I am having a lively online conversation with a man whom I really like and who continues to impress me, from an old-time A.G. family, Richard Waller. I also love his wife, Laurie, who gives Elizabeth and me massages so relaxing that they would melt Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s face.

Wait. Too late.

Anyway, we discovered we were in the Boy Scouts about the same time.

But Richard was in the Smart Guys’ Troop—filled to the brim with Dentons—Troop 29. They built linear accelerators and would occasionally launch hamsters into earth orbit and recover them off the Pismo pier.  The Rockwell painting above shows the Boys of 29 in the moments before they found Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. It was in Oceano, buried in the dunes.  The Rockwell painting, consistent with the modesty of the times, omits their faithful guide, Acorn, a Dunite and Orthodox Nudist.

Once, at a Camporal, Troop 29 brewed a new class of antibiotics over the campfire when the rest of us were singing “The Chicken Song” (“They’re layin’ eggs now/Just like they used ta/Ever since that roos-tah/Came into our yarrrrrd….”) and telling lame ghost stories about how the White Lady of the Mesa ate, say, Kevin McNamara’s uncle.

I may be mistaken, but I think I remember their Kodiak Patrol discovering the Northwest Passage during an orienteering competition.

I was in Troop 26, the troop that had profound difficulty with bodily functions. Hiking, fire-building, and tent-pitching were not problems for us. Finding the latrine was our Stalingrad: we took casualties. On one campout, one of us did #2 in a large and unusually virulent clump of poison oak, with grievous and medically spectacular results. In a separate incident, we became known as “Troop 26, The Troop Where the Guy Gets Lost in the Dark at 2 A.M. and Pees on the Side of Your Pup Tent Troop”

They did not then give merit badges for this achievement—or for pup tent irrigation, now that I think about it—but I smoked my first Marlboro with fellow Troop 26 member Julian Brownlee in the men’s room of the St. Patrick’s Parish Hall, when it was on Branch St. Today, that building is the St. Patrick’s Parish Hall on Fair Oaks Avenue.

There should be a little bronze plaque in that men’s room: TENDERFOOT SCOUT JIM GREGORY SMOKED HIS FIRST CIGARETTE HERE AND TURNED EVERY SHADE OF GREEN EVER INVENTED BY THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT.

I was a fine scout until we got into knots. Knots undid my Boy Scout career. I just could not figure them out, which means I would have been frequently flogged, for knot indolence, in Lord Nelson’s navy, but was merely embarrassed back then, in the pre-Haight 1960s. I was not embarrassed for long, for I discovered girls soon thereafter and my Boy Scout days were gone forever. I had sideburns to grow.