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Historians and genealogists alike spend hours studying old photographs, hoping to add names and places to anonymous faces. We look for clues to help make an educated guess. In Girl Scouts that means looking at the uniforms and badge sashes, which usually narrow the possibilities to one decade.

Sometimes we get very lucky, and people in the mystery photos contact us.

In March 2020, the Archives and History Committee of the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital installed a display about Girl Scouting in Japan. We thought the timing was perfect–the famous Washington cherry blossom trees were budding, and we had recently acquired three scrapbooks from Girl Scout troops based in Okinawa, Japan, in the 1950s.

As it happened, however, our timing was waaaay off. As we locked the last display case in the lobby of Council headquarters, executive staff emerged from a meeting and announced that the office was closing indefinitely due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Since no one could see the exhibit in person, I did several blog posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) that include photos and clippings from the Okinawa scrapbooks. Many came from a March 2, 1957, international festival attended by local American and Japanese troops. This is one of my favorites:

A few months later, one of these adorable hula dancers contacted me!

Cheryll Greenwood Kinsley was a member of Okinawa Troop 50 from 1956 to 1959. Recently, she was downsizing and searched online for someplace to donate her sash. She was astonished not only to find interest in her old troop, but a photo of herself!

She kindly donated her sash to Nation’s Capital as well as a furoshiki–a printed cloth used to wrap gifts. Girl Scout troops in Okinawa sold them as a fundraiser.

These items enrich the scrapbooks in our collection, giving current Girl Scouts a tangible connection to the past.

Thank you Cheryll!

PS: The Okinawa exhibit remained in place for a year, and the council offices had partly reopened by the 2021 cherry blossom season.

Let’s do a quick experiment: what Girl Scout history information appears on your local council’s website?

Go to your council’s website and click on “Our Council” then “About Our Council. The wording may vary slightly.

If those are not an option, try “About GS” then “Our History.”

Not affiliated with a particular council? Don’t know which council is currently yours? Not a problem. Go to the GSUSA Council Finder page and click on any state.

You should arrive on a page that looks like this:

It has a nice history of the Girl Scout movement. It is concise, and more info is available through a link. I like the photo of Juliette Gordon Low with an early troop and her personal flag.

But at the moment you’re looking at a council website, not GSUSA. Do you see any council history? It does not have to be lengthy, Southwest Indiana, for example, adds a paragraph specific to them following the national history:

I’ve found very little local history on council sites.

If your selected council has a museum, its hours and specifics are probably listed. There may be a sentence or two with information for prospective researchers. There might be a sentence that specifies the year in which that council was created. But wait … something is missing.

About 90 years of Girl Scout history.

Do you see anything about Girl Scouting between 1912 and 2008? Anything about the Realignment program or at least a list of the legacy councils that combined to create the current council?

Cue the crickets and try not to fall into that gaping chasm.

Only One Shade of Green

Beginning in 2015, GSUSA’s Customer Engagement Initiative standardized council websites. As someone who frequently visits websites of multiple councils, I find it very easy to navigate. I imagine it is cost effective for councils as well.

But I’ve noticed a troubling change in content in the past few months. Most council sites have a history page with the exact same three paragraphs on the history of the movement. I can see where that would be useful to introduce Girl Scouts to non-members.

But what happened to council histories? If there is a page or even a paragraph on council history, I cannot find much beyond the date the council was created. Where have all the legacy councils gone? It is difficult to even find the name of a legacy council--those 300+ councils consolidated into 112 a decade ago.

Instead, council descriptions enumerate counties covered today. Again, useful information, but only part of the story.   There is a gaping chasm in history between 1912 and 2008. 

I contacted GSUSA with this question and was told that councils have complete control over the content of their site. Really?

What about this statement, which was included in the 2017 Stewardship Report?

Take a closer look at the third line from the bottom:

…we introduced a standard set of national content covering our history and program as well as consistent branding…

GSUSA, 2017 Stewardship Report, p. 34.

Filling in the Blank Spots of Our History

Is the intent here to provide national history in lieu of council history?

I’m not suggesting a great conspiracy here, perhaps it is just confusion. Perhaps councils did not get the memo saying that they could add their own history content?

If not, GSUSA should send it again. Councils should ask.

Girl Scouts has a rich history across the movement. History that is rich in breadth and depth.

It is time we stop erasing the board every time new leadership arrives.

Sorry dear executives at GSUSA, but history does not begin with you--but you can end it.

I hope you don’t.

Thanks to the Corona virus, days, weeks and even seasons have become a jumble. This time-warp effect, I think, is partly due to the lack of seasonal signposts.

This year there was no July 4th parade in my suburban town. Summer concerts are cancelled. Back-to-school shopping has been scaled back. And what about the Kentucky Derby? The family julep cups were polished, chilled, and ready to fill with minty goodness.

But what I find myself missing today is Camp Sunshine, a Girl Scout day camp about a 45-minute drive from our house. The last week of July is always Camp Sunshine week. My daughter Erin went every year from first grade through 12th, except for one year she was at NYU. I also worked there for four summers, including the one Erin missed.

The camp is held in a wooded area owned by a small, nearby church, but it is separated from the church buildings (and cemetery) by a field, usually planted with corn or soybeans. There was a small footbridge by the church, and protocol was that parents stayed on one side and watched their daughters cross the bridge, join other campers and head for the woods, walking on a gravel road. At afternoon pickup, we’d wait in the church parking lot and watch for our daughters to emerge from the corn.

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The camp was pretty spartan. There’s a nice amphitheater, and porta-potties brought in for the occasion, but the units are concrete slabs with picnic tables and a large wooden storage box. Shelters are made by hoisting tarps and fastening the ropes around one of the many trees.

But once you got the campers and the staff together, the magic begins. Girls normally glued to their phones and screens discover that they can get by with much simpler gear. And, they learn that it is fun to be outside, that the occasional worm crawling about won’t bite them, and to always take a buddy. They also will learn songs. Morning songs, lunchtime songs, hiking songs, and at least one song intended to annoy adults for months on end. “Stay on the Sunny Side” always seemed to fill that last category. There always is a sober-minded staffer who explains to the girls that Princess Pat did not actually live in a tree.

And, for the record, Girl Scouts have been singing “Baby Shark” for decades.

In addition to making friends and having fun, Camp Sunshine was a treasured source of continuity for my daughter. Erin was in three different Brownie troops and three different elementary schools, but for the first four years at Camp Sunshine, she had the same leader (called “Butterfly”) and a large group of familiar faces in her unit.

That first year, she met a girl named Laura, and they quickly became friends. Unfortunately, they lived quite far apart. Year after year, the two girls would impatiently wait for Camp Sunshine so they could see each other again. As they became Cadettes, they were thrilled to find they were both going to the same magnet middle school and later the same magnet high school. Finally, the two wound up in the same troop, and they stayed together through high school. They attended college on opposite coasts, graduating in 2019. Both wound up in California for work, and despite being on opposite ends of the state, they have managed to visit back and forth. That is the power of a Girl Scout friendship.

When the camp switched from two weeks to one, I volunteered to lead the Cadette unit. I like working with that age group (middle school) because that’s the time we loose so many girls. They choose other, more time-consuming activities or decide that Girl Scouts isn’t cool. If we keep them through middle school, they can become Program Aides (junior counselors) in high school. At one point, my teen troop provided six Program Aides.

I tried to make the Cadette unit cool. We set up at the farthest edge of the camp, and skip some all-unit activities. The year all units had cute aquatic-themed names (Starfish, Mermaids, etc.), we were The Island–very foreboding and mysterious. I tried to create an atmosphere where the younger girls couldn’t wait to be a Cadette.

So we did cool stuff. I usually had around 15 girls. One year was forestry, origami, and paper-making. Another was Crime Scene Investigations, where the girls created crime scenes for the others to solve. We experimented with different recipes for fake, “movie” blood. That year I uttered one of the strangest sentences in my Girl Scout career:

“No, Susie, you can’t take your bag of severed limbs to the closing flag ceremony.”

The last two years were extra-fun. We did activities that turned into two of my Hunger Games patches. The girls did archery, made bread, and learned how to treat various injuries from the books. They made obstacle courses, makeshift tents, designed uniforms, and interviewed “tributes” competing in the games.

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I really wanted to stay on at least another year, enough to finish the Hunger Games trilogy, but I reluctantly had to acknowledge that I could not continue.

About 20 years ago I had a catastrophic leg injury. Doctors saved the leg, but after several surgeries, I lost muscles, tendons and more. I now have a leg brace and cannot stand for long periods of time. I am especially prone to tripping, so the woods are hazardous.

The camp director was very generous about accommodations for me. I could drive out to the campsite, and I had program aides to help, but that still meant keeping the girls close to the unit, and me collapsing in a pool of pain each night.

Nevertheless, I am proud that I took on this challenge. It was really hard, but also fun. I loved working with a difficult age group and keeping them excited about staying Girl Scouts. I loved watching camping return as staff. I loved stopping at 7-11 for a Slurpee fix with a carload of Program Aides from my troop.

But the best part, of course, was working with Erin. Even when we were in different units, we did planning and packing, and setting up together.

I guess with all of life’s many changes, girls growing up and leaving for the next phase of their lives, it has been reassuring to know that, year after year, Camp Sunshine would always convene on the last week of July.

Camp Sunshine was cancelled this year, but I hope it will rise again in 2021. We could all use a dose of stability and continuity.

I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorite vintage Girl Scout photos from time to time.

I’ll include some information, such as the date and location, but, dear readers, I’d like YOU to suggest a caption.

Serious is good, funny is better, but keep them clean.

Photo 1: Maryland Girl Scout camp in 1920s.

Grab some cookies, get creative, and start typing!

Last week, the oldest synagogue in Washington, DC, was seen rolling through the streets of the Nation’s Capital.

This wasn’t cheap entertainment provided during the federal government furlough–well, actually it WAS free and entertaining. The journey was a major step in the development of a new Capital Jewish Museum, whose design will incorporate the 1879 building. A decent-sized crowd gathered to watch the wheeled building migrate from near the Supreme Court to 3rd Street NW.

(Photos from UPI, but WordPerfect’s new editor is fighting me.)

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In fact, this was the third relocation for the Adas Israel synagogue.

This motorized procession reminds me of a similar excursion made by the Girl Scout Little House in 1924. But that move was accomplished with actual horsepower, not heavy equipment.

Built behind the White House in Washington, DC, for the second Better Homes Demonstration Week in June 1923, the Little House was a fully working home, with a modern kitchen, breakfast nook, three bedrooms, and a nursery. Between June 4 and June 10, 2,500–3,500 people visited the house each day. After the exhibition, the Better Homes in America and General Federation of Women’s Clubs offered it to the Girl Scouts for use as a national training and innovation center.

The Girl Scouts were reluctant to accept. While it would wonderfully fit in with the Girl Scout program, accepting the gift would require a considerable investment. There were no funds for utilities, staff, insurance, and other operating costs. Most important, there were no funds available to relocate the building.

The clock began ticking on the fate of the model home. The exhibit permit had expired on June 15, 1923.

Lou Henry Hoover immediately saw the value in accepting the house and began working to persuade the Girl Scouts to accept. As national president of the organization, she began a barrage of letters and telegrams to national board members that lasted all summer. On September 20, the national board voted to decline the proposed gift.

But Hoover refused to let the issue drop. She even offered to personally pay any deficit that might accrue in the first two years of operation.

Hoover offered several arguments to sway the reluctant board members. My favorite one sought to dispel the Girl Scouts’ image at the time, of being more interested in hiking than homemaking:

Considering the opposition we have had to meet in many quarters, particularly with the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts on this very matter of our home making propensities, or the lack of them, I feel that we must accept this, our justification, if possible.

–Lou Henry Hoover, October 1, 1923

Meanwhile, Colonel C.O. Sherrill, superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, was continually pleading for someone to get the house off of government property.

Mrs. Hoover asked the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to handle the concerned colonel. His reassurances helped little, as an increasingly desperate Sherrill offered his own solutions, including opening a Tea Room in the building to feed the many government workers situated in nearby offices.

Ultimately, Mrs. Hoover grew tired of the back-and-forth and took matters into her own hands. She contacted Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, of the Phillips Art Collection, who agreed to loan a plot of land that they owned at 1750 New York Ave. NW. The new home for the Little House would be two blocks southwest of the White House and across the street from the famous Octagon House.

Hoover wanted her financial contribution to be anonymous, so she arranged for Henrietta Bates Brooke to sign the moving contract, as member of the National Executive Board. Edward G. McGill of Cumberland, Maryland, oversaw a crew of men who hoisted the house onto rails and pulled it to the new site. McGill charged $3,000 for transporting the house. Hoover also paid for a basement, utility connections, and landscaping, for a total cost of $12,000.

Much to the relief of Colonel Sherrill, the Little House arrived at its new home in March 1924—nine months after the original exhibition. First Lady Grace Coolidge helped re-dedicate the building in a ceremony on March 25, as a beaming Mrs. Hoover watched.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Little House was THE place to go on Saturdays. There was always some badge activity to try or new skill to learn, and the First Lady, as honorary president of the Girl Scouts, might decide to drop by. After all, the White House was just around the corner.

It became the first of many “Little Houses” across the country, where Girl Scouts practiced their homemaking and hospitality skills.

The Little House was used continuously for trainings and demonstrations of the domestic arts from June 1923 to April 1945. The building was used as a branch of Girl Scouts of the USA, the national organization, for the next decade then given to the landowners in May 1955. The Little House was torn down in the early 1970s.

©2019 Ann Robertson