Sepia Saturday #117 Girl Scouts and Diaries

Here I am in my girl scout uniform in the 5th grade class photo. As I remember, our teacher had sent a memo home to parents saying that we should wear something nice for photo day, and please no uniforms. Somehow my memo didn't get home. And I'm the only one in our troop that wore a uniform that day. But I see that the Blue Birds didn't get the memo either. They're the ones in the the crisp white blouses and kerchiefs.

About a year ago my daughter who lives in Brooklyn, told me about going to a club in her neighborhood that once a week would feature people reading from their diaries. She said it was absolutely hilarious.

So I'm going to feature a page from my diary which involves Girl Scouts. I noticed in my fifth grade diary that I would sometimes write about the Girl Scout meetings, but mostly about boys.

I don't know why I didn't have a proper diary like this one, all leather with a secure lock:

No, I had one that I must have stolen from my father. Or did I ask him to buy me one and he said, "no, you can use this one".  He was known for being really, really cheap or should I say thrifty? So instead of a pretty red leather diary with a lock, I had this one which I had to personalize myself. You can tell that I didn't get any of the "art" genes in our family. My sister got them all. I can imagine what her diary might have looked like - certainly not like this one.

This page proves that the diary had belonged to my Dad, but he passed it along to me (or did I steal it?) and I scratched out his name (to hide the evidence) and added mine instead. The diary made the move from Chicago to California (note the different addresses) which leads me to believe that I didn't steal it - it must have been laying around for years before it was handed down to me. Looks like I was pretty scared that someone might return my found diary to Stanley Quality instead of to me. No way did I want my secrets sent off to Westfield, Mass.!!

So back to the Girl Scouts. On April 1st our troop must have decided to play an April Fools joke on the tourists heading to San Diego on the train. Can you imagine their horror seeing a bunch of uniformed 5th graders infiltrating their car? It couldn't have been a pretty sight. I'm pretty sure we weren't a well-behaved bunch. So here's my diary posting for that April Fools Day:
Dear Diary,
Went to the San Diego Zoo on train.
Sat with Jane on way up and on the way
back Donna, Connie, Jane and I sat
together on seats like this

Seats went like this when you
press a button.
Seats were comfortable.

So I was pretty impressed with the seats. There was absolutely no news about the zoo or San Diego or anything else about the trip - just the seats. How easy was I to please?


Here's another posting about the girl scout meeting, but you can really tell that all I was interested in at that time were boys.
Dear Diary,
We put on those plays at girl scouts.
Gordon never pays any attention to me, so I guess
I'll stick with Douglas. All day long it's the same old boys.

One of my fondest memories of girl scout meetings was that we would all stand around holding hands and sing the Girl Scout song. My friend Jane and I can still sing all the words. If you were a girl scout, do you still remember the words? If not, these lovely ladies on youtube will help us out:



I loved being a girl scout, but once I got into high school I dropped out. It just wasn't the cool thing to do.
For other scouting stories, click on Sepia Saturday.