There was a Boy Scout World Jamboree held in Santa Ana, California. I was chosen to be a patrol leader (yay) and my parents put me on a train early in the morning on July 9 in Rockford, Illinois. I left my folks knowing that I wouldn't see them again for 2 weeks. Separation anxiety was short as the train loaded with Boy Scouts from all over northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin left for two weeks of fun on Southern California. We sang songs, played cards, and played pranks on each other. It was fun sleeping in the Pullman bunks. The clack of the tracks, swaying of the cars easily put me to sleep. In 3 days we were in Santa Ana at the Irvine ranch with 50,000 other scouts. We swam in the ocean, cooked our own food, pitched our tents, had trading sessions where we traded things from our home town and state, and great hikes exploring the ranch. The evenings featured stage shows and entertainment by many movie stars, such as Debbie Reynolds, Jimmy Stewart, Roy Rogers , Mitzi Gaynor, Danny Kaye, and others. A bunch of us waited at the gate where the celebs came in hoping to get autographs and Richard Nixon, the USVP came in riding in a convertible limo with his bodyguards. The car stopped right in front of us and one of the bodyguards gave me a stick of Wrigley's spearmint gum. WOW I chewed that gum for 5 days, saving it overnight on the bedpost. From that time on I was a Nixon man! I knew then he didn't have any idea about Watergate!
[This memory first appeared on Mike's Facebook Wall, and is used with his permission.]
Jamboree Road now is one of the major thoroughfares in Orange County, California, running from just west of Irvine Lake, all the way south to Pacific Coast Highway.main street, but in 1953 it was a gravel road through a tent town of boy scouts.
Images are from OC Register story. Patch from Orange Co. Memories.
Here are some photos, including Nixon, from the OC Register. I wonder if the bartering and trading are what launched Mike's later antiques career. http://www.ocregister.com/.../webb-649572-jamboree-scouts...
http://www.octhen.com/2006/09/jamboree-road.htm
1 comment:
Great story, Mike. I've been to Irvine several times, but had no idea about this part of its history. A lot of our class members benefited from Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. According to a comment you made about the scout photo on this blog in 2006, "This was troop 50 and the scoutmasters were George Reeves and Pat Kellogg. We used to meet at the town hall, upstairs, to play prison ball and soccer baseball before and after the meetings. The troop evolved into a sea scout troop and we built a boat in the Rock River at Maxon's Manor."
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