You Can’t Take the Scout Out of an Old Scout

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I remembered the big Boy Scout National Jamboree that was held on the Irvine Ranch. Of course I do. It isn’t easy to forget the spectacle of 50,000 Scouts and their pup tents spread all over the barren hills overlooking Corona del Mar.

I didn’t remember the date and had to look it up. It opened July 5, 1953, and it was the third national jamboree.

If that jamboree were held at the same site today, the insurance companies would have a fit. The Scouts would have to build their campfires on the rooftops of buildings.

It’s hard to believe that was only 32 years ago, and that I had outgrown my scouting years by then. Well, in a way. I guess you never can take the Scout out of an old Scout. My son was 8 years old then and I decided he needed the kind of woodsy, outdoorish education that only the Scouts could give a young fellow. I figured I’d begin his education with knot tying.

In my scouting days in good old Troop 48 in Long Beach, I got pretty adept at tying square knots, bowlines (using the rabbit-in-a-hole method) and sheepshanks. For some impractical reason, the sheepshank greatly appealed to me. The purpose of it is to shorten a rope under tension.

You make a couple of loops in it and then tie a single half-hitch at each end of the bundled-up loops. It looks kind of tricky, so maybe that’s why I liked that knot because I was into card tricks when I first learned it.

I can still tie the sheepshank today. Frankly, though, I’ve never found any practical use for it in more than 50 years.

I was never able to teach it to my son. He resisted my teaching him. It’s probably just as well. By then he was taking violin lessons, and today he is a studio musician and a sound technician, making “noises,” as I call them, for such movies as “Ghostbusters” and “Starman.” He’d never have used a sheepshank anyway. It’s too quiet.

I wonder if Ralph Clock knows how to tie a sheepshank? He heads the Clock Construction Co. in Irvine in the same area of the national jamboree and a sheepshank just might come in handy to hold up a wall or something.

After I wrote here about scouting a few weeks ago, Clock sent me a letter, introducing himself as Henry Clock’s “middle son and I suspect I followed you by a few years as a member of Troop 48 in Long Beach. I actually earned my Eagle Scout in 1951 and was active for several years thereafter.”

Clock suspects correctly. I think I know something he doesn’t know. While he was very young, I was secretly in love with an older sister of his, Rosemary. I partly blame these secret affairs of the heart as the reason why I never made Eagle Scout. They weakened my will to achieve. The best I could make was first-class Scout. I was also enamored with Indians. Oh, how I looked up to the Tribe of Tahquitz, an honorary group of older scouts in full regalia who danced around the campfire at Camp Tahquitz at Idyllwild.

If Clock, who says he went to Camp Tahquitz in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, tells me he was a member of the tribe, I’ll know he can tie a sheepshank. It’s something no self-respecting, pretend Indian would be without.

As I said, you can’t take the Scout out of an old Scout. Clock has served as vice president of the executive committee of the Orange County Boy Scout Council for several years now. His son, David, 15, has been active in scouting.

Apropos of Ernest Thompson Seton, author and one of the pillars of early scouting, Barbara D. Locke of El Toro writes to tell me about her mastery of crow calls that she learned when she was a young mother. She obtained the calls from Seton’s story of Silverspot the Crow in his “Wild Animals I Have Known.”

“I can still do them--and they do work!” she crows.

I’m thinking of making her a deal. Mrs. Locke can teach me her crow calls and I’ll teach her how to tie a sheepshank. It would be fun to learn something else outdoorish. You just never know when crow calls may come in handy.