By 9 o’clock Saturday morning, temperatures already were in the 80s and the Girl Scouts were on the move. The streets of River North and Red Line platforms all the way up to Belmont Avenue were taken over by groups of chattering girls in identical T-shirts and their harried adult leaders. “I’ve never seen so many Girl Scouts,” the Navy Pier trolley driver said.
There were 18,000 Girl Scouts, to be exact, converging on Chicago from as far afield as North Dakota to celebrate the organization’s 90th anniversary. Other such events are happening across the country, but for this day, Navy Pier was Girl Scout Central. Groups of tiny Brownies in uniforms and sashes, their badges gleaming, squeezed into the festival hall to add their voices to a thousand-girl sing-along. Cadres of 14-year-old Cadets, dressed more casually in matching T-shirts and blemish concealer, wandered the food court and sculpture garden.
“Our friends are all jealous that we get to take so many trips,” says Heather Arnhalt, a Cadet from Breckenridge, Minn. “Hardly anybody from our town has ever been to Chicago.”
“My town has no Starbucks,” says Jeanie Ourenhagen, 15, from Enderlin, N.D. Enderlin doesn’t have a scout troop, either, so Jeanie goes to the next town over, Ft. Ransom, to meet with a troop there.
Voices like Heather’s and Jeanie’s are of particular importance to scouting’s higher-ups. At their ages, they’re in a kind of danger zone. Though the Girl Scouts have an overall membership of 2.5 million and have grown throughout the ’90s, the problem of retention is mentioned by troop leader after troop leader. Once girls hit puberty, the adults agree, scouting often fails the coolness test.
Indeed, few of the girls crowding Navy Pier looked much older than 14. “We get made fun of all the time,” says Audrey Barnes, a 17-year-old from Auburn, Ind. “They’re like, `Oh, you’re a Girl Scout? Can we buy some cookies from you? Like that’s all we’re here for.’ ” With three other girls, she stayed on through high school, even as their troop dwindled to six girls.
“There’s a definite peer pressure that it’s not cool to be a Girl Scout,” says Shirley Hartley, from Port Ransom, who has been leading troops for 20 years. “If we can get them to senior scouting, then they’re individuals and it doesn’t bother them. [The] Cadet age of 7th, 8th and 9th grade, that’s the hardest age for scouting to hold them in.”
Hipper than it once was
Scouting is hipper than it once was, and not just because of the new uniforms introduced last year. The anniversary sing-along in Washington, D.C., earlier this month featured the edgy folk artist Michelle Shocked. Instead of learning to use semaphore flags, the girls at Navy Pier crowded around laptop computers. At one booth, representatives from corporate sponsor Gateway showed girls how to print digital photos. At another, girls videotaped interviews with one another and learned how to earn badges in Media Know-How.
Those kinds of projects are part of the reason Latoya Bearden, 19, now a student at Millikin University in Decatur, stuck with scouting. Bearden, who grew up on the South Side, worked her way up from the first level, Daisy, to earn its highest honor, the Gold Award.
“It’s really hard in your high-school years to be in scouting, because of peer pressure and everything, but I keep pushing [younger girls] to keep going,” she says. “It really is a help later on–it teaches leadership, and all the projects look good to colleges.”
Retention is more than just a matter of helping girls get the most benefit from the scouts–it’s also a key aspect of the organization’s survival strategy. Once a scout makes it through those crucial early teen years, the odds seem good she will be a scout for life. Bearden, for one, seems poised for decades of involvement. In addition to working with her longtime troop, she leads a Brownie troop and is trying to build a network of former scouts at her college.
Saturday’s celebration was full of adults who had been in scouting for decades. They wore even more pins and badges than the girls did and sang along enthusiastically with the Girl Scout song.
“Girl Scouts love to sing songs,” says Peggy Sinko. She’s in her 50s and has been in scouting since she was a Brownie. “People are surprised that I’m in scouting because I don’t have any daughters. I do Girl Scouts not because I have kids in it, but because it’s a great place to learn how to deal with challenges.”
The early years
A historian at the Newberry Library, Sinko is a member of the Girl Scout Historians, a loose-knit group of 20 women in the Chicago area who collect memorabilia dating back to scouting’s early years. Some of this material was on display at Navy Pier. Members of the group circulated through the crowd, modeling past uniforms, including a reproduction of the one worn by Juliette Gordon Low. The historical display is just one way the scouts are trying to emphasize how much they have evolved. Veterans like Sinko clearly feel their most pressing challenge is staying relevant in a century when girls’ options are far greater than they were when the organization was born.
“The scouts have changed for the better since I’ve been a leader,” says Lettie Jarmon, 51, one of the heads of Bearden’s troop. “I think they’ve realized that times are different, and they have to change with them.”
———-
For more information about the 90th anniversary celebrations, check the web: www.Girlscouts.org/90thanniversary/about.html
