LEWISTON — Some local boys are trying to understand what it means to be 100 years old.

On Friday, members of Lewiston Troop 007 of the Boy Scouts of America, will honor some rising scouts, play some games and listen to several teenagers explanation the century mark.

Next Monday, the Boy Scouts of America turns 100.

To 9-year-old Layne Sawyer, a Cub with the Lewiston troop, it’s rather simple.

“It means that the Boy Scouts have been around a real long time,” he said.

Though scouting has been around far longer than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America was formalized as an institution in February 1910.

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Nationwide, scouts will be celebrating the birthday. A national jamboree is planned. Other big events are in the works. And countless smaller events, like the birthday-themed Troop 007 Blue & Gold Banquet, will be held among scouting groups around the country.

The national group has reintroduced four of its first badges — carpentry, path-finding, signaling and tracking — for the current generation of troopers, said Tony Bessey, the Abnaki district executive for scouts in Androscoggin County and part of Oxford County. The district has about 1,100 boys in uniform.

Bessey believes the badges ought to be a reminder of some of the difficult skills sought by scouts from the organization’s beginnings.

“Look at signaling,” Bessey said. “It’s not an easy art to understand.”

Along the way a few rules — such as the save-a-life requirement for Eagle Scouts — have been jettisoned.

“That wasn’t really practical,” Bessey said.  At the same time, rules teaching a scout how to carry a knife or starting a campfire have gone relatively unchanged.

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“Camping isn’t something that changes very much, and the outdoors is still our laboratory,” Bessey said.

And the goals of building character and training in responsible, fit citizens.

It’s a legacy the boys feel as they prepare for every meeting, said Layne’s mom, Heidi Sawyer.

“When they put that uniform on, they feel that they are part of something bigger than they are,” she said.

Layne said it his own way, focusing on the grown-ups who were once scouts.

” It makes me feel like I’m going to be like them someday,” he said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com


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