Boy Scouts and the Space Program

So, how do these two topics tie together? Read on…

I was in a Boy Scout troop at the North End Methodist Church across the street from the James Bowie Junior High School. I made Tenderfoot, 2nd Class and 1st Class, but became disenchanted with scouting and left the troop. I did not like the roughness of camping and eating food with sand and ashes in it. Also our scout master was imperfect.

One of the things that scouting is famous for is camping out. We had a couple of camps available to our troop. Camp Metigua (sp) was somewhere outside Silsbee and it was a primitive camp - no facilities. The better camp was Camp Urland near Woodville. I did a one week summer camp there in the summer of ’58. What I recall is living in a tent, swimming, doing a compass course, shooting .22 rifles at the shooting range, learning Morse code and swimming in both the lake and the pool. I am just not a camper.

We were on a weekend outing from 3-5 October in 1957. Mom and Dad drove up on Sunday the 5th to pick me up. Dad immediately handed me the Sunday Beaumont Enterprise. Covering the front page in red type: REDS IN SPACE!!!

The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik.

A propaganda victory for the Soviets, Sputnik circled the earth every 90 minutes or so and its onboard transmitter emitted a couple of beeps per second. The Soviets had announced the frequency of the transmission so that the entire world could tune in and hear the beeps.

A few days later Dad took us all to a dark spot on Bigner road and we watched ‘Sputnik’ go across the western sky just after dusk. We probably did not see the satellite itself, but rather its launch vehicle which was in the same orbit.

The launch put the fear of God into the US leadership. If they could launch a satellite, they could launch a missile as well. The US scrambled to catch up. The famous missile gap was fear inducing.

I benefited from this ‘catching up’ since science and math education were emphasized - my favorites. In high school both our physics and chemistry courses had new curricula developed to help close the space gap.