Venice Pride, Bill Gates, and the Moon Landing!

Star Date: July 20 1969  (continued). THE BIG DAY

It was hot and muggy day at the Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho. We wanted to hit the pool, but somehow the prior condition of our troop (back in the "Post-Prune" days in Yellowstone with the sudden flashes of diarrhea) made it all the up to the top brass. THE RULING BIG-WIGS decreed that "TROOP 32 be bared from the use of the community pool!"

Listen: It was humiliating to be the only Boy Scout Troop in the history of the world to be cut off from the public pool facilities. Unfortunately, it only served to irritated the infamous KYBO patrol.  The crazy "loons"sought revenge against the entire Boy Scout universe.  After all, we were about to land on the moon and conquer a celestial body in outer space and this is was the best thing they could think of at this historic moment! Man was about to set foot on the moon and they wouldn't let my 20 boys from Venice set foot on the bottom of the pool! Needless to say, Ronnie and Dego and Chronister and Cockerel were fit to be tied. They ended up over by Beaver Bay and began a rock throwing war with three other troops. Kissel, Humphrey and I had to get in on it and defend the honor of Venice!

After pelting each other with rocks we managed to inflict serious damage on two of the kids on the opposing shore!  We got a couple of them smack dab on the head and drew FIRST BLOOD...
                                                                               

YEAH! 

Victory! 

VENICE RULES! 

The only thing that would have made it better for the illustrious KYBO Patrol would have been if it were one of the kids from Troop 186 that we conked on the noggin... and even better than that - would have been if they had gotten that nerdy kid...Bill Gates! Luckily for him, he didn't have to eat glue-pasta like we did on the way.. he didn't have constipation...like we did... he didn't have to eat a bucket of stewed "grandma-prunes" like we did...and he and his cohorts didn't have explosive diarrhea like we did... and were now busy splashing around and having fun in the pool with other normal boys                                  ...LIKE WE WEREN'T!

The good news is we did manage to hit a kid named Charlie Schaupp who was one of the over-achievers in Troop 21.   Yeah!
 
And we also manged to hit one of those kids in the ridiculous red felt hats, who thought they were "all that."       YEAH us!

When brought up before the Tribunal, we denied it of course and had made up a big story about how we took this hike out in the woods trying to anticipate what the moon walk would have looked like.  Ronnie talked about how he pretended to eat the green cheese on the moon and Chronister said something about giant robots that morphed into different shapes on the dark side of the moon - stupid Chronister - who would ever believe that kind of nonsense!

Anyway, none of us cracked under the Waterboarding (just kidding about the Waterboarding part) not one of us cracked under their interrogation and it turned into one of those "he said...she said" type of brouhaha nonsense!

They screamed and yelled and made us recite the Boy Scout pledge to make sure we were really Boy Scouts and not that Zombies had eaten our brains and taken over our bodies.  Don't ask me how, but we managed to pull that one off!  They threatened to take the TV privileges of watching the Moon Landing away from us if we didn't behave for the rest of the day. Thank goodness we didn't do the naked raid as planned.. because they got pretty upset about the "White Angels" and 3:00 am "Pink Bellies"

Dego didn't care about watching, he thought the whole thing was a hoax anyway and was pretty vocal about it, but the rest of us wanted to watch as man walked on the moon.

We got to watch the whole boring hour of CBS coverage on the TV's they had set up all over Farragut State Park...

But the actually landing was very cool.  It was like one of those moments in life like "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" A thing you'll always remember exactly where you where!

Anyway we had a couple days left of making trouble and it is no wonder why they actually invited us NEVER TO ATTEND another jamboree.

I guess (like the Salem cigarette commercial jingle "You can take Salem out of the country, but you can't take the country out of Salem") was true for us... "You can take the kid out of Venice, but you couldn't take Venice out of the kid"  

We made our presence felt, we changed the outcome of history and two days later climbed into the back of that old Carbon Monoxide spewing "Scout Truck" and fought all the way home!

"One small step for somebody and a giant step for someone else - I guess!"


VENICE PRIDE!

Pictured to the right is the rear end of the infamous "Scout Bus"; Eagle Scout Kurt Dahlin on hood of red 1970 Toyota Corolla; Scout Steve Kissel (holding something important in the background) Senior Patrol leader...Ray (leaning in), and Markie D on bike along with other various creatures from Venice in the driveway of the Harding House with Famous Lennon Sister house in background!



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