V.G. Rollins Influenced Hundreds of Scouts, Including Me

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It came as no surprise that V.G. Rollins planned his own wake, “The Last Scoutmaster’s Roundtable — Cracker Barrel,” in advance of his death in mid-July at 87. Mr. Rollins, as we Scouts always called him well into our own middle age, planned everything. He is best known as Scoutmaster of Troop 201, whose cabin remains at Teague Park. Under his nearly two-dozen years heading the troop, more than 50 Eagle Scouts were pinned, including my youngest brother, Gregg. (I only made it to Life, becoming distracted by cars and girls.)

In the Great Hall at First Baptist Church — where my grandfather, a professional Scout, also was a member — we ate crackers, cheese, salami and Red Bug Juice. I skipped the latter but enjoyed the stories while a continuous loop of black-and-white film showed the exploits of this venerable troop, which turns 100 next year. I looked up and saw kids wearing the “Troop 201 – 50 Mile Hike” T-shirts that my dad silk-screened and I hung up to dry. There’s Mr. Rollins’ VW Beetle with a trailer hitch so he could pull campout materials to the Mill Pond north of Hallsville. Briefly, I saw myself in 1968, about to head out on that 50-mile hike after having just arrived in East Texas from New Hampshire.

About that hike: My grandfather, who was field director for the East Texas Area Council and ran Camp Pirtle in Panola County, got me in Troop 201 before our luggage was unpacked from New Hampshire. We were spending the summer with him in Greggton until my parents could find a house to buy. I had barely become comfortable with the notion that I now lived in a place so hot in summer that the asphalt sank beneath one’s feet while walking to the convenience store. Suddenly I was hiking from Uncertain, Texas on Caddo Lake, toward Longview, hoisting a pack on my 120-pound (at most) frame.

On Day Three, I fell out. My parents had to be summoned. I am sure I was a disappointment to my grandfather. I completed an approximate 30-mile hike. Luckily, this did not ruin my future in Troop 201. Mickey Melton befriended me, which helped a lot in terms of my being accepted, funny accent and all. Rest his soul. A future governor, Greg Abbott, was in the troop toward the latter part of my stint. He played on my brother Scott’s Little League team. Troop 201 was the fermenting pot for a lot of successful kids — all white and male, admittedly, but those were the times.

Mr. Rollins played a huge part in the lives of Scouts for three generations, including my brothers and me. The live-chicken campout stands out with members of Troop 201. I had conflated this memory with another campout, when boxes of provisions were dropped out of a plane, into thinking Mr. Rollins had chickens dropped out of a plane. That parallels a famous episode from “WKRP in Cincinnati” when turkeys are dropped in a Thanksgiving Day promotion to disastrous results.

When I returned to Longview in early 2008, Mr. Rollins came to visit me at the paper. I asked him about the chicken episode. He set me straight. Chickens most definitely were not dropped out of an airplane. Rather, they were set loose in the woods, and we were supposed to catch them for dinner. I brought a weekend’s supply of Payday candy bars and peanut-butter crackers, and only pretended to catch a chicken.

He said with a grin. “You couldn’t get away with that type of foolishness now.”

Kelly Coghlan experienced a “live chicken campout,” and wrote, “Although I was one of the lucky ones to catch a chicken… I couldn’t bring myself to kill my chicken, so I took it home as a pet.”

As I wrote a few years back, “Anybody who had V.G. Rollins as a Scoutmaster remembers him. He was tough, but he was fair and genuinely interested in molding us as young men. I didn’t appreciate it at the time as much as I did later.”

Mr. Rollins taught all of us to be honorable, self-sufficient and resourceful. Some of us, including me, have fallen short at times. But we never forgot the Scout’s Law: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. Next to my parents and grandparents, nobody had more influence on molding who I became. A lot of those gray-haired men gathered at the Cracker Barrel last week feel the same way.

Mr. Rollins’ program contained this benediction, which he chose, of course: “May the great Scoutmaster of all Scouts be with us until we meet again and may we follow the trail that leads to Him.”

Well done. Mr. Rollins. Rest easy.

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