Arlington Years

If the sign-up sheets haven’t yet begun circulating in your office, don’t fret. They will soon.

The annual Girl Scout retail juggernaut is underway, spinning thousands of signatures into hundreds of millions of dollars in roughly six weeks’ time, a pace and margin of profit that is the envy of many CEOs. (I believe I have already committed to buying 16 boxes of Trefoils).

For fans of the original Netflix series, “The Crown,” both the future Queen of England Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret were Girl Guides (the European equivalent of Girl Scouts) in the Buckingham Palace troop. Princess Margaret eventually became the association’s president. Photo circa 1937. Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2147347/Diamond-Jubilee-Playing-castle-dungeons-Nazi-bombs-fell-Elizabeth-panto-princess.html

What began in 1917 as a modest troop fundraiser in Merle Haggard’s Muskogee, Oklahoma has become both a model of entrepreneurship and training program in “Life Skills 101.”

According to the Girl Scouts, young girls and women learn five basic skills: “goal setting, decision making, money management [boxes are priced at $4 each], people skills, and business ethics.” And consistent with the times we live in, cookie sales in at least two national councils–Houston and Minneapolis–have gone mobile. A website to help support young scouts establish an online sales presence is found here.

Girls Scouts and their moms have not baked cookies in decades, even though an enterprising troop leader in Chicago created an inexpensive cookie recipe in the 1920s.

Two companies, Little Brownie Bakers, a subsidiary of Keebler, and ABC Bakers, are licensed to bake the cookies and may choose to produce among eight varieties, three of which–Thin Mints, Trefoils, and Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies–are mandatory. And there is some autonomy among troop councils as to which varieties they sell (provided they sell “The Big Three”), and which names they use: “Samoas” aka “Caramel deLites.”

Other useful bytes of information about cookies:

• They have little or no trans fat and no preservatives or artificial flavors
• Vegan “Thin Mints” are now available
• Little Brownie Bakers does not use any high fructose syrup in its cookies
• The packaging is sustainable

Not all adjustments to the nutritional value of the cookies, however, have succeeded. For example, low-fat and sugar-free varieties didn’t sell well and are no longer produced. They are cookies, after all. And some varieties, “Mango Cremes,” a vanilla and coconut cookie filled with a tangy mango-flavored crème; “Upside-Downs,” oatmeal treats with sweet frosting on the bottom; and my own fleeting favorite, “Dulce de Leche,” bite-sized cookies with milk caramel chips will never again see the inside of a cookie jar or sack lunch.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I was a Girl Scout in Arlington in the mid-1960s, and was one of the legions of young girls selling cookies. In those days, the operation was pretty low-tech. I would come home from school, change into my uniform, and hit the houses in my neighborhood unaccompanied (something I cannot imagine a Scout doing today), lugging my cardboard carton of 12 boxes of the Big Three. No driving around with a parent, no meet-ups with other scouts and mothers to sell cookies in front of a grocery store or library, no sign-ups sheets carried by my father to his office. Just me, my carton and my sales pitch.

To the list of life skills that cookie selling teaches, I would add: self–confidence; the ability to look an adult in the eye; perseverance (I refused to quit going door-to-door until every box was sold); the value of team work and how achieving something individually (selling my share) contributes to the greater good (troop camping trips).

In fact, it’s the camping trips I most remember from my years as a Girl Scout. The fun of being outdoors and hiking, telling ghost stories and sleeping (only sometimes; I was notorious in my troop for keeping everyone awake all night with my joking and clowning around) in huge canvas tents with wooden floors. And cooking foil-wrapped dinners.

Most people have tried their hand at making “S’mores,” the campfire confection first recorded in “Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts” (1927). While S’mores are tasty, I prefer the campfire treat favored by my Troop: a red apple (Fuji or Gala work best), cored and filled with the candy “Red Hots,” wrapped in foil and baked over a camp fire. Sweet, cinnamony, spicy, nutritious (well, sort of) and delicious.

For that treat alone, I would turn back the clock.

Shameless plug for Girl Scouts: Arlington girls interested in joining a troop or adults interested in volunteering their time and skills to serve as troop leaders and mentors, should consult http://gscnc.org. The current scout focus is the G.I.R.L. initiative which stands for: Go-getter, innovator, risk taker and leader.

Were you a Girl Scout with a story to share?

I would love to hear from you in the comments section below.

The author, top row, second from right.

If the sign-up sheets haven’t yet begun circulating in your office, don’t fret.  They will soon.

The annual Girl Scout retail juggernaut is underway, spinning thousands of signatures into hundreds of millions of dollars in roughly six weeks’ time, a pace and margin of profit that is the envy of many CEOs.

Julia Veitch Thomas with Arlington Girl Scout troop. She started the Girl Scouts in Arlington and Alexandria County. Photo circa 1920. Courtesy of Johnathan Thomas.

What began in 1917 as a modest troop fundraiser in Merle Haggard’s Muskogee, Okla. has become both a model of entrepreneurship and training program in “Life Skills 101.”

According to the Girl Scouts, young girls and women learn five basic skills: “goal setting, decision making, money management [boxes are priced at $4 each], people skills, and business ethics.” And consistent with the times we live in, cookie sales in at least two national councils–Houston and Minneapolis–have gone mobile.

Girls Scouts and their moms have not baked cookies in decades, even though an enterprising troop leader in Chicago created an inexpensive cookie recipe in the 1920s.

Two companies, Little Brownie Bakers, a subsidiary of Keebler, and ABC Bakers, are licensed to bake the cookies and may choose to produce among eight varieties, three of which–Thin Mints, Trefoils, and Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies–are mandatory.  And there is some autonomy among troop councils as to which varieties they sell (provided they sell “The Big Three”), and which names they use: “Samoas” aka “Caramel deLites.”

Other useful bytes of information about cookies:

• they have little or no trans fat and no preservatives or artificial flavors
• vegan “Thin Mints” are now available
• Little Brownie Bakers does not use any high fructose syrup in its cookies
• the packaging is sustainable.

Not all adjustments to the nutritional value of the cookies, however, have succeeded. For example, low-fat and sugar-free varieties didn’t sell well and are no longer produced.  They are cookies, after all.  And some varieties, “Snaps,” an iced oatmeal raisin cookie; “Double Dutch,” a double chocolate; and my own fleeting favorite, “Dulce de Leche,” will never see the inside of a cookie jar or sack lunch again.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I was a Girl Scout in Arlington in the mid-1960s, and was one of the legions of young girls selling cookies.  In those days, the operation was pretty low-tech.  I would come home from school, change into my uniform, and hit the houses in my neighborhood unaccompanied (something I cannot imagine a Scout doing today), lugging my cardboard carton of 12 boxes of the Big Three. No driving around with a parent, no meet-ups with other scouts and mothers to sell cookies in front of a grocery store or library, no sign-ups sheets carried by my father to his office. Just me, my carton and my sales pitch.

To the list of life skills that cookie selling teaches, I would add:  self–confidence; the ability to look an adult in the eye; perseverance (I refused to quit going door-to-door until every box was sold); the value of team work and how achieving something individually (selling my share) contributes to the greater good (troop camping trips).

In fact, it’s the camping trips I most remember from my years as a Girl Scout–the fun of being outdoors and hiking, telling ghost stories and sleeping in huge canvas tents with wooden floors.  And cooking foil-wrapped dinners.

Most people have tried their hand at making “S’mores,” the campfire confection first recorded in “Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts” (1927).  While S’mores are great, I prefer the campfire treat favored by my troop: a red apple (Fuji or Gala work best), cored and filled with the candy “Red Hots,” wrapped in foil and baked over a fire.  Sweet, cinnamony, spicy, nutritious (well, sort of) and delicious.

For that treat alone, I would turn back the clock.

————————————————————————

The author, top row, second from right.

Were you a Girl Scout? Have a tale to add to “Cookie Chronicles”?

Please do so in the comments section below.

Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001?

As the 10th anniversary of this epochal moment approaches, I find myself reflecting back on the day and its aftermath. My memory plays like a movie. It was a day just like any other canopied by an improbably blue sky.

My walk to work, a stop for carryout coffee, waves to store owners, a chat with two moms about my eldest son’s high school application process, arrival at the office around 8:30 a.m. Within minutes, a colleague stops in my doorway to announce that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. My first thought: a small aircraft, horribly off course. I get to the nearest television: a second plane hits the second tower. Fast forward: other planes, rumors of fires, explosions. I retraced my steps down the same street—no chats or waves to store owners, now. I retrieved my children from their Capitol Hill school. Our neighborhood eerily quiet. No planes flew overhead; my youngest son screamed as a helicopter broke the wall of silence.

The television and the Internet were vigilant companions, hypnotically replaying the crumbling towers, forming a backdrop to the family discussion. And the unforgettable images: of police and firefighters, of streets filled with fleeing office workers coated in white ash, of the rubble and the detritus of lives uprooted. My movie ends with me on the telephone with friends, some halfway around the world, reminders of the grace of humanity in the face of indiscriminate inhumanity.

The need to understand “why” attends any tragedy. How can we make sense of the incomprehensible; prevent something horrific from happening again? The Greeks created myths to embody their understanding of the world. William Shakespeare told us that past is prologue. Art and science allow us to explicate emotions, share dreams and aspirations, examine human folly, question existence, wonder. And libraries collect and make accessible the fruits of these labors.

Our nation’s founders understood how important free access to information is to a democracy. The Library of Congress received both a book collection and a collecting rationale from Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin helped establish the Library Company of Philadelphia, the nation’s first lending library. James Madison, author of the First Amendment, gave voice to one of the most important tenets of librarianship, intellectual freedom, when he wrote: “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

While no library has been immune to the aftershocks of the global economic meltdown, the challenges we face as information professionals are not limited to economics. The ubiquity of increasingly affordable mobile technology coupled with the rise of e-media presents exciting opportunities to deliver more content to library patrons where they are. Yet how do we keep up with the demands for both print—newspapers, magazines, books—and e-content? How do we maintain the balance between high tech and high touch so that patrons can help themselves and get help when they need it? How do we ensure patron privacy—and we must—when the more we know about our library users, their tastes and interests, the more helpful we can be? How can we have it all/do it all?

As professionals and managers of an institution dedicated to serving the public good, we will continue to evaluate what we do as we harness new tools and media that paradoxically enable us to connect with others and know more about the world we live in but present unprecedented challenges. The health of our community depends on our commitment to identify, experiment with and pursue the right solutions and balance and so does the health of our democratic way of life.

Baseball became a part of my life on a cool evening in the late summer of 1960 at Griffith Stadium in a game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Senators. The Yankees won. And from that evening on, I was hooked on both baseball and the Yankees.

In the months before my 10th birthday in June 1964, my father smoked enough Phillies cigars to collect a Mickey Mantle Big Leaguer Rawlings baseball mitt for my birthday present. When I opened the box it arrived in, and saw it nestled there among tissue paper and a color, “autographed” photo of Number 7, I could not have been more thrilled.

Finally, my own glove to fit my hand–not a battered hand-me-down cast off by the neighbor boys. For the next several months, I lovingly seasoned it with a little Neatsfoot oil and scores of games of “hotbox” (aka pickle). By the following spring I was ready to be called up to the newly formed Arlington-Fairfax Savings and Loan softball team for pre-teen girls, one of a dozen or so teams that comprised Arlington’s Pigtail League (as differentiated from the Ponytail League for older girls), and administered by the Better Sports Club of Arlington, they of the “Better Sports Today, Better Citizens Tomorrow.”

We were “coached” by a willing neighborhood mom, a sports naïf whose children were dragged to practices and left to whine “can we go home NOW?” from the bleachers while we tried to turn two and shag fly balls.

I played shortstop with a wicked side arm that more than once pulled our leggy first baseman off the bag. But when the 6-3 worked, it was sublime. (Hitting was another story. It was not for nothing that I earned the moniker “good field, no hit.”)

Over several blissful weeks, on unforgiving elementary school ball fields and Barcroft fields under the lights, we scratched out a 3-10 record, playing less like New York’s baseball finest, the Yankees (locally, that honor fell to the Conklyn’s Florist team) and more like the hapless, expansion Mets. And I couldn’t have cared less. I was doing what I loved to do.

As another June rolls around (and another birthday, too), it’s hard not to think of lessons learned both on and off those dusty fields of dreams. So here’s to Mrs. Miller, Kay, Kim, Debbie, Barbara, Mimi, Baby Ruth, Janis, Nancy, Jane, Gayle, Carol, Ginny, Linda, and all the rest of the girls of summer who taught me teamwork, humility and how to take joy from a game well played regardless of the outcome.

Arlington Public Library has a terrific collection of DVDs and books that celebrate our national past time. Here are just a few of our favorites.

What are yours?

DVDs:

• A League of Their Own — “There’s no crying in baseball.”
• The Natural — Robert Redford meets Bernard Malamud. Gets better with each viewing.
• Eight Men Out — The Black Sox scandal of 1919. Now some folks think the 1918 Series was thrown too.
• Bull Durham –“I believe in the Church of Baseball.”
• The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (documentary) — A true mensch. My late father’s favorite player on his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers.
• The Pride of the Yankees — “Today, I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” The Babe plays himself.
• Baseball: Tenth Inning — The right stuff from the Ken Burns docu-factory.
• Sugar — A film about a ballplayer but much more.

Books:

• Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime” by Mark Frost
• Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season by Jonathan Eig
• The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy
• Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero by Tom Clavin
• The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from the New Yorker edited by David Remnick — Updike’s adieu to the Splendid Splinter is a MUST-READ for any baseball or sports fan.
• Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye
• Cobb: A Biography by Al Stump — Movie by the same name with Tommy Lee Jones as the driven baseball star.
• The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
• Ball Four by Jim Bouton — The first glimpse of The Mick and others without halos.
• Bang the Drum Slowly by “Henry W. Wiggen” (Mark Harris) — Movie with Robert DeNiro and Michael Moriarty; sequel to the baseball classic, “The Southpaw.”
• Heart of the Game: Life, Death and Mercy in Minor League America by S.L. Price — for every major leaguer who sticks, there are thousands who come so close.