Word: scouts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After being a schoolteacher and a coach, Rice E. Cochran thought he knew and liked boys. When a local minister asked him to take over the church Boy Scout troop, he was happy to agree. Now, 20 years later, he has published the results of that decision in a new book called Be Prepared!* (Sloane, $3.50). Though he writes under a pseudonym (he is now an NBC scriptwriter) and keeps his town anonymous, Cochran manages to paint a lively, hair-raising picture of what it is like to be one of the most bothered and bewildered of U.S. educators...
...news of an afflicted boy," says Cochran, "seems to rouse other boys . . . This first became apparent to me . . . when I met a Scout named Alan Wylie . . . Alan Wylie . . . was blind . . . Yet he was determined to become an Eagle, and the rest of his troop was determined that he should. They took him everywhere. He was a nuisance on hikes, but the troop slowed d.own to his pace, and detoured around the invitingly rugged areas which might have been troublesome...
...mess table, described to him what went on at campfire, patiently taught him (by touch) to row a boat and chop a log." Eventually, Alan Wylie passed all his tests. "The last time I saw [him] was the night a representative of the National Council presented him with the Scout Life Guard emblem. The boy's . . . face was transfigured, and the rest of us felt somehow transfigured...
...Scout motto, adopted by Founder Lord Baden-Powell, whose South African Constabulary first used it "partly because ... it spoke of their readiness to take on any kind of duty . . . and also because it brought in my initials...
...sports Warren Duff's dialogue would be a credit to Mankiewiez. William Dietetle's direction shows near genius in the court room scenes, with Fd Regley, as the syndicate mastermind, radiating an injured innocence that makes Frank Costello look like a boy scout...