Leader of the Pack : Eagle-Eyed Collector From Orange Knows Articles of the Boy Scouts

Doug Allen has had the sort of fulfilling life in Scouting that I used to read about in Boys Life magazine as a kid: Beginning as a Cub Scout at age 8, Allen found outdoor adventure and camaraderie. He made Eagle Scout at an early age and went on to be an adult leader of a troop that goes on two-week canoe trips into Canada and 80-mile backpack hikes through the Sierra. He included ‘Eagle Scout’ on his job resumes and wound up with a job building a space station. There probably wasn’t a Scout of his generation who didn’t dream of someday building space stations.

My own Scouting career wasn’t so idyllic. I lasted one year in the Cub Scouts, where our den mother’s dry yard was all we saw of nature. With watered-down Kool-Aid and stale cookies, I’d swear she turned a profit on our 15-cent dues. Our motto may have been “Be Prepared to Suffer.” For the slightest infraction of unstated rules we’d be compelled to crawl through a gantlet of paddling fellow Cubs. Once, upon winning a paper drive, we were awarded a wood-burning kit, which we never saw again. The final straw came when we did a show for parents in which our pack lip-synced to Beatles records, and they made me be Ringo.

Maybe that’s why I turned my back on Scouting, becoming a bitter journalist, while Allen builds space stations and is still so taken with Scouting that he has amassed a collection of thousands of rare Boy Scout items. It’s practically enough to fill a museum, and that’s what he hopes to do someday.

Some of his collection is on display (and some for sale) at Nix Books (2820 E. Chapman) in Orange, while more of it crowds the study of the Orange home he shares with his wife, Sharon, and three teen-age sons.

He has 1930s jodhpurs, ‘50s flint fire-starting kits, an ashtray commemorating the 1953 Scout Jamboree held in Orange County (from which our Jamboree Boulevard derives its name), felt-cased canteens, merit badges, axes, first-aid kits, belts, ancient issues of Boys Life and two copies of the Scout Grail, the 1910 handbook by Boy Scouts of America founder, naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, including a signed copy from Seton’s own library.

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While most of his collection is devoted to American Scouting, he also has several rare items from Britain, where Scouting was originated in 1908 by Lord Robert Baden-Powell. He was a hero of the Boer War, where he had organized boys in a courier corps, also using them as medical aides and scouts.

Baden-Powell was encouraged to develop a civilian version of that corps at home, Allen said, because “there was a lot of concern in that time before World War I about the listlessness and directionlessness of boys, concern that boys would go bad if they didn’t have anything to hold onto. Here in the U.S. they had the same concerns.”

While others in the growing hobby of Scout collectibles tend to specialize in particular areas--collecting merit badges, for example--Allen says he collects everything. “I’m interested in the history of Scouting, and every item you come across tells you a little more,” he said. If those jodhpurs could only talk!

The early Scout uniforms in the United States were often surplus Army doughboy uniforms, and that is of some historical import, Allen said.

“At first there was a lot of resistance to Scouting from pacifists. There was quite a pacifist and isolationist movement then. I have some slogan pins from the time, ‘I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier,’ ‘No entangling alliances,’ things like that. And these sectors thought the Scouts were militaristic because they wore uniforms that were the same color as military uniforms, or even surplus doughboy uniforms.”

Until it was recognized by Congress in 1916, the Boy Scouts of America was only one of several scouting organizations duking it out for prominence in the United States. Others had similar names, such as the American Scouts and the Scouts of America. Some of these groups drilled with rifles and did other military training.

Early Boy Scouting was decidedly more pacific, though, if relatively rustic by today’s standards. Even city boys then usually weren’t far from a rural area, and Allen relates that it wasn’t unusual for Scouts to take to the woods for a week or two with no adult supervision.

“Some of them would even fell trees and build cabins. They might live in it for a whole summer, hunting game or bartering with local farmers for eggs and milk. They might only get a visit from a Scoutmaster on a weekend. Things were a lot different then, where I guess parents weren’t afraid to let their kids run off to the woods for quite a length of time and live on their own,” Allen said.

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Things weren’t altogether different when he began Scouting in Anaheim in the ‘60s. “Every so often we’d throw a pack on our backs and bicycle up to the Firestone Scout Camp in the Brea Hills beyond the oil fields. We’d camp there by ourselves. A ranger would come along and collect the 15-cent-a-day fee, and there was no other supervision. We wouldn’t get away with that today. They require now that every outing have at least two adult leaders in attendance, for safety and also for the child-molestation concerns that every organization has now.”

One might well be drawn to collect old Boy Scout items just for the more innocent times they reflect. He said getting into the hobby was a gradual thing:

“In being a leader for years, every so often I’d see a handbook I didn’t have and I’d pick it up and read through it. That just fed on itself, and I became more and more interested, with all the unique history and artwork--you know, Norman Rockwell started out illustrating for the Boy Scouts--and everything else. If you’ve been in the Scouting movement since 1963, 31 years, you start to develop an interest in it. I’ve spent more time in Scouting than I’ve been married.”

He and Sharon are nearing their 19th anniversary. She recently purchased a pre-1955 flint and steel fire-starting kit for him. She has collecting interests of her own, and parts of their vacations are spent checking out antique shops and garage sales in different climes.

While some of his items come from thrift shops, he’s spent as much as $600 for others, such as the 1910 handbooks. He estimates he now has some 4,000 pieces in his collection, and a bare fraction of that fits into his display at Nix Books.

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Of the items marked for sale there, he says: “I run that as a business, not a hobby, although the real reason for it is to try to sell extra things so I can continue to buy things I don’t have. In two years there, we haven’t really turned a profit yet.

“One of the advantages I see to it is boys can come in there and see some of the stuff, whereas before I had it in glass cases here, and my wife didn’t really want people tramping in all the time to see it. So now there’s a place they can look at it.”

He’d like to get his collection into a proper museum setting, both because he feels Scouting history warrants it, and because he’d rather not have to be paying the rent on it. A few years ago he talked to a local Boy Scout council office about putting displays in there, “but the council executive at the time said he didn’t want anything cluttering up the office,” Allen said.

He says Scouting history often reflects the times as well. For example, “during the early ‘70s, the Scouting program changed because of the culture change during the Vietnam War. There was a big backlash against uniforms, and everybody was trying to make things simpler. So during that time they really slackened off the requirements, got a fashion designer to make the uniform more appealing to young people and loosened up on having to wear the uniform so more people would stay in.”

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There is one bit of history he wishes the Boy Scouts had never been part of. Some of the most recent items in his collection are news clippings of the legal battle over the agnostic Anaheim Hills brothers who were thrown out of the Scouts for refusing to recognize God in the Scout oath. Allen, who is chairman of the board of deacons at his church, said: “We never used to make a religious issue of Scouting. If a boy wanted religion, he went to church.

“When I was a Scout, religion really wasn’t emphasized. Maybe we’d have a pastor at an annual awards banquet sometimes. But we never had a litmus test for saying, ‘Are you an atheist?’ It didn’t matter. The real push now is not from atheists who want to deny religion but more from the religious right who want to impose more and more religion on the Scout program and want to make it more of a religious organization.

“They’ve been changing requirements, so now there is a religious requirement in the Cub Scout program that never used to be there. And in the latest handbook, they have a requirement now for one of the Scout ranks that the boy has to lead the patrol in prayer before a meal on a camp-out. That was never there before. These are things that are creeping up. Some of us who have been in Scouting a long time are saddened by that.”

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He still thinks Scouting is the best thing going for kids, and he remains active as assistant Scoutmaster of Troop 543 in Orange.

“It’s definitely a good program. Boys can learn to operate in a team environment, where they go out and camp and have to fend somewhat for themselves. They learn to run their own patrols, learn how to be leaders and followers, how to rely on themselves. They experience the elements and high adventure in the outdoors,” he said.

Working as a project leader on the space station at McDonnell-Douglas, do the things he learned as a Scout--leadership, teamwork, starting fires with flint--come in handy?

“Absolutely. I’ve always put on my resume that I’m an Eagle Scout. I don’t know if that’s ever gotten me a job, but I figure it doesn’t hurt. And Scouting has taught me a lot about leadership. I earned my eagle fairly early and served in a number of leadership positions as a Scout and as an adult. It taught me to plan early and set goals and work within groups and teams.

“And nowadays, Scouting provides a lot of satisfaction for me to see boys advance and grow. You get these new kids that are really just kids. For them, life’s all comic books and just being out to play and having problems with attention. Then you see them mature over a period of years, from a point where they have trouble making a three-mile backpack to where they’re doing 60, 70 miles without a problem, taking on responsibility.

“You can spend five or eight years with a kid. Then when he comes back and helps as an adult leader, that gives you a real feeling of accomplishment, the sense that you’ve touched somebody’s life, that you’ve helped them make it in this world. There’s nothing like that,” Allen said with a smile.