Previously by Abbey Fenbert: The Pitch Meeting for Wishbone
On my honor:
The horse was too high. I was no coward. It’s just there was an assessment, and logic deemed the horse was way too high up.
I will never be good at selling things. Dad will never take the cookie sales sheet “to his work” and sell boxes by the dozen, yet I will covet the catalogue of prizes and imagine that thermos with the dancing samoa is mine.
Our most popular campfire song was a rousing but truly shuddersome ballad of the sinking of the Titanic. Pretty sure my mom was the one who taught it to the troop.
Despite reciting the pledge to “serve God and my country” in the Girl Scout Promise, the fact is that I do not believe in “deities” or “nation-states” and have no intention of rendering services unto them. Nor do I “help people at all times.” Right now I’m lounging barefoot in a papasan chair; I’m barely helping myself. As for living “by the Girl Scout Law,” I have never recognized the Girl Scouts as a legitimate legislative body.
One camping trip, I refused to go to the bathroom for at least two days in a row. The outhouse was weak. Not so my will.
Was it bad that on our “Middle Eastern Cultures Field Trip” we did a make-your-own-headscarves craft? They didn’t seem to mind at the mosque, but I’m still not sure my seafoam-green lace hijab was entirely halal. Cool field trip though.
Best field trip: the sleepover at the science museum.
Worst field trip: horseback riding. Get lower, horse. Hard pass.
The reason I went on a rogue mission to earn the Friendship Badge was that losing out on the riding badge really stung. NB: The Friendship Badge was super easy.
“Oh, the Lord is good to me / And so I thank the Lord / For giving me / The things I need / The sun and the rain and the apple seed / The Lord is good to me.” That is the Johnny Appleseed Grace, a perennial favorite of Troop 526. At least in the early years, there was a lot of praying at our meetings. Do people know how much praying goes on?
Flags, too. There are lots of flags.
Reading the Girl Scout Handbook is a good way to demonstrate troop spirit while also not participating in any group activity. Did you know that Juliette Gordon Low pronounced “idea” as “idear?” Did you know that periods happen? These are things you can learn from the Girl Scout Handbook!
Once, in Brownies, I stepped on a girl’s foot. Just to see what violence was like.
Daisy, Brownie, Junior, Cadette, Senior. How these ranks link together in a chain of promotion mystifies all and we dare not ask.
At International Friendship Camp (it was in Canada) I made one friend. I thought she’d be amused if I sang to her the funny new lyrics I invented to the “Make new friends / keep the old / one is silver and the other’s gold” song. So I sang “Make new friends / forget the old / they are stupid and growing mold!” But she was not amused.
International Friendship Camp exponentially increased the number of flags present.
Yay, Winter Camp! Let’s all go to Winter Camp. Winter Camp is really just “winter, not at your house” because we stay in a building with indoor plumbing.
We meet with the Cadettes, and it is like visiting a convent of 21st-century nuns: their devotion has not diminished with their numbers, but anxiety flickers across their brows with every mention of the future. Will we be the ones to carry Juliette’s torch? As these accomplished teens regale us with stories of the service projects they’ve organized and awards they’ve won, my eyes go wide with ambition. But my heart knows the truth. I will never bridge to Cadettes. Cadetteship is a bridge too far. A horse too high.
I was more of an observer in the crafting of my Sit-Upon.
The chorus of the Titanic song was “Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives / It was sad when the gre-eat ship went down, down, down!”
My single greatest (and perhaps only) contribution to Troop 526 was the writing of cookie sale advertisements in rhyming couplets. We read these during church announcements. Upon reflection, I’m not sure anyone asked me to do this.
I wanted camp to be more like the Molly Saves the Day book wherein American Girl Molly plays a large-scale game of Capture the Flag and emerges victorious due to her superior knowledge of the D-Day invasion. Our Girl Scout camps never involved thinly veiled reenactments of World War II.
Perhaps by now you suspect that I was a difficult, moody, asocial child. Perhaps you should direct your attention to my Friendship Badge.
I’m not sure that I or my mother ever felt any sincere desire to participate in Girl Scouts, but we did, for six years, through all the Bridge Ceremonies and star pins, through the four seasons of camp, through several mutually embarrassing presentations of Mother’s Day crafts and many pitchers of Tang. Why did we do it? Female empowerment? Community engagement? An attempt to instill in me some combination of competence, generosity, cooperation and salesmanship? The reasons may never be clear to either of us.
(Thin Mints. The reason is Thin Mints.)
Tags: abbey fenbert, childhood, girl scouts, nikki loves the girl scouts and will love them forever despite having to learn the world’s most racist camp song, that titanic song tho, the girl scout law, weird true tales, you can’t learn how to participate in a flag ceremony without flags
“Reading the Girl Scout Handbook is a good way to demonstrate troop spirit while also not participating in any group activity.” I did this too! I hated Girl Scouts! My parents made me participate until I finished elementary school at which point I was like “hell no” and quit. There was no camping, too much talking about feelings, and the other girls were really mean. 11 year old Floridagal saw no benefit to sticking with it.
I never made it further than Junior Scout, and eventually I jumped ship to the Venture Scouts instead. They had more of what I was looking for – that is, less hawking goods to strangers and more backpacking over long weekends.
However, Girl Scouts did do one great thing for me: taught me how to change a car tire. No joke. When I was about 12 or 13, my troop went on a field trip to a nearby Kia car dealership, where they showed us how to check the oil, refill the wiper fluid, stuff like that. I didn’t encounter a flat tire situation until college, a decade later, when a friend’s car got a flat. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t recall exactly how to change the tire and was able to show him how it works.
Holy shit, that’s pretty goddamn awesome. Never learned anything nearly that practical in Boy Scouts, except for first aid, and never had to use that.
Boy Scouts get to do more cool camping shit, though. My dad was the troop leader for my brother’s scout troop, and I pestered him to let me go on all their backpacking and canoeing trips. If I hadn’t done that, the extent of my “camping” experience would have been staying in cabins and “practicing” setting up tents (but never actually staying in said tents overnight).
it just depends on the troop and the leaders and, as you get older, what the girls agitate to do — I grew up in Oregon and we had outdoor trips all year round in Girl Scouts.
We had so much camping!
That sounds awesome!
I was also an extremely ambivalent Girl Scout. Sold the bare cookie minimum, safety-pinned my patches on because I could never be bothered to sew them on properly. The year before I was supposed to graduate to Juniors, I dropped a hint to my mom that I was totally over Girl Scouting and she went “oh good, because that would’ve been way more commitment than either of us wants.”
We have never been a joining type of family.
One of my treasured memories of Girl Scouts was gathering together minutes before having a ceremony, sharing a hot glue gun to try to get all of our patches on. None of us bothered to learn how to sew. (To this day, my seams are reinforced with staples and double sided tape.)
But honestly, I loved Girl Scouts. Mostly because we didn’t sell anything or try to learn how to sew. It was just an excuse to start fires, play with knives, and run around in the woods.
I was a Girl Scout until I graduated from high school, but those last four years were really just community service projects, camping/sailing/rafting/skiing/road trips with my besties, and a few weeks of camp-counseling every summer. My high school Girl Scout leader flew across the country to attend my wedding and two former troopmates were bridesmaids. I now co-lead a Daisy troop. I LOVE THE GIRL SCOUTS I WILL FIGHT YOU ALL.
I was only in Girl Scouts for 3 years, but I have some great memories of Camp Menzies! I am now a leader/co-leader for my daughter’s Cadette troop; I ALSO LOVE THE GIRL SCOUTS AND I HAVE YOUR BACK, NIKKI.
Wait Camp Menzies can’t ACTUALLY be the name of a girls’ camp. Or am I just too completely juvenile? Probably that one.
I visited Camp Menzies once on a field trip from Camp Sugar Pine. It was right after the 6th Harry Potter book came out, and only a few girls had been able to have the book shipped to them at camp. The bloodlust was so intense that the entire camp was forbidden from talking about it.
It’s real! https://girlscoutshcc.org/gshccadmin/site1/girlsc… What were they thinking?
I mean, now that I am more parent-age than camper-age, I’m trying to imagine dropping my kid off and saying, “Have fun at Camp Menzies” and having to stifle the giggles until I could roll up the car windows. And I’m CERTAIN I would slip up when addressing the care packages, those would all be headed straight to Camp Menses for sure.
I AM INCAPABLE OF HATE OR LOVE #ambivalence
I have too much love for Girl Scouts (lifetime member aww yiss) so I completely understand!
(I was a Daisy leader for my gold award project, the learning petals were super fun to teach and work with!)
I just realized I’m a Brownie leader now. Those girls are bridging in about a month!
I learned the Johnny Appleseed grace in Quaker meeting, but now I realize we said grace before snack-time in Girl Scouts too. I am trying to remember those…the Adams Family theme song one anybody?
I can tell you ALL THE GRACES (although a few years ago, our camp director realized, “Yeah, as a non-denominational organization, we should probably remove all graces that have a direct reference to God.” So that took most of them out of the rotation).
Addams Family grace was a common one. Also Superman grace. Also Tony the Tiger grace (“Grrrrrrrace!” That was the entirety of it).
At my camp, the Johnny Appleseed grace was cursed. If you sang it, it would rain. This was accepted camp wisdom.
I’m DYING because we went to 4H camp and our grace was SO BORING. (God is great and God is good, and we thank him for this food. By his hands must all be fed, give us Lord our daily bread. Ahhhhhh-meeeeeeen)
Come on share, what was Superman grace?
Emmalouska posted it below–although we sang “God” instead of “cooks” up until my last year as a counselor. We also had a different last line: “Thank you God” (both arms above head) “For giving us food” (hands on hips in classic Superman-standing pose)
Oh we believed that Johnny Appleseed would cause rain as well. I know Johnny Appleseed from Guide camp and Bible Camp, but Addams Family and Superman from Catholic school. We still do Graces that invoke God even though were non-denominational and the Guide’s Own handbook even mentions you shouldn’t mention Easter if you have non-Christian girls in your troop so it’s almost odd.
THAT ONE WAS MY FAVORITE! We thank the Lord for giving/the food we need for living/Let’s hurry up and eat it/before it walks away! doodly-do *snap snap* doodly-do *snap snap* doodly-do, doodly-do, doodly-do, A-MEN!
(sorry, that song was quite literally my favorite part of being in girl scouts)
Wow, our version was “We thank the Lord for giving/the things we need for living/like food and fun and friendship/we thank thee now O Lord.”
Which is much less interesting.
Ahahaha. I went to a bible camp and our version was “We’re thirsty and we’re hungry/we want to fill our tummies/the food looks really yummy/and so we thank the Lord.”
Yes!! I was hoping someone would remember the Addams Family theme song. Our version went, “We thank the Lord for giving/the food we need for living/And now we’re gonna eat it/Because we really need it/Amen *snap, snap* Amen *snap, snap* A-men, A-men, A-men *snap snap*
Controversial stance: Canadian Girl Guide cookies are far superior to American Girl Scout cookies.
Where would an American be able to get these Canadian cookies? you know, for science…
And the reverse! Also for science.
Border smuggling cookies?
Also the old Canadian Girl Guide cookies were better than the new ones, at least for the vanilla.
(Yes, I know it’s been, like, twenty years, but the old vanilla cookies were really good.)
Don’t remind me of the heartbreak.
Perhaps the old cookies will return someday…
They’d probably turn out to be one of those things I loved as a kid and don’t care for as an adult. Or so I keep trying to tell myself.
(I’ve heard it suggested that Mr. Christie reused the recipe for Golden Oreos, and I admit there is some similarity in the cookie part, but the Oreo cream is nowhere near as good. Wikipedia tells me that Golden Oreos with Birthday Cake cream exist, and those sound to me like they might be marginally closer, but it doesn’t look like they’re available in Canada.)
(My understanding is that they had to change recipes when they changed manufacturers, because something something intellectual property something, so I don’t hold out much hope of ever seeing the old recipe cookies again.)
Yes especially the Canadian mint ones!!
I don’t know I got kind of sick of them because I could never sell all my boxes as a kid and my mom always wound up buying them and putting them in the freezer (though the mint ones are better frozen, especially with hot chocolate) and we wound up eating a lot of them.
I liked Girl Scouts in the Daisy/Brownie era and then by the time I was a Junior it was a little more like this. There’s that year where you transition to thinking “selling cookies is fun and great!” to “selling cookies is like shaking down my neighbors for money” and you just don’t want to do it anymore.
Speaking of racist girl scout camp songs, did anyone else learn “Running Bear and White Dove”? I liked it at the time (probably because I was super into Pocahontas and also ridiculously tragic love stories), but now I realize that “they’ll always be together in that happy hunting ground” may not be super pc.
But besides that and the super-Christian Cadettes leader I had, Girl Scouts was pretty sweet.
Yeeeeeeeeep. We sang that one a lot.
I haven’t heard that one, but there was one about an eagle (flying so high, circling the universe) and it had a bunch of supposedly Native American words that were probably so garbled that I doubt they meant anything other than LOOK OUT, THERE’S WHITE PEOPLE O’ER HERE.
We didn’t sing that one, but there was a weird camp call-and-answer chant we did, and AGAIN DID NOT REALIZE UNTIL I WAS AN ADULT it was in the vein of that cutesy mocking-fake-words thing non-Native people do to mock Native languages.
I’m more bummed than ever that I never wrote or pitched a piece on super racist camp songs.
Never too late!
OWAH – TAGU – SIAM?
That was a hit song when I started high school in 1959. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9V-9dSPb_A
BRB, googling the full lyrics for the Titanic song.
If you happen to want to here a couple of random Girl Scout sisters singing the full thing, that exists, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rP1gD9xXkU
I learned it in fourth(?) grade, at some sort of art history class for “gifted” children. Paul Klee and the Titanic, that is my takeaway after almost forty years. Yes, the teacher taught us the song somewhere in between Klee and American Gothic.
It’s a Woody Guthrie song isn’t it?
I had forgotten ALL about that song, but we definitely sang it in my troop too. The best(?) part was the enthusiastic echo-shout of “TOO BAD” after the second “It was sad” in the chorus.
And now it’s in my head all day.
OH they built the ship Titanic
to sail the ocean blue!
And they thought they had a ship
that the water would never go through!
But the lord’s almighty hand
said the ship would NEVER LAND!
Oh it was sad when the great ship went down!
OH IT WAS SAD! (SO SAD!)
OH IT WAS SAD! (TOO BAD!)
It was sad when the great ship went down! (to the bottom of the seeeeaaaaaaa)
Husbands and wives,
little children lost their LIVES!
Oh it was sad when the great ship went down!
(alternately, Uncles and aunts, little children peed their pants…)
I’m sorry, in your version did you not yell “hallelujah!” after the second “it was sad?”
…just us then?
I earned a reading badge, a writing badge and a riding badge. As the twig is bent…
Wait WAIT there was a writing badge? (Maybe I have it? I feel like I probably amassed a majority of the sitting badges.)
When I moved up from Brownies to Junior Girl Scouts, all of my Brownie group was put into one Junior tribe and I was put into a different one. I’m still not sure if this was some sort of Mean Girls esque situation or if was simply due to scheduling conflicts with dance and/or softball, but I did not last beyond that first Juniors year. (Even though, ironically, many of the girls in that group ended up being my friends later). My most solid Junior memory is burning the fuck out of my finger on a hot glue gun and refusing to tell anyone since I had already been warned to be careful.
So, in Canada, Boy Scouts became fully gender integrated in the 90s (and are just known as “Scouts”). As such, I spent much of my youth arguing with dudes (both my brother, and my now-husband) about why Girl Guides (Girl Scouts) still needed to exist. Their point: since Scouts was supposedly fully equal, what was the point of having a separate group for women?
When I got to university, I ended up writing a long paper about why Girl Guides still needed to exist in this world, stating that Guides focused specifically on preparing girls for the larger world, with focuses on leadership and STEM and others. It might have been a slightly bitter paper.
I was a moody asocial child, which is why I so loved the horses. Horses don’t make fun of your teeth. Horses will always appreciate a sugar cube. Sure, sometimes they will nip your leg, and there is A LOT of poop, but still. Team horses.
“I wanted camp to be more like the Molly Saves the Day book wherein American Girl Molly plays a large-scale game of Capture the Flag and emerges victorious due to her superior knowledge of the D-Day invasion. Our Girl Scout camps never involved thinly veiled reenactments of World War II.”
Are you me???? All I have ever wanted is to reenact Molly Saves the Day.
Are you both me??? I even dressed up as Molly from that book one Halloween (I think I even had my mom make the same costume for my cheap not-American-Girl-Doll doll).
When I was at summer camp once we played capture the flag and I tried to enact my own Molly-style D-Day assault on the other team.
It didn’t go nearly as well. 🙁
YES! And then learning real Capture The Flag is mostly people running around like chickens with their heads cut off and NO STRATEGY. Come on. STOP RUNNING AND LET’S PLAN THINGS!
It seems like someone needs to put together the most epic capture the flag competition of all time. Forget these spartan races or color runs or ragnars, let’s get a Molly Saves the Day-style capture the flag day going. Dozens of us are dying to participate!
I really think someone needs to start a Camp American Girl, but only admit grown-ups. (Also, admittance is restricted to people old enough to remember when the whole deal was infinitely superior and run by The Pleasant Company.) Each day can be devoted to a different book. (What? They’re short? Granted, we might need a long weekend for Molly Saves the Day.) During Felicity week we can illegally attempt to tame horses from neighboring camps, rescue runaways in the woods, and refuse to drink tea. Kirsten week should probably be more about quilting bees and making Saint Lucia buns and less about bees and bears and cholera. We’d have to tread lightly with Addy week, (thinly-veiled WWII Capture the Flag games are one thing, but Escape from Slavery Relay Races probably wouldn’t go over well) but there could totally be sweet potato pudding, gardening, ice-cream-making and puppet shows. (Clearly, I took away the important messages from these books.) For Samantha we can teach people to read, make gingerbread houses, (in the summer because fuck the cold) and chase a dog around New York City. Molly week will involve dumping boys’ underwear on the girls they like, one-roller-skate-and-jumprope-leashed-imaginary-dog relay races, and culminate in a total reenactment of Molly Saves the Day. I guess we could include newer historical girls, too, but none of this Girl of the Year bullshit.
As I remember it, Molly Saves the Day involved pretty much just a ton of poison ivy and nothing else.
But that might just be me; I think most of my childhood was spent in abject terror of poison ivy.
I remember being fairly into Girl Scouts for a few years as a Brownie. Lots of craft projects, which were totally my jam at the time. We never did go camping though, which was my ultimate desire. When I was in 5th grade, our scout leader told us if each person in our troop sold at least X boxes of cookies, we would get to go to an honest to god, overnight camp. We all did and yet we never got to go to camp. The injustice was great. I quit. I did, however, get a sweet teal stuffed lion after all of my hard hours of cookie selling. SMH.
I started out in Boy Scouts in a small town, and had the stereotypical small-town Cub/Boy Scout experience: four-season camping, working on merit badges and crafts of dubious practicality, etc. Moved to a big city and most of the people in my troop were dicks and they never seemed to get my records transferred from my previous troop, and I wasn’t about to start over from scratch, so I quit and found a group of friends who were into Monty Python and punk rock and general mischief, and turned my scout uniform into a Punk Skout costume for Halloween, including merit badges that seemed to be pinned directly to my arm. Good times.
ok – I really like the “pinned to your arms” skout badges.
Okay, but the refrain of that Titanic song is so fun to sing as a small child (OH IT WAS SAD! SO SAD!). Mom taught it to me before I was ever even a girl scout. And her mom had sang it at camp–and then an adult at that camp told them not to sing the song because she knew people who had died on the Titanic.
The history of camp songs is endlessly fascinating. Some of the songs we sing at camp today are songs my Grandma sang. And some camp songs are seemingly everywhere, but they all have slight differences by region.
(Incidentally, my grandmother also sang the “Suzie had a steamboat” song as a child. But with two fewer verses than I know. And mom sang the song with one fewer verse. So I’m really curious about what new verse the next generation will add.)
The Titanic song is the best campfire song ever. It’s a song and a ghost story rolled into one! It is the music of campfire itself.
Additional unauthorized Titanic lyrics sung at my brother’s sleepaway camp: “Uncle and aunts, little children lost their pants, oh it was sad when that great ship went down!”
They built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue
And they thought they’d built a ship that the water wouldn’t go through
But they filled it up with beer
And it sank right off the pier
It was sad when the great ship went down
that’s the one true and living lyric from the Titanic song.
Our version was “Husbands and wives/Itty-bitty children lost their lives!” “Itty-bitty children” must be sung in the most annoying treble squeal possible.
Then your grandmother will come in and scold you for being so disrespectful to the dead. Sorry, Nana.
I was a Rainbow, a Brownie and a Girl Guide from the ages of about 5 to 13, and then in my teens went back to volunteer as a young leader with my local Brownie pack and did it for an unconscionable seven years. I hated it, but once I was doing it I didn’t really feel like I could quit. I always had conflicted feelings about it as a child (the Brownie Promise then included the words “I promise to love my God, to serve the Queen and my country” (etc.) and even as a seven-year-old I was not hugely into that, as a burgeoning atheist republican. Our Brown Owl was immensely unpleasant and disliked me and my sister in part because we never went to church parades. Volunteering with Brownies in recent years was unpleasant for many reasons; I found most of the children irritating, and we never seemed to do anything interesting or challenging, which was shit. I refused to become a proper adult member because I didn’t feel comfortable making an oath I wouldn’t be prepared to keep (leader in charge: “Oh, most people just don’t think about it!”) and in the last few months before I left had several arguments with the other leaders, who were mainly very conservative. One was about the fact that I felt that one of the campfire songs we sang was deeply racist (“oh, I’m sure Native Americans say things that are just as bad about us!”); another was about the changes to the promise, from “to love my god” to “to be true to myself and my values” (or words to that effect). All the other leaders hated it and my former Brown Owl even said that Brownies was a Christian organization (not true, according to the Guiding website) and people who didn’t like it could go somewhere else. But when I was a child, at least, we didn’t have anything else – my town had several Brownie packs, but other similar organisations were few and far between. And there were things that I enjoyed about it, despite everything, and I have many fond memories; the willingness to just exclude anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable with Christianity makes me really angry.
I’m sorry you had that experience – come on over to my town where all the Brownies are atheists, we swear love the planet, be true to our selves and save the earth, and we tried to get outdoors when it was not absolutely freezing. We also planted things, made a LOT of things (I was always willing to teach sewing, quilting, tying of knots, etc.) I had the most fun with my troop of tiny Dasies, but part of that might have been because there were five and I could keep track.
I am Right There With You on the grown up Girl Scout pledge, and I had a two day freakout over being mandatory reporters for suspected abuse and endangerment. But a lot of it was fun. I had to quit when my co-leader (who did all the paperwork) (she said she </i liked /> it, I swear) left me for her home state. also we had a couple really great college kids in from the local women’s college, who helped me think about how to help kids grow up.
I was in girl scouts for maybe two years, and it was miserable. I remember my mom enrolling my two younger sisters in a Brownie troop (thus securing our family’s cookie supply for another year) and asking me, “are you *sure* you don’t want to do Girl Scouts again this year”. Thankfully, she took my adamant “NO” as an answer, and I never so much as looked at my old sash, again.
Nothing will ever be worse than the two weeks I spent at summer camp. I was in a cabin with seven other girls, and I was the only one brave enough to kill/exist within fifty feet of spiders, which prompted the other girls to nickname me “Brave-O” and put me on spider-killing duty all week. I…didn’t appreciate it.
“Brave-O” is awesome-o.
If applied correctly, Girl Scout activities generate clever, indepdendent, thoughtful people. Exactly the sort of people who are deeply suspicious of Girl Scout activities.
(I was a counselor during college. While painting the art cabin, we horrified a Evangelical Christian counselor by pointing out that a full half of the counseling staff was lesbian or bisexual. *That’s* Girl Scouts in a nutshell right there.)
You are completely correct.
That is all.
I’m kind of pissed none of you have even asked about the racist song I learned at Girl Scout camp. It involved a Chinese laundry and there were hand motions.
… I have been reading all of the comments, hoping someone else would ask.
I came here to ask! But based on the information provided so far, I don’t think I know it?
I was scrolling the comments for more details!! Maybe I knew it? Why would there be a Chinese laundry song?! Oh, America…
Was it this one? http://everything2.com/title/I+sing+banned+Girl+S…
We sang that one at camp. Looking back, I’m pretty horrified that we did.
YES THAT IS THE ONE. [shudder] I was one of, I don’t know, three Asian kids at most at a camp full of white girls when we learned this song at my day camp in southern Oregon.* In the NINETEEN NINETIES.
* So surrounded by whiteness was I as a kid that the horrible racism of the song, and the fucked-up-ness of ME of all people learning/singing it, would not hit me until years later.
YES. OH MY GOD THAT SONG.
That was a hit song when I started high school in 1959. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9V-9dSPb_A
We had a racist song that was essentially wordless… it was sung in three parts, intending to emulate some sort of camel caravan of the homogeneous Middle East that lived in our minds. The central line was Zum Gali Gali, which was supposed to be what the presumably-Arab camel driver was singing.
Likewise, it did not occur to me that Ging Gang Gooley is probably racist gibberish as opposed to generic gibberish for years.
My favorite aunt taught us the alternate lyrics “uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants” but my mom wouldn’t let us sing it that way because it made light of a tragedy. Which is kind of a stretch now that I think about it.
My mom sang it “Uncles and aunts, little children wet their pants” which is probably even worse
But no doubt entirely factual. I’m sure I would have under the circumstances.
In my girl scouts handbook, the girls were all cheerful and happy, right up until Cadette–the Cadette was using crutches, and the Senior was in a wheelchair. I understand now, in hindsight, that they were trying to be very inclusive. But at the time, I seriously and legitimately thought that that was how Girl Scouts got you…they WOULDN’T LET YOU LEAVE. Like, this was an example of what would happen to me, the longer I stayed. They’d break my kneecaps so I could sell more cookies, or something equally horrific.
I quit after Junior level. So.
Like many of my childhood activities I joined with expectations of doing stuff and learning things and having fun and when a grand total of none of those things happened I lost interest. I stayed in girl scouts longer than I should have just for the cookie access.
I just wish Girl Scouts as an organization had provided more support, instead of leaving so much up to individual leaders and troops. I was a Brownie and then a…whatever comes after that…in elementary school, and our council never provided any meaningful support or programming beyond the day camp I went to once, which was pretty boring–they just sold us books and uniforms and put us to work selling cookies. Eventually our leader/my mom got burned out. I am 100% behind the progressive policies I hear about Girl Scouts of America having, and the idea of forming connections between girls based on cooperation and skills-building. But when I was a Scout I couldn’t have named a national GSA policy if you’d paid me.
The sleepover at the Museum of Science was ABSOLUTELY the best field trip, you are right about that
anyways my troop kept falling apart bc of lack of interest, or else I probably would have kept up all the way thru high school. But by the time I got my Silver Award it was just me and one other girl, and we both had a full slate of high school extracurriculars, so we quit there.
my parents were actually pretty innovative about the lack of interest in camping shown by the other girls- my mom and I went along with an older troop when I was about 10, and in 6th and 7th grade, they sent me to an overnight camp by myself, independent of my troop, so I could have the same experiences my brother did at his summer camp.
I was a passionate Girl Scout from age 5 to age 19. I was a camp counselor, I earned hundreds of badges, my bronze, silver, and gold awards, and sold over 1500 boxes of cookies a year. It was hard work but the dedication and open-mindedness it taught me made it so worth it. I still love GSUSA and their mission to empower young girls.
That being said I laughed so hard reading this article because it’s all so true, especially the bit about the sit-upon and also the friendship badge. Maybe I was more ambivalent than I remember?
We definitely didn’t pray at our meetings, though. Most years at camp we would sing grace by replacing “Lord” or “God with “Cooks”. It still feels more natural to me to sing “cooks”.
The Superman Grace, Camp Elk River version:
(to the tune of the superman theme song)
Thank you cooks for giving us food (One fist in air, one fist on hip like superman flying)
Thank you cooks for giving us food (opposite fist in air/on hip)
For the food that we eeeeeat (Switch arms and lean towards arm in air)
For the friends that we meeeeeeet (Switch arms again)
Thank you cooks! (Both arms in air like superman flying, optional zooming around the dining hall before sitting down to eat)
Y’all sang the song that went “I rolled into a sewer, and that is where I died/they didn’t call it murdering, they called it sewer-cide” at Girl Scout Camp, right? I often mumbled that verse because I felt really uncomfortable singing about death and suicide.
I don’t know whether it was a result of getting older, or differences between the troops I was in (or, more likely, a little of both), but Girl Scouts rapidly became way less fun after, like, 13 or so. Back in Brownies and Juniors, it was a whole lot of hanging out with friends, going camping, feeling like we were super awesome, etc. By Cadettes, I was in a troop where nobody wanted to go camping (even yurt camping on the coast, where you are inside in bunk beds and there is a heater and a roof) and it seemed like every other meeting revolved around learning beauty tips.
I was still sad when my parents made me quit (high school is a time for Serious Things, not after-school activities), but I wish my last years in Scouts would’ve been as great as my earliest ones.
Faked Mom’s signature on badge completion forms, never looked back.
Actually enjoyed the craft-y parts, and would have loved riding, but: fuck camping, fuck camping so much, with its outdoorsiness and its dirt and its CATERPILLARS OH MY GOD GO AWAY. And RAIN. Camping in good weather could maybe kind of be fun if you look at it sideways without bugs; camping in the rain is stark masochism without any of the sexy qualities generally associated with that. (I did read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for the first time on a Girl Scout camping trip; I’m not sure whether that’s a positive or negative. Almost as terrifying as the damn caterpillars.)
Also, the cookie sales, as mentioned above, started seeming a little sketchy. Maybe back in the thirties when “selling things door to door” was an actual non-serial-killer-y job, but now…does the GSA just assume a lot more future Avon Ladies than actually exist these days? I have the same question about the school “wrapping paper” sales, actually: I mean, they say they’re “building skills”, but the only modern jobs where those skills would seem useful are, like, telemarketer and the really unfortunate versions of drug dealer/prostitute.*
All of that said: go them for being good on LGBT issues, and also for making a damn fine Caramel DeLite.
*I mean, even your more upscale coke dealers don’t cold-call, is the impression I get.
In third grade, my gramma took the cookie order form to where she worked: the local mall.
“I” sold three hundred boxes. I got a wallet–blue plastic with a bunny proclaiming my skill at selling cookies. I used it for YEARS.
I was totally one of those nerdy kids who wore her uniform (including sash!) to school on the days we had meetings.
I finally got rid of my brownie and junior girl scout guidebooks when I was 23 and regret it now! But I still have most of my patches.
I was never a Girl Guide, (Canadian version of Girl Scouts) but I was a Guider for six years, by virtue of having a daughter in the troop and an ability/willingness to play the guitar for campfire time.
Things look very different when you’re a leader – the sleepover at the science museum, the sleepover at the aquarium – the program coordinators think that a 1:00 am bedtime is perfectly acceptable, but there is something peculiarly disagreeable about having to wrangle large groups of small girls after midnight – exhausted beyond all patience, the girls just want to lie down, and I am stuck telling that one mother (purportedly here as a ‘chaperone’, really here to push her kid to the front of every line) that no, she can’t set up a queen-sized air mattress for her little princess right in front of the beluga exhibit because all the girls have to fit into that space, and her daughter’s comfort may be important to her, but all the girls’ view of the belugas is important to me.
I spent so much time organizing a fair view of the belugas for all the girls that I forgot to claim a space for my daughter and me.
Oh hai! I did that too. I admit I am delighted to hear good things from the kids who did it because I remember a different set of things:
The science museum… the lateness of the hour, the insistence of the troublemaking child that ghost stories are necessary, the floor, the distance from the bathrooms, the lights, the darkness… I think the late bedtime was to have less hours with the kids on the loose and thinking about anything. by the time bedtime rolled around, they were DONE, and mostly lay down and passed out. Except for the homesick ones, who were invited to snuggle next to me.
I would have been much more gracious the next morning if there had been coffee in sufficient quality and quantity.
Weeeeee’re…..Brownie Guides, we’re Brownie Guides/ we’re here to lend a hand!/To love our God and serve our Queen!/ and help our homes and lands!
I absolutely adored Brownies, which was out-and-out run by the Catholic Church in my part of England – at least 7 times out of 10, our activity at Brownies was cleaning the church, which is sort of appalling and also hilarious as an adult. But I loved it, partly because I have had a mad love for rules and traditions and order since infancy, and partly because the brown-on-brown-on-yellow uniform was almost exactly the same as my hideous brown-on-brown-on-beige school uniform (wooooo Catholic girls school), and I felt like I had been extremely sneaky by wearing my school skirt to Brownies.
(Also, my girlfriend at boarding school was a Guide Leader, and she used to get out of my bed on a Saturday morning and put the whole uniform on and troop off very happily to be virtuous and godly, and it cracked me up every time.)
The American Scout variety of Brownies changed their uniforms from brown and orange to brown and light blue right after I moved up to the Junior section. I never could quite decide whether or not I felt jealous of them or sorry for them, but now I think it’s more probably the latter. The brown and orange combo was hideous, but it was also the last time the uniform looked even remotely like something meant to be worn by “Scouts.”
Ours started out all brown, brown dress, than became a brown shirt and brown pants (when I was a brownie), than an orange and blue t-shirt, and now is a mostly blue with brown fringe shirt (they are making all the shirts look more like the Guide ones). Of course everybody has older shirts so you can see all the older Spark shirts and some of the older Brownie shirts (we have a combined Sparks and Brownies unit because we live in a tiny town, I’m one of the leaders).
At the summer camps I went to, you didn’t sing the Johnny Appleseed Grace unless you wanted it to rain, because we had somehow decided it was a weather spell of some kind.
All of your camps?? It wasn’t just a tradition at my one camp? (What area of the country, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m so excited, this is the first time I’ve heard of other camps also deciding that that song was cursed.)
I don’t remember if my camp in CA believed that, but it was definitely a thing at the camps I went to in NC and FL.
We would only sing it on the last day for that reason! Theory was — it would rain after we left.
My church camp in eastern PA had that belief! We only sang it if the weather report said it was going to rain anyway, thus reinforcing the legend that it brought the rain.
I attended a girl scout camp for most of my summers, but I wasn’t from a “joining family” as another commenter put it, and my mom was too cynical to take any of it seriously.
A few commenters have mentioned boy Scouts, and I feel like sharing that my partner was a boy scout in his early teens, his troop was headed by a childless, slightly crazy Australian who had emigrated to the US during WWII, and seriously claimed at various times to be a werewolf, 12 years old, and from Mars. He gathered a group of awkward, nerdy kids and took them camping and taught them to program computers. He also offered my partner a job coding right out of high school, and I once went over to his house and saw the giant robot the kids had made years before, and an infamous crock pot that had been unplugged and abandoned so long it was full of soil (which to this day seems to me like the only appropriate thing to do with a crock pot…) I feel like a common thread of everyone’s remembrances is the idea that the experience is shaped by the adults, and that the best experiences are based on the adults’ best impression of what the kids need/would like. And I feel like my partner’s former scout leader was a perfect example of that. All those kids work in STEM fields now, and most of them came from families who could not have been able to afford computers or tutors or lessons in the mid ’90’s.
My partner should give that guy a call…
ALSO Abbey I am also from the Detroit area & went to BU (undergrad though)! I wonder if we were ever at International Friendship Camp at the same time.
Did I sing you a creepy song?! (Also, International Friendship is the reason I know the Canadian National Anthem.)
the only thing I remember about International Friendship is trading ugly handmade pins that we all wore on our bucket hats. Why was that a thing??
I was spared from Girl Scouts because my parents were in the Socialist party and thought it was “too bourgeois”.
OH MY GOD ARE YOUR PARENTS MY PARENTS
QUITE POSSIBLY
I was never a girl scout, but all of my friends were, so I was very scout adjacent. As long as the event was not an official girl scout event, I was invited and learned all the scout lore without any of the responsibility. My confirmation sponsor wast the troupe leader and we all got the Marian Medal. Later, I was the assistant leader of the troupe my younger sisters were in, which consisted of my sisters, my mom’s best friend’s daughter, and occasionally one other girl. It was great! I got to go on the outings I wanted (high tea at fancy downtown hotel, day hikes, local farm to pick veggies), didn’t go on the outings i hated (actual camping), and had cookie access without having to sell any. Basically had all the advantages of scouting without any of the work.
I think my troop was in cadettes when we disbanded, friends I’d had in the troop had left and we didn’t manage to do too many cool or interesting things anymore, and nobody quite wanted to try working on gold award projects, and I lived the furthest away from the troop. But then I feel slightly like I should have pushed through, even though we didn’t sell that many cookies.
Although I have to bring up that for whatever reason in Brownies, with a completely different troop, I decided to proceed under an assumed name. Why I thought this was the perfect venue to change my name I don’t know, however I’d forgotten about it until my mother brought it up “remember when that poor scout leader called, telling me you were sick and wanted to go home, but you were calling yourself Polly and I was like ‘who?’ and your scout leader said ‘uh.. your child? in the brownies? that I am the leader of?’ like I was confused or something!”
Oh I know the answer to that: because each new group of humans is a change to try out a new name.
I worked SO HARD to be called Cat, and to my deep chagrin it never ever worked. I did not successfully rename myself until my SECOND college. so.
Nice try Polly – you just need to persist. and also to find more people who do not know your name. Alternatively, I notice that people in my town are Very Good (for the most part) about changing how people are called, so maybe you only have to move?
I liked Brownies, especially since my best friend was in it too. But when we moved up to Juniors, she quit and I ended up in a troop with a bunch of older girls and girls from a different school (one of whom would end up being one of my best friends years later; if only I’d known that then!). It was awful. None of the older girls were friendly and the mom who ran it only ever did arts and crafts. So much glue and pipe cleaners and glitter. Meanwhile, my brothers were going to Boy Scout camp every summer, where they got to sail, and do archery and target shooting and other cool things. And my grandmother ran a troop in the 1950s and 60s and she had her girls learning to tie knots and light campfires and set up tents. But my troop got pipe cleaners and weird craft projects.
Oh, and I have FEELINGS about the Museum of Science field trip! We only got like an hour to enjoy the museum after it closed to the general public and they made us get in our sleeping bags before 10pm. WHAT WAS THE POINT of sleeping over if we don’t get to enjoy the museum all night? That was one of my favorite places growing up and I was so disappointed. I might still be a little annoyed…
I probably would have been an ambivalent girl scout, were it not for my mom being one of the troop leaders during my last couple of years. As it was, I was always pretty involved with what was going on. We didn’t go camping much, since that’s not something that sane people do in Florida, but we did have overnights at the zoo and Kennedy Space Center (I got to sleep under a rocket!) and a rather strange field trip to a cigar factory.
Oh man, the Johnny Appleseed grace was near-forbidden at Camp Casa Mare because it would always rain the same day if it was chosen. Was that a thing anywhere else?
Yep! There’s a thread above about it. It was definitely a thing in eastern PA.
Yes! I loved Casa Mare! (despite the fact that I never went sailing). I had a great experience in Girl Scouts, I think because the leaders I had were so insistent on letting the girls lead the activities. I still remember a lot of the songs and good times!
I quit Brownies on a matter of principle, when the Brown Owl would not accept my little sister’s custard, which was identical to the custard I got my cooking badge for the year before. She had some perverse notion that custard contains eggs. Everyone knows the only real custard is Bird’s Eye. We would have been seven and eight.
So we joined Canadian Girls in Training instead. And later the New Democratic Youth.
Still remember the Pledge though.
I promise to do my best.
To do my duty to God and the Queen.
To help other people every day,
Especially those at home.
When I was a Brownie, Girl scouts was super fun, partially because my mom was our troop leader. My mom is very crafty, and we learned a lot of stuff like embroidery (made our own designs on pillowcases), some painting, cake decorating, various popsicle stick creations, as well as signing us up for day camps and letting us have sleepovers and movie nights. Junior scouts was still fun, at first, (though I hated the cookie selling) but after a while, my mom decided that we needed to learn to be independent. We would have entire meetings sometimes dedicated to making the girls in the troop decide what activities we wanted to do. None of us happened to be very creative in that way, and eventually we just stopped having meetings because we could never come up with things we actually wanted to do.
All in all, though, I had a good experience with the girl scouts. My mom took apart my vests so that she could frame all of my old badges and I could hang it on the wall. I don’t know where it went once I moved out, though.
ok – I really like the "pinned to your arms" skout badges.
I'm sorry, in your version did you not yell "hallelujah!" after the second "it was sad?"
…just us then?
I'm sorry you had that experience – come on over to my town where all the Brownies are atheists, we swear love the planet, be true to our selves and save the earth, and we tried to get outdoors when it was not absolutely freezing. We also planted things, made a LOT of things (I was always willing to teach sewing, quilting, tying of knots, etc.) I had the most fun with my troop of tiny Dasies, but part of that might have been because there were five and I could keep track.
I am Right There With You on the grown up Girl Scout pledge, and I had a two day freakout over being mandatory reporters for suspected abuse and endangerment. But a lot of it was fun. I had to quit when my co-leader (who did all the paperwork) (she said she </i liked /> it, I swear) left me for her home state. also we had a couple really great college kids in from the local women's college, who helped me think about how to help kids grow up.
You are completely correct.
That is all.
Oh hai! I did that too. I admit I am delighted to hear good things from the kids who did it because I remember a different set of things:
The science museum… the lateness of the hour, the insistence of the troublemaking child that ghost stories are necessary, the floor, the distance from the bathrooms, the lights, the darkness… I think the late bedtime was to have less hours with the kids on the loose and thinking about anything. by the time bedtime rolled around, they were DONE, and mostly lay down and passed out. Except for the homesick ones, who were invited to snuggle next to me.
I would have been much more gracious the next morning if there had been coffee in sufficient quality and quantity.
Oh I know the answer to that: because each new group of humans is a change to try out a new name.
I worked SO HARD to be called Cat, and to my deep chagrin it never ever worked. I did not successfully rename myself until my SECOND college. so.
Nice try Polly – you just need to persist. and also to find more people who do not know your name. Alternatively, I notice that people in my town are Very Good (for the most part) about changing how people are called, so maybe you only have to move?
I quit girl scouts at age 10 because my troop was the troop that went "camping" in a hotel. my best friend was in a cool troop and ended up working at a Girl Scout camp until she was 25 and the camp recently hosted a "fight the patriarchy" archery activity where they shot arrows at slips of paper that had microaggressions the girls had experienced on them.