On His Honor: The Boy Scouts Are Back Again : Leadership: William Hillcourt, 91, led the way for a return to Scouting’s traditional roots.

When Boy Scouts reverently say William Hillcourt wrote the book on Scouting, it’s the literal truth. Scout’s honor.

Next to Lord Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts in England in the 1890s, the 91-year-old Hillcourt is the most widely known figure in Scouting.

Hillcourt is the principal author of the official Boy Scout Hand Book, which has sold nearly 32.9 million copies since its first printing in 1910. The ninth edition alone, which came out in 1979, has sold 4.4 million copies.

The first six editions of the handbook were written by several authors, although Hillcourt was the major contributor to several editions. Beginning in 1960, with the seventh edition, he became the sole author.

Hillcourt also influenced generations of boys through the tales he told in Boys’ Life--Boy Scouting’s magazine--as Green Bar Bill, the know-all patrol leader.

“His enthusiasm for the outdoors and the Scout’s life was always a part of his writing,” says William B. McMorris, editor-in-chief of Boys’ Life.

“He said, ‘Here’s what you can do. Get out and do it.’ His enthusiasm reached to all Scouts.”

Hillcourt will tell you the same thing, but there’s little swagger behind his words.

“Mine is the story of a serendipitist. I set out to become a pharmacist and became a writer of handbooks for boys,” says Hillcourt, whose voice still betrays his Danish heritage after nearly 70 years in the United States.

Robert Hood, who retired in 1986 after 22 years as editor-in-chief of Boys’ Life, says Hillcourt “knows everything about Scouting. He knows the bread-and-butter about teaching the Scouting crafts. He’s a link to Scouting’s past.”

Hillcourt was 10 when he read Baden-Powell’s “Scouting For Boys,” which had just been translated into Danish. He immediately became a Scout.

Ten years later, he traveled to London to attend his first International Jamboree, where he met Baden-Powell. The meeting started a lifelong friendship that resulted in Hillcourt writing the definitive biography of the British general, “Baden-Powell--The Two Lives of a Hero.”

Hillcourt had become a pharmacist by 1924, graduating from the Copenhagen Pharmaceutical College. But his yearning to write continued. During his college days, he edited the monthly magazine for Danish Boy Scouts and by the time he was 23 he had published his first novel, recounting his experiences camping on a desert island on Denmark’s largest lake.

Seven decades later, his lifelong penchant for outdoor adventure is evident inside and outside his basement apartment in this small town near Syracuse.

The bookshelves are lined with travel and adventure--Youngblood Hawke, the Kon Tiki expedition, “Ivanhoe.” The walls are covered with walking staffs and wooden carvings, a boomerang, an African antelope horn and a football-sized pine cone. A pair of totem poles sits in the small yard outside the house.

It was Hillcourt’s ambition to write that prompted him to offer his services to one of Copenhagen’s largest newspapers, covering the second International Jamboree, which was held in Denmark.

His experiences meeting people from around the world made Hillcourt restless. In 1925, he set out on a trip around the world, stopping in Liverpool, England, for a month to write another boys’ book.

It was on his global excursion that fate intervened in his life, he says.

Hillcourt had taken a job in the supply department of the Boy Scouts of America’s New York office, where he was learning about equipping Scouts for his homeland’s organization.

One day, he met James West, the BSA’s chief Scout executive, on the elevator, Hillcourt recalls. “He knew who I was and asked me what I thought about American Scouting.”

There wasn’t enough time for an adequate reply, so Hillcourt sent West an 18-page report a week later. West’s response was to assign Hillcourt to write the first “Handbook for Patrol Leaders.”

“Fortunately, my English wasn’t very good in those days. It was the English of a 13- or 14-year-old boy,” Hillcourt says.

Which was exactly who the manual was intended for.

Hillcourt joined the organization’s national staff in 1929, but another twist of circumstances led him to Boys’ Life, the Scouting magazine published by West.

“They wanted me to write a monthly feature,” Hillcourt says. “I decided on a page of hints for patrol leaders.”

In October, 1932, Green Bar Bill passed along his first bit of advice.

“It was a popular column for years, so much so that I had him continue writing it after his retirement,” Hood says.

Green Bar Bill, which was transformed into a comic strip for its final years, gave his final advice in April 1988.

During the ensuing 30 years, Hillcourt wrote a new “Handbook for Scoutmasters,” the BSA’s first “Scout Field Book,” Baden-Powell’s biography and a 50-year history of Scouting in America, “The Golden Book of Scouting.”

He also wrote a new handbook, which for the first time was penned by a single author and contained color illustrations. Because he was a BSA employee, he has received no royalties for the handbook. He does get six free copies for every 400,000 books sold.

In 1965, Hillcourt finished the round-the-world trip he’d started four decades earlier and entered into a tranquil retirement with his wife.

Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts issued an “improved” handbook in 1971 as the organization changed its direction, looking to build its membership in the cities. Instead, membership fell from 4.9 million in 1972 to 3.1 million in 1979. Today, membership stands at 4.2 million.

Hillcourt noted that the annual average sales of the “improved” handbook, which carried a civic emphasis, were about 350,000, compared to sales of 630,000 for his handbook in the 1960s.

BSA officials attribute the membership drop to an overall change in society. Scouting also may have been inappropriately identified as a military organization because of its uniforms during a time when the Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War were in the news, officials say.

“It was idiotic,” says Hillcourt, who still bristles about the subject.

“Scouting wanted to be in tune with the times. But they took the romance and adventure out of Scouting. The book didn’t even have the word campfire in the index.”

Hillcourt, horrified by the plummeting membership, turned his back on retirement and offered to write a new handbook for free.

Rather than advise Scouts to learn about government by attending a city council meeting or lecturing them about proper telephone manners, Hillcourt underlined those things he found exciting about Scouting life.

“Yes, it’s fun to be a Boy Scout! It’s fun to go hiking and camping with your best friends . . . to swim, to dive, to paddle a canoe, to wield an ax . . . to follow the footsteps of the pioneers who led the way through the wilderness . . . to stare into the glowing embers of a campfire and dream of the wonders of the life that is in store for you,” he wrote in an opening section to his 1979 handbook.

Civics and other useful sections presented prominently in the “improved” handbook were wisely reserved for later pages.

“I know Scouting has to compete with so many other things. We just have to be more vigorous,” Hillcourt says.

“Certainly we can make camping in the woods more entertaining and educational than Nintendo.”