This one will test me a little bit, fact is, a whole lot. I’m not real good with dates and averages and scores and stuff like that, but I’ll give it a shot. It was back in the 1950’s when I was about, I don’t know, ten or eleven years, twelve. Anyway I was a member of the Boy Scouts. There weren’t very many of us and don’t ask me to tell you names. It was interesting for two reasons.
Number one, we were invited to football games for FREE! All we had to do was get a parent to take us and it was, like I said, free for as many as wanted to go. It was called Scout Day at Baylor. I wasn’t much of a Scout and I wasn’t a Baylor fan but every time they had Scout Day, I took advantage of it. The interesting thing back then, now they are stocked full of mediocre teams or teams that are supposed to be non-conference games, but these were not non-conference games. I mean these were legitimate. I remember one year they played Arkansas and it was games like that. So for three years or so we hopped into whatever car we were taking. My dad took us one year and anyway we survived. It was a good time and good ballgames and all that. I enjoyed those!
I also enjoyed something else with Scouts. They had one year- I swear I don’t remember much of this – I was about twelve maybe, whatever. They had, at the lake, a Camporee or something like that. A tremendous number of kids were there. A lot of Scouts were there and it was competition. You’re not going to see it anywhere else. They had a three leg race. They had competition on getting a fire started and things. About the only thing I got involved in that year, me and another kid (I can’t remember a name here) but we were in the competition of starting a fire with nothing but flint and steel. In other words, you had no fire starting kits, but obviously a lot of kids couldn’t get a fire started. It was after you won that you compared it to the rest of them and see what you got.
So, the flint and steel thing is not terribly favorable to kids who aren’t – what am I trying to say – well they’re not very good at it. Anyway, we got the go signal on starting a fire with flint and steel and low and behold I struck the flint and it just erupted. The judges came over and looked and tried to figure how the fire started, and I said, “I just hit it”. There was nothing on the leaves and stuff and it just exploded and caught on fire. I’m sitting there with my mouth open. The others were turning in their times and they were like 30 seconds or so. And then there was me……2.3 or 3.2, something like that. At the end of that day, they were already calling State headquarters. We had started the flint and steel fire and we were ranked Number 1 in Texas. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Number 1!” They announced it to the entire crowd of kids that we were Number 1 in the State of Texas! By the time we got up the next morning, we were Number 1 in the Nation! I think it lasted all of about one week. But, that was my two big things with Scouts. Seeing the Baylor Bears play and the flint and steel competition at Campo-something at Lake Brownwood. It was a great year!
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].