A couple of weeks ago, I posted the first of memoir of one of my mentors. Click here for that post. Here is the second part.
Staff Retreats
Ron taught those of us on staff to make the best of any situation. We were a small staff; there were only five of us. Twice a year, Ron pulled us away for a three-day retreat. We spent the time planning and training. We worked hard. But Ron was never one to let hard work get in the way of a good time.
Many of these retreats were held in beach houses owned by a council board member. Several were on Wrightsville Beach, others on Brunswick County beaches. In addition to planning, training, and setting goals, we’d fish and take turns preparing fancy seafood dinners. If the water was warm, we’d swim. There was one fall retreat, after working all day and a big dinner, we played football in the surf as the sun set. It probably wasn’t the brightest thing as the sharks often move closer to shore to feed at dusk, but no one was harmed.
One fall morning we meet at a beach house on Wrightsville Beach. Ron unlocked the door. We began to barge in with boxes of food, a couple of cases of beer, bottles of booze, bags of chips, along with flip charts and calendars and other assorted accruements. We were all shocked as a barely dressed woman stepped out of the bathroom. She squealed and ducked back in. Then, in the commotion, a young man appeared from the bedroom as the coed returned from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her. “Who are you?” She asked. Ron told her he arranged with so and so to use the house for a few days. This turned out to be the girl’s father.
Embarrassed and concerned her daddy might learn she’d taken a premature break from college in order to entertain her boyfriend, she asked for a few minutes to pack. Ron was polite and said we were all in need for some breakfast and that when we return, we’ll have forgotten what we’d seen. We left. An hour later we returned; the woman and her illicit boyfriend were gone. I’m sure when Ron dropped a thank you note to her Daddy, he omitted that it had been our pleasure to meet his daughter.
Ron’s Organizational Skills
Ron had a temper and never liked it when things didn’t go the way he’d plan. In one staff meeting, where he learned several assignments had been dropped, Ron started cussing and fussing and marched us into his office.
Ron’s desk was always immaculate. He started lecturing on how to organize our mail so that everything got done. He had a three-bin file on the edge of his desk. His goal was to never handle a piece of paper more than twice, he said. When he opened his mail, if it could be handled immediately, he did so. If it was of top importance and wouldn’t take much time, it went into this top bin. Second bin was for things that weren’t critical, and the bottom one was for things he wanted to look at but was not so important that the world would end if he didn’t get around to it. In his rant, Ron picked up the stack of papers in his top bin.
On the bottom of this stack was a Hustler magazine. We all started to smirk. Ron’s face became redder and redder as we all broke out into laughter. Finally, before Ron blew a gasket, someone pointed to the magazine. Ron turned over the pile. Then he laughed. His lecture came to an end with some mumbling about priorities.
Ron and Marketing
Ron should have been on Madison Avenue. Not only was he a good salesman, but he was also a master marketer. Even when we were doing things like raising money to pay off debt, Ron could come up with positive campaign slogans and materials that turned what many would have considered drudgery into an opportunity to celebrate. I don’t remember all the names, but one desk, I still have a “Catch the Scouting Spirit” mug holding pencils. In a shelf at work, there’s a “Total Development Campaign” apothecary jar holding toothpicks.
Ron insisted that when an event was over, it didn’t matter how good it turned out. What mattered was how people thought it went. If it was the greatest event in the world and only those who were there knew about it, it was a flop. Then next time we’d have to work just as hard. However, even if the event was mediocre, but everyone thought it was great, then it was a success. The next time such an event would be even easier to promote. Ron encouraged us to learn the stories from scouts and leaders and to tell them in order to promote the program.
Knowing I was interested in photography, Ron encouraged me to shoot photos whenever possible. With the scouting program financing my film and developing chemicals, I photographed everything. As I was working in rural areas with smaller newspapers, I often had full page spreads of my photographs showing scouts in action. Photos ended up in the council annual report and on camp posters. I was shocked when visiting Ron years later, just before his death, to see the posters framed and hanging in his home. Although at the time my writing was limited to an occasional press release, I’m sure Ron’s insistence on telling stories influenced my writing more than I could have imagined.
Ron and Perception (another part of Marketing)
Perception was also important in how we did our jobs. Ron taught us that you always left your business card and even encouraged us to stop by places in which we knew someone wouldn’t be home or in the office. Leaving a business card was almost as good as making a face-to-face visit. It didn’t take as much time and it left the perception that we were hard at work (in truth, when you have hundreds of volunteers, such time saving techniques were necessary to help everyone feel connected and cared for. He told stories about dropping off his business cards in mailboxes in the middle of the night. I never did that, but I wouldn’t put it past Ron.
In addition to dropping off business cards, Ron was always writing notes to people—both to volunteers as well as his professional staff. Whenever we did something well, he’d write us a note and encourage us to do likewise. To this day, I always care a few note cards in my folder, a habit I learned from Ron.
Building Camp Bowers
One of Ron’s great achievements as the Scout Executive for the Cape Fear Council was creating Camp Bowers in Northwest Bladen County. The council had not had a camp since a few years after my scouting days when they had sold Camp Tom Upchurch. While they had property, nothing had been done toward building a camp. Ron set out to change this. He charged ahead.
I remember one of my first staff meetings where I learned the importance of fund raising, if we wanted to be paid. We all worked hard and soon were not only raising enough to meet the budget but also paid off the debt which had been accumulating on camp construction through the “Total Development Campaign.” While the camp wasn’t quite finished, we dedicated the camp in May 1981. Hank Aaron, who had recently retired from baseball (and an Eagle Scout) gave the keynote address. A month later, we began the first summer of camp.
The fire at Camp Bowers
A year later, we held another council camporee at the camp. Troops from all over Southeastern North Carolina gathered. We had around 1000 boys on the site. It was dry and windy spring day, and things were going well. Around lunch, people began to comment about the smoke in the air. It was checked out a learned that a few miles away, someone was burning a large brush pile from where there a track of land had been clearcut. Shortly after lunch, the winds picked up. We received word the controlled burn was no longer in control. A raging fire headed straight toward the camp.
The word went out to evacuate. Since the camp was a couple miles from a paved road, with only one way in or out, it was important to be on the safe side. After everyone had been safely evacuated, the staff all stayed behind.
Ron went into town to get more water hoses so we could have hoses available at all the buildings. He came back, not only with water hoses, but with a cooler of beer and snacks. That night, the humidity rose, the wind died, and the fire laid down, burning in a bay (swamp) at the edge of camp, not too far from the camp office. We were told to watch the fire and to let the forest service know if it started to come out of the swamp. Ron got the bright idea to haul lawn chairs and the cooler up to the roof of the camp office. We took turns napping and watching the fire, while enjoying cold beer and chips.
The next morning, the wind picked up and the humidity dropped. We worked liked crazy putting out spot fires and watering down buildings. The North Carolina forest service brought in the big guns. Several large helicopters were based on the lake, picking up water and dropping it a few hundred feet away. A waterbomber made a couple of passes, as bulldozers trenched around buildings. While the first didn’t destroy any buildings, the burned areas were on the camp boundaries were evident even as summer camp began that summer.
Ron’s Single Life
Toward the end of my time with the Cape Fear Council, Ron and his first wife divorced. We’d often hold staff meetings on Friday afternoons and those of us available would go out on the town during the evening. Often, I stayed with Ron overnight in the condo he rented on Wrightsville Beach. On one occasion, I had been down to the council office mid-week. Ron suggested we go out. We did and I spent the night with him. The next morning, I had a 7 AM breakfast meeting with the Chairman of the Board of United Carolina Bank (for whom Camp Bowers had been named). That morning, it was foggy. I wondered what’d I’d gotten myself into as I drove back just in time to make the meeting.
A few months after I left for the Piedmont Council, Ron became the Scout Executive in Orlando Florida. Not long after that, Ron returned to Wilmington to marry Pam, who had been his secretary. It was a delightful wedding and they remained together until Ron’s death in 2005.
Addendum 1 (added two days later):
Parker, a who was also a part of the staff at Cape Fear Council in the early 1980s and can barely be seen in the back of the photo, emailed me about this post. He told of another skill Ron taught. Always set up for a meeting enough tables and chairs for 90% of the expected guests. This way, if more came, it looked even more successful as you pulled out extra chairs. If there were those who couldn’t make it, you didn’t have a lot of empty chairs sitting around. Parker spoke about how he, in his career working for Chambers of Commerce, adhered to this practice.
For some reason, I didn’t associate this practice with Ron, but it was also another thing I learned from working with the scouts. Over the years I have fought the battle with administrators, sextons, and volunteers to set up less chairs than expected. It takes a while for them to see the reason, but eventually they do.
Addendum 2 (added two days later)
In my previous post, I told about being with Ron a few months before his death. At the time, Ron and Pam asked me if I was willing to officiate at this funeral. I was. Sadly, when Ron died, they wanted to do the funeral on a particular day in Wilmington, NC. I had already committed to officiate at a wedding the next day on the West Coast and needed to be there for the rehearsal. I wasn’t able to officiate at the funeral.
Other Scouting Stories:
My Last Week as a Camp Director: Camp Bud Schiele, 1984
Camp Bangladesh (A Summer Camp Scoutmaster)
