With piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones and a comely mane of white hair, 85-year-old Alma Knox seems the embodiment of a Girl Scout alumna. Who better to explain how "the movement" has evolved since she first donned a khaki outfit and bloomers in 1924?
"The only thing that hasn’t changed is the motto, and our ideals," Know explained from her perch in an open-air tent on the Mall in Washington yesterday. "But I’d like to think we’re keeping up. We’ve always been ahead of our…"
Her last word is drowned out by a ruckus. The Girl Scouts’ 85th Anniversary Sing-Along had just started, and she is suddenly afloat in an undulating sea of 50,000 badge-earning Brownies, Juniors, Cadettes, Seniors, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and Scout leaders boogieing and singing along to the ground-shaking sound of – the Macarena.
Know taps her foot lightly and smiles. These aren’t just the campfire singing cookie sellers of yore. Uh-uh.
Today’s Girl Scouts, all 2.25 million of them, still hike and sing, but they are just as likely to talk about leadership, work on computers and help the homeless. The organization no longer officially requires a belief in God, and its recruitment poster for the Girl Scouts summer camp has a decidedly 1990s spin: "it’s a great resume builder."
It all adds up to an understated sort of feminism, in an everyday, change-your-neighborhood-and-have-fun sort of way.
"It’s a camaraderie, a safe haven, and it has a great emotional pull," said former Girl Scout Laura Mytels, who came to Washington from Palo Alto, California, three years ago to work for a lobbying firm but soon quit to work for the Scouts. "We are going to help girls reach any goal they want. It’s no more radical than that."
Let’s start with the basics. Forget about a sea of green uniforms. That’s history. The Brownies wear culottes and floral dresses, the Juniors sport teal, and a bunch of youngsters still sport baseball caps covered with a thick quill of patches and doodads obtained from Girl Scout troops across the nation. But the principal look is late 20th-century adolescent: T-shirts, baggy pants, sneakers and the occasional nose ring.
Tammy Lou Fay, 14, of Tennessee, taps her head and tries, gently, to nudge a reporter into 1997. "You see, Girl Scouting is up here now. It’s a mind-set. It’s not what you happen to wear anymore."
These girls, especially the older ones, often have a lot more to talk about than the merits of Thin Mints vs. Do-Si-Dos or Tagalongs. As the earrings, badges and even the occasional tattoo attested yesterday, Girl Scouts come from all over the nation and from every social class. More than 30 percent of the 2.25 million Girl Scouts are black.
Tameka Allen, 13, and her cousin and best friend, Kristeena Denman, 11, spend a couple of hours every month or so slapping together peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for a shelter for the homeless in Silver Spring. Jessie Autry and Megan Funk of Elizabethtown, KY, passed a weekend last spring bailing out a florist’s shop in their town’s flood-ravaged business district.
And pigtailed Ly Ea, 12, and Hiem Thack, 11, talk with elderly shut-ins in the Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. They are part of the Girl Scouts "linguistic outreach" troops. Their troop leader, Anh Phan, 53, was a Girl Scout many years ago, in Saigon. The Vietnamese scouts were known as huong dao.
When Phan came to Philadelphia and began working in a local public school, she said, it seemed only natural to volunteer as a Scout leader. Ten years later, she had to order 10 buses to bring the 130 Southeast Asian children to Washington for the Sing-Along.
"Some of the Vietnamese parents, they remember the Scouts," Phan said. "And they love that we are helping their children while they struggle to establish themselves."
Tanya Harcum spoke of a similar new day for her African American troop from the Howard Park neighborhood in Baltimore. The voluble 37-year-old troop leader was a Girl Scout herself once, but that was a while back.
Now, her program touches on drugs and sex education for the older girls, health and hygiene and computer and reading skills. Each year, her troop collects pennies off the street and sells cookies to build up a little war chest, which is used to reward those girls who get the best grades.
"Most of our girls go to college, and they really work hard for those awards," Harcum said. "We’ve worked very hard to stay up to date."
Now that might sound like quite a break wit the Girl Scouts of old. But the Girl Scouts have ever been a bit the genteel revolutionaries.
Juliette Gordon Low, then a recently widowed and worldly matron from Savannah, Georgia, founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, and when she marched the first dozen girls off into the coastal pine forests for a night of camping, some in her Old South city were scandalized.
In the years to come, Low would encourage girls to prepare themselves not only as wives and mothers but also as professional women. She also built a formidable business organization, and when a bunch of Philadelphia Girl Scouts happened to bake and sell a couple of dozen cookies in 1932 to earn their badges, Low saw a future assured.
She set home ovens by the hundreds to humming. By 1936, the Girl Scouts went national with their cookies, and today the organization is the nation’s fifth-largest cookie retailer. Girl Scouts sell about 15 cookies per year for every man, woman, and child in America. Management gurus still refer to the Girl Scouts as one of the best-managed organizations in the country.
"Juliette Low was way ahead of her time," Alma Knox said. "She wanted girls to hike and play basketball, and she formed aviation and seafaring clubs."
Knox registered for her first Girl Scout troop at Calvary Methodist Church in Washington in 1924 and recalls riding the street cars out to the hilly parks surrounding the city for weekends of camping and hiking. Her daughters and granddaughters have passed through the Girl Scouts.
She fingered the Golden Eagle brooch on her lapel, a Girl Scout badge earned more than seven decades ago.
"I’m waiting for my great-grandchildren," she said. "They are Brownies in the making."
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