JANUARY 24, WEDNESDAY
On this day in 1908, the Boy Scouts movement began in England with the publication of Scouting for Boys, a nonmilitary field manual by British army officer Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell.
The year before his book was published, Baden-Powell tested his ideas by camping on England’s southern coast for nearly two weeks with twenty adolescent boys. The boys played games, went hiking, and learned about pioneering and how to cook outdoors.
Scouting continued to grow in England; by its first census in 1910, there were one hundred thousand youths involved. At about this same time, a Boy Scout in London came to the aid of Chicago businessman William Boyce when he was lost in the fog. Boyce tried to tip the boy, but the boy politely refused, saying that he was a Scout and couldn’t accept a tip for a good deed. Boyce was intrigued. After returning to America, he organized the Boy Scouts of America, which he incorporated on February 8, 1910.
During a trip to Chicago in 2015 Darryl visited the site of the office build of William Boyce and took pictures of the plaques that commemorate the start of Scouting in the US.
