Boy Scouts celebrate 100th year

By Ryan Howard (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published 06:00 a.m., February 7, 2010

On Sunday, the Boy Scouts of America celebrated its 100th birthday, and some members of the local Oxcart Trails scout district couldn’t be more pleased.

The Boy Scouts of America was founded on Feb. 8, 1910 by Chicago publisher William D. Boyce. Today, it is a thriving nationwide leadership program which, in 2008, boasted over 2.8 million current traditional members, including many people locally.

Art Stortroen joined the Boy Scout troop 305 in 1935, and he eventually graduated as an Eagle Scout. He then worked as a scoutmaster with the troop for 35 years, and he is now the chairman of the troop committee. He said that outdoor skills, critical thinking and self reliance were all things he learned through scouting.

Stortroen’s scoutmaster tenure grew out of both a love of the program and desire to help kids, a goal he certainly hopes he achieved. “A lot of boys have come up to me since and said, ‘I wouldn’t be the man I am today if it wasn’t for Boy Scouts,’” he said.

Stortroen certainly sees the positive effects scouting has had on his life. He cited “learning citizenship and the importance of faith” as two of the most important things scouting gave him. “I think I learned leadership and how to... get along with people,” he said. “[Scouts] learn so much that you use everyday and you don’t realize that you’ve learned.”

Jim Stratton is the senior district executive of the Oxcart Trails district, which covers Grant, Otter Tail, Richland and Wilkin counties in Minnesota and North Dakota. He said that the scouts are as viable and needed today as they were when the organization was founded. “It’s a big milestone when any organization can be in existence for 100 years,” he said.

There are going to be national and local events commemorating that milestone all year long, including the scouts’ local annual food drive in March, which Stratton said will be ramped up this year for extra effectiveness. The culminating event will be a “little jamboree” in early June in Bismarck, N.D.

Stratton, like Stortroen, stressed the importance of the Boy Scouts, and he added that one of the best things about it is the idea of family involvement. “[Parents] make it their own,” he said. “They instill values and ethics into the boys.”

Those values, he explained, will pay off later in life. “You build a bond and form some kind of relationship with them so that once they get to their teenage years, they’ll want some kind of connection with you,” he said, concluding that that combination of morality, life lessons and recreation could be what has made the organization as successful as it’s been. “We call it ‘having fun with a purpose.’”

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