freebie collector. Once she turned up with six twenty-foot flagpoles. Lacking any other notion of what to do with them, she asked me to install them by the camp swimming pool. It wasn’t easy. The granite mountains of the San Gabriel aren’t billiard table flat or made of loam.


I got them in, seated and in line, and I called the director over.
When the director came to look, she scowled.


“They’re not level at the top,” she snapped.  She was standing by the deep end of the pool, so I had her walk with me to the shallow end.


“That’s crazy,” she said. “Now they slant the other way.”


“Now stand in the middle between them,” I said.


She did, then walked away grumbling, “Everybody will always think they’re crooked.”


I offered to take them down, at which she whirled toward me and said, “We’re the only camp in California with six flag poles.”