COLUMN ONE : Boy Scouts in a Knot of Disputes : The organization is beset by an adult debate over what is, and who can be, a Scout. And figures on its growth have been called into question.

For a brief sun-swept weekend in a San Gabriel Valley park, the kingdom of boys was as it ever was.

In the shadow of an electric power pylon, 10,000 Los Angeles Boy Scouts swarmed into the Whittier Narrows campsite last month for their annual jamboree, a three-day festival dedicated to the forest lore, rites of passage and cardinal virtues of a mainstream American institution now more than 80 years old.

Reminiscent of Norman Rockwell, it was a scene that plays out each summer in 400 U. S. communities: ragged columns of boys in khaki and olive drab, pitching tents in the afternoon dust, building fires, shuffling noisily past Scout exhibits. There were rope-and-wood “monkey bridges” to gawk at, fireside songfests and toy car derbies to revel in--all the familiar trappings of the Boy Scout experience.

“It’s just like it was when I was a Scout 35 years ago,” marveled John Weir, a Scout volunteer touring the crowded campsites. “There’s something comforting in knowing that with each new generation of kids, so much is the same.”

But as the nation’s Boy Scouts hike through another placid summer, much is not the same. At a time when Scout leaders would prefer to dwell on a decade of growth after years of decline, they are beset by adult controversies that strike at the core of their identity--what is, and who can be, a Boy Scout.

In courtrooms and Scout halls across the country, the group stands accused of bias for refusing to admit girls, children without religious beliefs, or homosexual Scoutmasters. Moreover, the Scouts’ growth has been called into question by revelations that 1,800 boys enrolled in the Los Angeles area were phantoms, fabricated by paid recruiters to inflate minority membership.

Suddenly, the well-scrubbed, pastoral image that Scouting has cultivated since the turn of the century has given way to a darker tableau.

In Anaheim Hills, a Cub Scout troop brought in guards to bar an agnostic lawyer’s twin sons from a den meeting. In Los Angeles, a judge’s decision upholding the Scouts’ ban on homosexuals has provoked appeals by the American Civil Liberties Union and protests by demonstrators calling themselves “Queer Scouts.” In Miami, supporters of a young girl rejected by a Cub pack vowed to lobby Congress to amend the Scouts’ 75-year-old national charter.

Such adult turmoil perplexes Scouting’s youthful rank and file. “I don’t understand,” said 16-year-old Herbert Ramirez, a Central Los Angeles Eagle Scout. “Why would they want to keep kids out?”

There are both moral and practical considerations, Boy Scout leaders respond. “The last line of the Scout oath is ‘morally straight,’ ” said Scout spokesman Blake Lewis. “That hasn’t changed.”

And the organization’s hierarchy is also under pressure from within to hold the line. Mormon, Catholic and other religious sponsors, whose troops make up 30% of the Scouts’ national membership, have bluntly threatened to abandon Scouting if there are any compromises.

“I am not the one who makes the decision, but we would withdraw” if homosexuals were able to join, testified Jack Goaslind, a Mormon leader and a national Scout board member, during the lawsuit filed by fired homosexual Scout leader Timothy Curran.

The Scouts have paraded psychologists, church officials and teachers into courtrooms to buttress their cause. A Brigham Young University expert recently testified in a Chicago trial that if atheist Mark Welsh, 8, becomes a Scout, his presence might cause “cognitive dissonance” among young believers.

“There are plenty of atheists in Scouting who are just too afraid to speak up,” retorted the boy’s father, Elliot Welsh.

Those who do, Scout elders say, pose only minor distractions to a program that has attracted record numbers of Americans eager to embrace old ways--by the end of 1990, 4.3 million youths between the ages of 7 and 20.

“People are returning to the values that Scouting never left,” said Lewis, the Scouts’ spokesman.

Critics contend that the Scouts’ woes reveal a fundamental flaw about the organization: that it is trapped in a time warp, unwilling to open its doors to outsiders and sometimes compromising its squeaky-clean principles to promote an image of perpetual growth and ethnic diversity.

“It’s like dealing with the 1950s all over again--or at least all the bad parts of the 1950s,” said James Randall, the agnostic lawyer suing to get his 9-year-old twins, Michael and William, readmitted to their Anaheim Hills Cub pack. The boys fell from grace for refusing to say the the word “God” in the Scouting oath. “What kind of father would I be if I didn’t stand up for them?” said Randall, whose sons want so badly to be Cub Scouts that he sometimes finds them sleeping in their blue uniforms in bed.

The 1950s were a watershed decade for many current senior Scout officials. That decade saw Scouting’s steepest rise, from 2 million to 3.5 million youths, as suburban America mushroomed, sprouting troops wherever a new church, men’s club or PTA group formed.

Many Scout elders say their adolescent experiences with compasses, intricate knots and Scouting comrades left deep impressions on them. “It was one of the most meaningful times of my life,” said Edward C. Jacobs, once a teen-age Scout in Missouri, now Scout executive in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest council.

Scouting was a transplant from Great Britain, started in 1908 by Lord Robert Baden Powell, a British Army officer who returned a hero from the Boer War. He made his first Scouts into a miniature army, modeled after England’s colonial forces. To the dismay of Scout leaders, a recent biography by British author Tim Jeal portrayed Baden Powell as a repressed homosexual who enjoyed watching boys swim naked.

The program flowered quickly in the United States in the early 1900s and, after rival Scout groups competed for public favor, Congress granted a national charter to the Boy Scouts of America. The organization is still set up largely the way it was envisioned--using volunteer Scoutmasters to steep their young charges in camping, nature and survival skills and offer a regimen of independence and duty.

Jacobs and other Scout leaders are not shy about their allegiance to the “Scout Way,” with its three-fingered salute, its fascination with flags and military pomp, and its firm code of responsibilities. Indeed, said Jay Mechling, an American studies professor at UC Davis, such trappings are deeply ingrained in Scouting’s maturation process.

“Successful Scout troops impart an entire culture to their kids,” said Mechling, who studies the inner workings of Scout troops. “The Scouts provide good role models . . . and the Scout oath and all the rest give kids something they can look back at with nostalgia.”

But old ways can grow stale. After membership plummeted to 3.1 million youths in 1979, the organization groped for a new focus. Scouting got relevant. Designer Bill Blass was hired to add dash and epaulets to the Scout uniform. New merit badges were given for agribusiness, cinematography, personal management and other contemporary disciplines. For the first time, Scout recruiters ventured into housing projects, sometimes lighting campfires on concrete playgrounds to re-create forest outings.

Trying to be both traditional and relevant is “a difficult trick” for the Scouts, Mechling said. “If they change too much, they lose what makes them distinctive. But if they don’t change enough, they’re in danger of becoming a parody of themselves,” he said.

Until recently, the Scouts’ monolithic administration--80 officials atop 4.3 million Scouts, 1.1 million adult volunteers and hundreds of schools, churches and clubs acting as troop sponsors--was able to keep its membership in line. Troops could plan their own activities, while all policy emanated from Scout headquarters in Irving, Tex.

That peace began to fray, youth service experts say, as Scouting broadened its ranks. Baby Boom generation parents who rejected the Scouts when they were teen-agers are now targeted by Scout recruiters for their own children. One Scout advertisement reads cheekily: “Join a gang where you’ll learn to use knives, ropes and clubs”--accompanied by photographs of a pocket knife, sailboat lines and a baseball bat.

James Randall, who said he naively encouraged his twins to join and “have fun,” now complains that “not all of our generation subscribes to (Scouting’s) ideals. How can they urge our kids to join and then reject us for what we believe?”

The recent flurry of lawsuits represents “an explosion of people waiting to make Scouting more responsive” to societal changes, said former Eagle Scout Curran, 29, who was fired as an assistant Scoutmaster in Berkeley after his homosexuality became public. Curran is now appealing a Los Angeles Superior Court judge’s ruling that his readmission would “undermine the force of the Boy Scout view that homosexuality is immoral. . . .”

A recent Times Poll indicates no clear-cut public sympathy for any side in the membership dispute. The poll found that a 66% majority frowns on girls joining Scout troops. But at the same time, a slim majority opposes the Scouts’ insistence that belief in God should be a requirement for admission. Fifty-two percent oppose the mention of “God” in the Scout oath, while 43% support it.

Some legal observers predict that if the Scouts continue to discriminate, the current wave of litigation could be followed by tougher action by charity groups and local governments.

Already, the San Francisco chapter of the United Way, one of the Boy Scouts’ most dependable funding sources, is investigating whether a ban on gays violates the charity’s anti-discrimination policy. And a San Francisco school board member is urging a reassessment of city policy that allows Scouts to use schools as sponsors and meeting places.

The threat of evicting Scouts from public schools is a “legal land mine,” said Jon Davidson, an ACLU lawyer representing Curran. “Public schools are the biggest sponsors that the Scouts have. “Without them, all of the gains they’ve made in recent years could begin to collapse.”

Urban schools are at the heart of the Scouts’ inner-city recruitment drive, exposing thousands of black, Latino and immigrant schoolchildren to new programs and old heartland values. During the last decade, for example, more than 700,000 high school youths have enrolled in a national Scout program that offers “career awareness” instruction.

These school-based activities and other inner-city programs bear little resemblance to traditional Scout troops. Instead, they offer “pieces of the traditional Scout program to kids who would otherwise get nothing,” said John Clarehout, former Scout executive in Los Angeles and now executive director of the Hugh O’ Brian Youth Trust.

There are plenty of successes. At a battered Salvation Army center in Los Angeles’ Pico-Union district, 30 Boy Scouts and 20 Cubs gather each week under the tutelage of Scoutmaster Rafael Gomez. The Salvadoran native still has trouble with English, but he has worked wonders with a ragtag troop of immigrant boys who live nearby in tenements and housing projects.

“Before he (Gomez) came, there was no Scouts,” said 17-year-old Milton Romero, a street-bred Eagle Scout who is now a patrol leader. Pointing to a red ax mounted on a wood plaque, an award for a well-maintained campsite, he added: “Now we got this.”

Critics have charged, however, that the Scouts’ determination to show success in Los Angeles’ minority communities have sometimes fostered abuses that call their growth into question. Former Scout recruiters Frank and John Madrid alleged in the spring that membership rolls were bloated with the names of nonexistent boys.

The brothers, fired for flouting Scout procedures, charged that paid recruiters often invented phony troops and populated them with “garbage”--phantom Scouts--to meet quotas, please their bosses and keep their jobs.

An internal audit by the Scouts turned up 1,800 fictional Scouts in the Los Angeles area. After firing two administrators, Scout officials deemed the case closed. “We’ve tightened up our monitoring system and we’re satisfied that everything is under control,” said Jacobs, the Scout executive.

But several other former Scout officials have since come forward, charging that membership abuses are routine in Los Angeles and perhaps in some other urban Scout councils as well.

“Wherever I’ve worked, they inflate the numbers,” said Randall Jackson, a Scout recruiter who worked in Detroit, Texas and Los Angeles until he was fired here in 1987 for enrollment abuses. “It’s that way all over, but it’s particularly bad here.”

In a pending lawsuit against the local Scout council, Jackson contended he was “merely following a long-established practice.”

The abuses in Los Angeles, Frank Madrid said, often grow from pressure within the council to “meet membership quotas. Your job depended on it.”

And that pressure, critics say, comes from the importance Scout officials place on maintaining strong urban programs.

Keith Monroe, a former Santa Monica Scoutmaster who worked on an unpublished history of Scouting, contends that membership-padding scandals have periodically plagued the Boy Scouts since the 1930s.

The most devastating was in the mid-1970s, when Scout officials discovered rampant cheating in their “Boypower 76” program, a national effort to enroll one-third of all American boys. In Chicago alone, officials estimated that 25% to 50% of the city’s Scouts did not exist.

Now, in the wake of the Los Angeles scandal, critics suggest that enrollment in some of Scouting’s most vaunted urban programs may similarly be inflated. Ex-recruiter Jackson estimates that of the 71,000 Boy Scouts currently claimed by the local council, “probably 55,000 or more don’t even know they’re Scouts.”

The council’s former director of accounting, Barbara Baldwin, recalled that whenever membership deadlines approached, the atmosphere in the group’s clapboard headquarters on Scout Way in Los Angeles “became frantic.” Recruiters openly joked of getting “membership masters”--a reference to taking names from telephone books and putting them on Scout rolls. Another method, according to Jackson, was to lift names from school rosters.

Scout Executive Jacobs denied these charges, insisting that “there is no mass inflation. Anyone we catch doing it, we fire.”

Jacobs had angry words for his critics. Madrid, he said, failed to follow Scout regulations and was “constantly making allegations, but he’d never give us proof.” Jacobs dismissed Jackson by saying: “He cheated and he got fired.”

In the wake of the abuses, some Scout sponsors rallied to the group. Despite membership abuses in Lennox, school district administrators there said the program would continue. But other school officials and Scout sponsors in South Los Angeles and neighboring areas were dismayed. Some complained that children’s names were used by the dozens on Scout rolls--while programs floundered or were nonexistent.

At the Crenshaw YWCA, Executive Director Gregory Burks was perplexed to learn that his facility sponsored 12 Scout troops when, in fact, it had none. “It’s a great organization, but at the present time, they are not affiliated with the Crenshaw YMCA,” he said.

On a recent afternoon, Hyde Park Elementary School counselor Byron Wilson sat on a playground bench, watching the members of Cub Troop 3554 play a listless game of tug of war. On recent Scout rolls, his school’s troop has listed 114 members. In reality, it has 14 boys--and four Scoutmasters in three years.

“It’s been frustrating,” Wilson said. “These kids are crying out for this. Who needs it more than inner-city kids?”

The latest Scoutmaster is Marco Cano, a Guatemalan emigre who is paid $5 an hour. He shows up irregularly at best. “Sometimes I have to take the bus,” he explained.

Troop meetings have been scheduled, but when parents and children showed up, Scout officials did not. When he calls to complain, Wilson said, he is ignored.

Wilson summoned one of the Cub Scouts, Quincy Hunter, 10, a solemn child with two small earrings but no uniform.

“Quincy, you ever go camping?” Wilson asked.

“No sir,” the boy said.

“You ever go anywhere but here?”

“No, we always stay here,” the youth said. “One of my friends, Jose, said the Scouts are dumb because we don’t do anything. I say we do more than he does. But I wish we could do some stuff like camping or some kind of trip. It’s boring playing the same things all the time.”

Excused, he trudged back to the troop for yet another tug of war.

Times staff writer Anthony Millican contributed to this story.