1965
Boy's Life Magazine
Boy's
Life, October 1965
Joining Boy Scouts included a subscription to Boys Life magazine which I always enjoyed. The magazine had interesting stories about scouting, adventure, history, exploration and so on, both factual and fictional. In the back there was the full page comics, Pee Wee Harris, The Tracy Twins, Scouts in Action which had a comic version of a true scouting story, as well as others. Then there were advertisements including one for Estes Rockets and the magazine always ended with “Think and Grin”, a full page of corny jokes often involving scouts and the scoutmaster.
First Class: Give me a shovel quick! Our
Scoutmaster is stuck in the mud up to his shoelaces.
Tenderfoot: Up to his shoelaces? Why doesn’t he just walk out?
First Class: Just give me the shovel and don’t argue! He fell in
headfirst.
--
Scoutmaster: When I was a boy I thought nothing of a 20-mile hike.
Tenderfoot: Well, I don’t think so much of it myself.
--
Sign in a Volkswagen factory: “Think Big—and you’re fired.”
The June issue of Boy’s Life was a particularly interesting one for me with a focus on “The New Age of Exploration” with an opening article with the same name by the famous astronaut John Glenn. But it was the fictional story “The Man Who Made the 21st Century” that inspired me. By Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, the story was based 100 years in the future, in 2065, and was a biography of a fictional man, chronicling his inventions from childhood to adult. It told of conditions of the past (current time for me reading the story),
The people of the world of 1965 were split up into separate factions; many of them at odds with their neighbors. The atom bomb had already been invented, of course, and there was the constant threat that a ware might take place in which nuclear power would be use for total destruction.
Going on to tell about an amazing future, a permanent base on the moon in 1995, the positronic brain in 2000, exploring Saturn and the asteroids by 2025 and more. The story ended with
Out of so many discoveries he returned at the end, to the greatest discovery he had ever made, when he had first come to realize that here were horizons to be reached for---unlimited horizons that would stay unlimited forever, no matter how far mankind advanced.
read full story
Perhaps
not Asimov at this best, but it inspired me, and I turned the page
and there it was, a new merit badge, Space Exploration, how cool was
that. I review the requirements, 1. A report about the history of
space exploration and development, no problem, I been reading about
it in Popular Science for some time. 2. Identify models of U.S.
space craft, like how easy was that and so on. I would put it on my
list of merit badges I wanted to earn in the future.
Updated: 09-19-2022