By Paula Haskin

pkhaskin@yahoo.com 

For as long as there have been canned foods, there have been people collecting them for other people in need.  The Boy Scouts have been around almost as long as canned foods, quietly doing their Good Turns during the last 97 years. So, it seems natural that they would eventually go together--the SCOUTING FOR FOOD food drive.  The program was started in St. Louis and is one of the most successful campaigns in the nation.

This first example shows what were some of the early individual efforts:  Back in 1976, 17-year-old Rick Haskin of Boy Scout Troop 722 of High Ridge submitted his Eagle project to the Three Rivers (now known as River Trails) District Board of Review.  Walter Marquart, sitting on the Board of Review at that time, approved the Eagle project that Rick used to collect cans of food for the needy in the High Ridge area.  The cans were collected and given to the High Ridge Elks to put into their holiday gift baskets.

This next example shows some early district efforts:  The Gravois Trails District food drive also started because of an Eagle Service Project after the 1982 Meremac River floods of Valley Park, but quickly grew beyond that.  Gregory Gutting of Troop 688 also had his Eagle project approved by Bob Parsons, who sat on the Board of Review at that time.  Gregory made flyers and posted them throughout Crestwood.  Bags were put out on Feb. 5, pickup was done on Feb. 7 using eight overloaded cars and trucks, and sorted at the St. Elizabeth of Hungry School at the regular troop meeting with many other people helping.  It was quickly apparent that there was too much food for just one family and the cans were donated to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Valley Park, which was being used as a staging area for long-term recovery of all the flooded-out families in the town.   Plans were made to repeat the collection for the following year.

And finally there were the collective St. Louis Area Council efforts:  In 1980, Robert Meinholtz came back home to the St. Louis area as Executive Director, having started his Scouting career in University City at the age of nine.  In 1984, he planned an area-wide Good Turn to celebrate the upcoming 75th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America.  He talked with the United Way and the St. Louis Area Food Bank, resulting in the first Council-wide Scouting For Food campaign. Fred Wenzel, then the CEO of Kellwood, acted as that year's Campaign Chairman.  Since the Scouting for Food campaign is always an expensive campaign needing to cover the bags, boxes, and transportation, other groups joined in with the Scouts to make it a successful event:  Local fire houses acted as staging areas to repackage the food and the Army Reserve donated the trucks to take the food to the warehouses.  Later Sunset Transportation provided the transportation of food to the FoodBank.  It became a tradition after that first year to have the chairman rotate from one major St. Louis company to another while the number of cans grew to 920,000 in 1986 upwards to about 2 million cans by 2004.

So now the call is going out to all Scouts, young and young at heart, to document and archive these early efforts through to the present.  There are several reasons for taking the time to do this:

• To attempt to recognize and thank as many people as possible who have participated in what may well be the largest volunteer effort of its kind.
• To renew interest in this program at a time when the need has never been greater.  We've all gotten used to the idea that Scouting for Food will always be there without realizing just how much effort does go into the program each and every year.
• To help understand the pattern of how this program grew so successfully and how those successful lessons learned can be applied to other programs.
• To each and every Boy Scout who has done their Good Turn, parents who drove kids around collecting bags, firefighters who sorted cans, soldiers and employees who drove trucks, and pantry volunteers, we would like to hear about individual stories, group histories, photos, and even from some of the recipients who benefited from the Scouts efforts.

In summary, what got started with these examples shown of one Eagle Scout's efforts, one district's effort, one council's effort for the 75th anniversary of the BSA, is now a successful campaign still going strong, still filling a need, still doing their Good Turns.  So the question put out there is this:  Looking back at all the Boy Scouts have accomplished in this past century and looking forward into the next century, where do we go from here?

Paula Haskin is a volunteer in the Greater St. Louis Area Council.