CAMPING WITH THE DERITA BOY SCOUTS

My Very First Time


Most folks know I was a Scoutmaster for nearly 40 years, but only a few have heard about the first Scout camping trip I ever went on. It was in 1958 at Pioneer Point, Camp Steere, two nights and the start of many, many happy memories.

A couple of my classmates, Johnny Herring & David Hubbard, talked me into it. I had been a Cub, a Webelos, and even visited a Troop Meeting or two. The closest I had come to camping was the night 30 of us Cubs spent the night in Freddie Nelson's basement .. . Never again, his folks told our Cubmaster Jim Sharpe.

But I was reluctant to go into Boy Scouts. Heck, most of those Scouts were way bigger than I was. Some of them were playing sports in High School. Mike Rodman & Rick Hyman played varsity football & wrestled at North. Gary Ashford ran track; Smitty Smith played basketball & baseball; and I
think Fred Kerr may have majored in high school girls, but he still earned a Monogram Club letter.

Anyway, Scouting was pretty much the only extra-curricular going. There was no Derita Athletics. The nearest YMCA was in North Charlotte, and being part of that early busing generation, meant that any after-school sports were all in Huntersville. So, I joined Johnny & David Hubbard and their Hunter Acres friends for a few Friday night meetings at the Cole Memorial Scout Hut. Troop 14 was the Derita Troop and Troop 22 was at Sugaw Creek Presbyterian. That's it. The other two Troops at Derita Presbyterian & Derita Anerican Legion came along much later.

Our Scoutmaster was Marvin B. Kerr. He was a tall, thin guy who maintained all of the melting pots at Florida Steel Mill in Croft. He laid all of the insulating bricks that kept the place going. It was a hot, sweaty, dangerous job, but he found time to keep us boys (and his own two Scout sons) on the straight and narrow. His son Fred even made Eagle Scout. He was also the man who lined up the parents to drive us off to the woods on Friday nights when they got off work and found still other parents to come collect us on Sunday afternoons.

There was no I-85 or I-77 back then, and it was like Camp Steere was on the other side of the world. It sat on Lake Wylie just a mile or so north of the old Buster Boyd Bridge that crossed into York, SC. To get there, you either drove through Charlotte's downtown traffic, or took the backroads out to Wilkinson Blvd, a rural road past the old Harvey B. Hunter Dairy at Steele Creek and then onto Hwy 49 South. In all, we're talking a good hour & half to two hours drive. Usually parents did it with five Scouts scrunched
in the backseat and two riding shotgun.Your trunk would be filled with the backpacks and food that we couldn't stuff in Mr. Kerr's stationwagon with his 6-8 Scouts.

At Camp Steere, we'd either backpack everything to the campsite up & down the hills over the old fire road past Pawnee Point and then on to Pioneer Point, or if we were lucky we'd take the much shorter firelane in off Hwy 49. Either way, we knew there would be a chain across the gate and no cars were going in. All of the roads were dirt when dry and mud when wet. This particular week we had had rain several days and it was mud. The Lake was up, filled with heavy run-off from downtown Charlotte and we got the lecture about staying back from the riverbanks where the water was undercutting the sandstone.

Us new guys, and there 4 of us this trip, stayed in the designated outpost campsite. Keeping us close so we wouldn't hack down any live trees, stab our toes playing chicken with our Scout knives, or let our campfire burn out the surrounding wilderness. There were plenty of signs that other Troops had not been so well supervised. The
older guys chose clearings closer to the lake where they could hoop & hollar all night without disturbing the Scout Leaders (Mr. Kerr & whichever Dad he managed to bamboozle into spending the weekend. Usually we never saw a Dad come camping with us twice). Our campsite had an old hand-operated well pump and we were lucky
if we had water by the fifth pull. It usually took a couple of us to work the handle. The toilet was wherever we chose to dig it, so long as there was a sawed-off stick with a recent date written on the end of it at that location. Occasionally, we'd find ourselves covering over someone else's mess. If they buried trash or uneaten food in their latrines, local dogs and wild animals would often did it up.

We didn't have much equipment to speak of. Some Scouts brought their own tents (those yellow light canvas play tents which would fit 3-4 boys uncomfortably and pray, please pray that it didn't rain.) The Troop had some WW2 canvas shelter halves that buttoned together across the top to form a pup tent. Most all of our cooking was done in a surplus army mess kit that each of us picked at Gotlieb's Army-Navy store downtown on 11th St,

We set up by flashlight, stopping only to eat the bag lunches that we had brought from home. That's right, no roadstops at Mickey D's, Bojangle's, or Hardee's. They hadn't been invented yet. Usually it was PB&J, a banana sandwich or bologna & cheese, if you had the fixin's at home. Soon, we'd gather round the campfire and find out what was planned for the weekend, listen to a ghost story or two, then head off to our tents. . . Not that anyone was going to sleep that night. Everyone was too keyed up! For us new guys we'd talk through to daybreak, or if you happened to drift off, noises from bird or owl would likely shock you back into consciousness.

I remember this trip best of all because Mike Rodman & his Patrol had purchased a new CocaCola insulated drink bag and they had filled it with Puffin Biscuits (the name brand for canned biscuits back then). Nobody told them you also had to use ice. Mr. Kerr had done a demonstration the Friday before, showing us how fry up
doughnuts created from biscuits, cooking oil & powdered sugar. So you know what these guys had on their minds. They had 12 cans to cover Saturday & Sunday morning breakfasts. I heard the explosions began about 2am. I'm surprised they lasted so long. Us new guys kept our distance the next day because there was a rash of raw biscuit dough getting down people's shirts and in the back of their pants..

We had a great day of activities. Mr. Kerr even took us on a nature hike pointing out tracks & bird's nests and such. But back at the campsite we heard rumblings about initiating the new guys and about a Snipe Hunt planned for after supper. I knew all about that because my older brother was a Scout and I made the mistake of sharing what I knew. That night us new guys actually made it back to camp from the Snipe Hunt before the older guys, and then it was on. Our tent mysteriously "fell down" four times that night and we "got raided" and "piled on" twice.

One of the strangest occurrences was at the tent off to the left of us. Older guys Gene Trythall & Raymond Coleman had set up there to keep an eye on us. We knew that Mr. Kerr had taken away a pack of Camel cigarettes they brought, but he didn't find the beer or the second pack of smokes rolled up in their bedrolls. Funniest sight ever was the two of them out there crawling around in their tighty-whities trying to re-light the campfire with a bunch of twigs & balls of toilet tissue. You see a nightwind had started up sometime past midnight and the thin blanket that each of them had brought just wasn't cutting it.

Come morning, Raymond was in a foul mood and his younger brother Jerry did something to set him off. They were back at their Friday night antics, having a full-contact stick-fight, each one tring to knock the other sense-less. Mr. Kerr was there quickly to break it up. But it wasn't as if we hadn't all seen the brothers go at it before. When Mr. Kerr took it to their Dad one time, the old man just said, "You know boys will be boys." I knew it was best to stay out of their way.

All in all, it was a good weekend. Mr. Kerr had us go down by the Lake on Sunday to wash up & put on clean clothes before a couple of parents came to pick us up. A good thing, too. I remember this one kid who's Mom always made him strip naked before he could enter the house after camping trips. She complained more
than once, wanting to know what all we did to leave the boy smelling like a goat. My own Mom's rule was that neither my sleeping bag or backpack was to enter the house before they had been thoroughly aired and checked for bugs or critters that might have found their way home with me. It wasn't my most exciting camping trip, but it was my first. --- Bernie Samonds