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Band of Scouting Misfits Attains Eagle Ranking
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For his Eagle Scout project, John Goodwin wrote a play and staged it with fellow Scouts in local nursing homes, along with Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?" skit.
They didn't mind that some peers wrote them off as dweebs.
"A long time ago, I got over the people who say it's not cool," said Goodwin, 18, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, who lives in Vienna and is headed to Columbia University in the fall.
Will Douthitt, 17, the troop's smart aleck, said few of the boys thought about reaching Eagle Scout until they were well down the path toward the goal. But then they hung on, despite punishing schedules.
Douthitt, for example, fit Scouting into a high school routine that included fencing, student government, playing trumpet in jazz band, participating in a model United Nations and volunteering for the Global Community Service Foundation, which took him to Vietnam and Burma last summer.
For their Eagle Scout projects, which required at least 100 hours of work and enlisting other volunteers, most of the boys did traditional trail work or construction projects for local public parks: an erosion-control buffer, bluebird boxes, a horseshoe pit and 30-foot-long butterfly bush planters.
Their crowning achievement was a trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, N.M., when the patrol backpacked more than 90 miles. It was a demonstration in the art of setting goals and sticking to them, said Choppa, of Falls Church.
"The goal in life is to raise [these] guys to be able to give back to society. It's breaking the will of the individual to the good of the group, because these kids have strong personalities," Choppa said. "For me, I did it to be with my son, so he's not playing video games."
