Trail Talk – 3/10/25

Here are our Troop announcements for the week:

OA UNIT ELECTIONS – Unit Elections for Order of the Arrow on Tuesday, March 18th. You must be 1st Class and have 15 camping nights(including 1 long term camp like Summer Camp) in the last two years to be eligible. This will take place at the beginning of the meeting! I am urging everyone to be present. For an OA election to take place, at least 50% of each troop needs to be present. This means having at least 21/22 of the boys in the boy troop present and 12 of the girls in the girl troop present. If you don’t show up, we can’t have the election and that means that those that are eligible lose out! If you are a member of the Order of the Arrow, please wear your sash on Tuesday March 18th.

March GERALD R. FORD Museum Trip –March 22nd 8:30 am – 3:00 pm. This should be an awesome small trip for the church to take. I just drove by the Gerald R. Ford Museum a couple of nights ago and was excited about the idea of getting to go there again! How cool is it to go to a museum dedicated to the only Eagle Scout President in United States History! Meet at the church to leave. SCOUTS MUST WEAR THEIR CLASS A UNIFORM!  Lunch Provided. Permission slip is attached. The cost is $10, please sign up, pay and turn in permission slip to Sherry. If you have questions, please see Christy Szekely.

Our annual Jerky sale began on January 28th. Each stick sells for $1.00 and for each one sold, the scout earns 24 cents into their individual scout account. You can make payments for jerky at any time here – https://bit.ly/244Jerky

There are 3 ways you can sell . . .

1. Pick up jerky at any scout meeting, sell it and then return the money to get credit.

2. Take pre-orders using the order form here – https://www.facebook.com/…/permalink/10161092202452135/
Turn in the order form to get your pre-orders filled and then deliver to your customers.

3. If you have family and friends out of the local area who would like to purchase jerky to support your scout’s efforts, they can order through this link – https://www.countrymeats.com/fundraiser/troop-244-mi-49024

You can make payments for jerky at any time here – https://bit.ly/244Jerky

If you are interested in helping with this fundraiser, please see Mr. Townsend.

Pioneer Scout Reservation the week of June 15 – 21st! The cost for Summer Camp this year is $430 per scout and $215 per adult. That cost goes up by $21 per scout and adult leader if we don’t get the fees paid by the end of April. I sent out an email about Summer Camp this last Saturday. Hopefully you all read it. I hope you realize that we have deadlines that we have to meet and so waiting to sign up for Summer Camp is not a thing we can do. We need you to sign up NOW! Please go to Zeffy(click here) or see Sherry and sign your scout up now. As I said in the email, Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting movement, fully believed that “A week at camp is worth 6 months of theoretical teaching in a classroom”. I agree with him on that. Every scout NEEDS to go to camp! If there is an issue or something keeping you from signing up, please let me know and we will address it.

CUB SCOUT INVOLVEMENT – We have some Cub Scouting things going on this month that we need to attend to. First, On March 20th, is the Crossover/Blue and Gold Banquet for Mason Clapp! This is at Centerpoint Church on 10th Street at 6:30 p.m. Second, Pack 235 is having their Pinewood Derby on Saturday, March 22nd. They need help for set up on Friday, March 21st starting at 5:30 p.m. at the church. They again need help in the morning on Saturday, March 22nd starting around 9:00 a.m. There are various jobs to be done! Finally, on Tuesday, March 25th we have a scout from Pack 251 in Vicksburg crossing into our troop. His name is Thomas Hawkins and he is the son of a Troop 244 Eagle Scout and a dear friend of mine. His crossover will be at Vicksburg Bible Church at 6:30 p.m. It is a Tuesday night so you would have to miss our troop meeting to attend. I will be attending this one. You can sign up to attend one of these Crossover events here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30E044AADAC2CAAFE3-54790393-2025#/

Pack 235 is still looking for Den Chiefs for their various Dens! If you could help be a Den Chief for one of their dens for the remainder of the school/scout year, that would be great. They meet at the church on Monday nights at 6:30 p.m.

ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY – April 12th at the car wash next to the Speedway gas station on the south side of Schoolcraft at 9:00 a.m. Jim Gluys will be leading this one last time for Troop 244 and then Sean Harrigan will be taking over when we do this again in the fall. To get this done quickly and efficiently though, we need scouts to show up. This typically only takes about 3 hours if we have enough scouts. This counts as service hours towards your rank advancements! Please wear long pants and long-sleeved shirt. Boots and hats. Bring gloves and a water bottle. We need everyone to attend. We DO need ADULT help to drive and escort the scouts for safety reasons.

BOUNDARY WATERS – I sent an email to the Boundary Waters group this weekend, but I will put the basic information here again. We will be having an informational meeting during the regular troop meeting on April 15th at 7:00 p.m. Location at the church is still TBD. We will do a training/shakedown for those going on this trip on the Saturday of the April Campout. April Campout is April 25 – 27th. Come on the campout or come out for the day on Saturday!

Mini-High Adventure –The trip will take us to the historic battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This trip is taking place August 2 – 6th. A day of travel, 3 days in Gettysburg and a day of travel home! The mini-high adventure sounds like it is going to be loaded with fun and some awesome things to see. Sign up now! The final cost is to be determined but could be somewhere around $150. That is a STEAL for a trip like this. We are going to ask for a $50 deposit currently to secure your spot. Sign up for this and pay the deposit with Sherry in the office.

PHYSICAL FORMS! – Every Scout and Leader MUST have an up-to-date BSA PHYSICAL FORM with all parts of the form filled out, Part A, B1, B2 and C if you plan to go to Summer Camp, Boundary Waters or the Mini-High Adventure. You must get a new one for this year. No Form, No Trip. WE NEED ALL PHYSICAL FORMS TURNED IN BY MAY 1ST.

HIGH ADVENTURE 2026 SWAMPBASE! – at the current time, I have 11 people signed up for this trip which fills up 1 crew. If more people want to go, then we will have to have at least 5 more people sign up and I will even have to see if I can add a second crew or not. I will be in contact with SwampBase this coming week to reserve 1 crew for the summer of 2026. I am shooting for a date of July 10, which means we would leave on the 8th or 9th depending on travel. We have asked for a $50 deposit currently to hold your spot. Once I talk to SwampBase and have this reserved I will let you know more about dates, payments and such.

Scoutmaster Minute – HELPFUL – I sat down to write the Troop Trailtalk for this week yesterday afternoon and when I got to the Scoutmaster Minute, I saw that I had just 2 laws left to write about. Helpful and Kind. I chose helpful for this week but then I had to step away before I wrote anything. This was mostly because my thought process was “Duh, this is a pretty easy one to understand and do”. It seemed to me that being helpful is fairly self-explanatory. However, I got to thinking about it more last night and I really started thinking about not only being helpful but how being helpful is interconnected to so much more. The scout slogan says, “To do a Good Turn Daily”. How many of us do a good turn? What is a good turn? Do we even notice when we do a good turn? I think this is another way of saying “are we helpful daily?”, do we notice it, or is it automatic. A good turn is doing something for someone or something else without receiving any benefit for yourself. I often use the example of holding a door open for somebody or carrying something for someone as basic good turns. We should all strive to be helpful daily, but I don’t think we should confine ourselves to just 1 good turn a day. We should be helpful whenever we can. Why would I call holding the door or carrying something “basic” good turns? Holding the door for someone or carrying something could mean the world to that person. Maybe they are suffering from an illness or an injury and the fact that someone held the door for them that day brightened their day up. I think all of us go through our day and without realizing it or not, we are helpful or are at least presented with the chance to be helpful. I see people being helpful all the time in small and big ways. A chair gets tipped over, so someone rushes over to pick it back up. A table collapses and a mess occurs and so people rush over to help the people that the table collapsed on, they help to clean the mess, and they help to put the table right. Someone is struggling with that stinking math problem that the teacher gave as homework and someone else leans in and helps them out. Being helpful is pretty self-explanatory because there are ways to be helpful that surround us each and every single day. It is up to us to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us to be helpful. Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Help out immediately and whenever you can!

 “What Troop Does More!!” – 244