Especially as the years went on, I'd have to say Don Moss (and, to some extent, his younger brother, Bob) were my best boyhood friends. During the high school years, we'd generally walk together for the mile from my house to the high school. Walking with someone for two miles a day, you get to visit a lot. Then when Scouting puts you together every Thursday night and many weekends and school often puts you together in the same (relatively small) class, well.... you really get to know each other very well. In fact, for six months after high school, we'd walk the three miles to Newark (unless it rained, in which case we'd splurge and take the bus).
In the Inter-Troop rallies, Moose (as we called him) and I were often the team for the code events: Morse AND semaphore. He lived yet another half-mile north of our house, so he did even more walking than I did. If I walked three doors down the hill from our house, it was a straight shot up Beech Street to his house, so I could see him almost from the moment he left his house. If we didn't have too many books to carry, we could practice our code (usually semaphore, which is faster) by talking to each other with our arms. I'm sure this puzzled onlookers who often couldn't see the recipient of the arm-waving.
Cooking was a required merit badge in those days and Troop One had its own standards for that badge: the meal had to be PERFECT or you got another shot at the badge. Actually, it was rare for anyone to pass until there was another, younger, boy working on the badge. That made it easy to decide who was in charge of K.P. for the whole weekend. Since the judge was Don Moss' father (and he was a father who demanded MORE of his own son), Don probably set the troop record for attempts at Cooking M.B.
Don was a member of First Baptist and had a key to the church. The church had a pool table downstairs. I remember on our graduation night in January of 1962 that, when all of the other events had wound down (and we were determined to see in the dawn), Don took a few of us to the church and we shot pool until dawn. We then all dragged home, tired as could be, and found some major space event unfolding on television, thus keeping us up much of Saturday. On Sunday, the older boys in Troop One had their annual ski trip to the Concord Hotel. When I started my job at Mutual Benefit Life Insurance on Monday morning (my first computer experience), I was an extremely tired young man.
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