Memories of Girl Scout Cookies, camping, & Button Bay, Vermont, 1962
The annual Girl Scout cookies sale is well underway. Favorites like Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Patties, Samoas, Trefoils, Tagalongs, Lemon-Ups, Do-si-dos, and S’mores shouldn’t be hard to find, but Emily Heil of The Washington Post (Jan. 19, 2022) says that this year’s flavor addition—Adventurefuls—has run into supply-chain issues in the Washington area which will impact the amount available in booth sales, but it can be purchased online.
The Girl Scouts figured heavily in my life from the age of 7 (as a Brownie) until my graduation from high school in 1965 (as a Senior Scout). In my first school picture, I’m wearing my Brownie uniform, my hair disheveled under the beanie. Each year, we Girl Scouts would go door-to-door taking orders and distributing cookies. We were supposed to have at least one buddy walk with us, and it had to be in the daytime. Once my friends Lynn Andrew, Connie Lane, and Linda Mays thought it would be a great idea to sell cookies in what they deemed an underserved area of Lynch Station. In their enthusiasm, they neither realized the approaching dusk nor the distance they’d have to walk. They pulled a red wagon filled with colorful boxes of cookies along the old railway bed toward their final destination—Tucker’s Market. As darkness fell, Linda’s father found them and asked Lynn and Connie if their parents knew they were out so late. “Oh, yes, sir,” they fibbed. “We’re almost there.” Linda rode off with her father while Lynn and Connie pulled their little wagon along the narrow country road in the dusk. By the time they reached Tucker’s Market, it was after dark.
Money from cookie sales go toward Girl Scout activities throughout the year—like the 1962 Roundup in Button Bay, Vermont. Several of us wanted to attend this gathering of thousands of girls from around the world. The selection process was rigorous and required grueling weekends of tryouts at Camp Sacajawea, observed by women we didn’t know. Our duties for the day were posted on caper charts. We pitched tents in scorching sunlight and shivered when rain blew into our tents at night. We barbecued chicken full of gristle, and cooked to a moderate crunch foil-wrapped potatoes in the campfire.
Attendance at each tryout was obligatory—no exceptions. Two in our group of contenders, Lynn Andrew and Trisha Frazier, had been invited to the Senior Prom which happened to fall on a Roundup trial weekend. When they asked permission to be absent, they were told to make a choice—it was either the Prom or the tryout. They both chose the tryout, despite the agony of having to tell their dates, “I can’t go with you to the Prom because of Girl Scouts.” When Lynn and Trisha checked the caper chart on Prom weekend and found that their job was to clean out the latrines, they attacked the chore ferociously while belting out Tara’s song from “Gone with the Wind,” the Prom theme that year.
Of the 30 or so girls from this area who tried out, only 8 were selected to go to the Roundup. Lynn, Trisha, and I were among this lucky group. On July 17th, 1962, we set out from E.C. Glass and arrived at Button Bay, weary from our all-night bus ride. By the next morning, a tent city, population 10,000, had sprouted upon the shores of Lake Champlain. After we’d pitched our tents, each patrol had to build a picnic table. Ours collapsed as soon as we sat down. We’d brought little felt pins of cardinals and dogwood blossoms as symbols of Virginia which we swapped with campers from other states in the trading post. Although we’d never received instructions on how to make authentic fly-fishing hooks, we designed our own artistic versions and gave a demonstration in the arena on how to make them. One day the von Trapp Family Singers, inspiration for “The Sound of Music,” gave a concert. Their music carried well over speakers in the amphitheater, but the singers were tiny in the distance.
It’s been 60 years since the Roundup, but every once in a while, especially when Girl Scout cookies-sale season comes around, I remember that city of thousands who sang and dreamed together of a world at peace. We were young. We were naïve. Perhaps this kind of optimism belongs to the past. But, as I bite into a Thin Mint, for a brief moment I recapture the sweetness of that youthful idealism. Give me four boxes, please.
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