‘I think being a scoutmaster is a civic duty, we must do this. I call it our debt for being born.’

Tom Emery says he is an artist by vocation and a Scout by avocation. The first Eagle Scout in Mineral City, Ohio, Emery discovered his talent in a Scout troop exercise, and grew up to lead more than 1,500 boys in Poway Scout Troop 610 in 25 years. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art and a 27-year resident of San Diego County, he has drawn illustrations for Convair, painted dioramas for the history museum and sculpted religious works for churches. He was the show-and-tell artist on the “Adventures in Art” program on KFMB-TV for 11 years and has written more than 20 instructional books on painting, drawing and sculpture. He is currently working on a relief design that he will chisel into a boulder at La Colonia Park in Solana Beach. Though grumpiness prompted him to retire as Scout leader two years ago, the 64-year-old artist says inspiration for his art still comes from his life in Scouting. Times Staff Writer Nancy Reed interviewed him at his Solana Beach studio and Dave Gately photographed him there.

Scouting teaches a boy what he can do. No boy who is a fairly decent swimmer would jump in and swim a mile, he wouldn’t know he could do it. He didn’t have any concept of distance.

When I decided I wanted my art badge, I didn’t know that I had the ability. I had never seen anybody draw until I was 14. I never heard anyone talk about art. In a little town of about 800, there wasn’t any art there. The comic strip was as close as anything.

I was told who I could see, and I had to go 34 miles. I wonder how many bicycle wheels I wrecked doing that twice a week for about two years to get my badge.

I had never seen anybody draw in my life before like he did. The drawings might have been very crude, I don’t know. But I thought he could draw like Michelangelo.

I remember him drawing a rooster. He drew on the kitchen table, on a piece of butcher paper, and he drew with a stub of a pencil he had sharpened so beautifully. Even today, my favorite thing to draw is a rooster. It was so marvelous.

At a political rally for Wendell Wilkie, who was running against President Roosevelt, he had me go to a high school auditorium, and I stood there in front of people to do a series of drawings, of things Roosevelt should be doing.

I had told him I couldn’t draw because I would forget. He said, let’s put them faintly in pencil and you can draw with big black chalk. But when I got up there, the light was so bright on the stage, that I couldn’t see them.

He said do it anyway. I got an applause, and I had to go back and do some more. I was about 15.

Scouts still come to me who are working on an art merit badges--I took two boys to a museum last weekend.

You watch youngsters growl at first, but these little fellows learn that they can do things they never even dreamed of. A boy would complain on his first hike at 11 years old--complaining that his feet, his legs, his teeth hurt. He would say he was finished. But he was there at the next meeting and the next hike. It became a challenge. Watching their growth is the most satisfying.

I think being a scoutmaster is a civic duty, we must do this. I call it our debt for being born. We need to pay back what we have gotten out of society. I wouldn’t know what else to do.

It’s the cleanest and most gratifying thing to get into. And it’s as useful as anything anyone can do for society--for boys or for girls.

When I want to feel clean, I find a Scout. There is so much dirt in this world. We are all trying to get in the same spot at the same time. A Scout has to think of the other guy.

I have tried to combine my art and my Scouting. Scouting includes God and country and youth, which are the future of our world.

And art is aesthetic beauty--mine comes from Scouting. It comes from that life I led for 25 years leading boys to manhood.

Though I don’t illustrate Boy Scouting, I transform what I feel, see and experience from Scouting into art.

It doesn’t look like it, but it feels like it. If you know anything about working with youth, well, I can’t explain it. But I can paint it and cut it out of stone.