Boy's Man

HARDLY A MAN Is Now ALIVE--Don Beard--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Hardly a man is now alive who remembers Dan Beard except as the be-buckskinned, gimlet-eyed, weather-resistant Grand Old Man of the Boy Scouts. Yet his autobiography gives only eleven pages to his career as founder and National Commissioner of the Boy Scouts. Apparently "Uncle" Dan thinks his 30 years of Scouting is altogether too well known--it "seems to have wiped my past history off the slate," he complains. His picturesque record of a Vanishing American, written with a sort of grizzled spryness, covers his first 60 years, before he joined the Boy Scouts.

Though few remember it, Beard was famed in the '80s and '90s as an illustrator. His masterpiece was Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. (Said Mark Twain: "It was a lucky day I went netting for lightning bugs and caught a meteor.") His drawings of monks swigging ale got him boycotted for nearly ten years by most big magazines. Another time he was made to put shoes on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, prohibited from drawing cows with udders.

Still remembered is Dan Beard's American Boy's Handy Book, Or, What To Do and How To Do It, an exciting manual on kites, knot-tying, boats, trapping, taxidermy, etc., etc. Published in 1882, while Beard was attending Manhattan art school, it made Dan Beard's reputation as a boy's man which even Teddy Roosevelt could not surpass, blazed the way for his Boy Pioneers and Sons of Daniel Boone (forerunners of the Boy Scouts) started as a promotion stunt when he became editor of Recreation in 1905.

The son of a famed portrait painter, James H. Beard, Dan spent his boyhood in Cincinnati and Covington, Ky., was nicknamed "Buffalo" because of his infant virility. In those days pigs still cleaned the Cincinnati streets; Conestoga wagons still lumbered past the house on their way West; downriver pilots still swaggered on the levee. Danny fought the "river rats," dug for gold in the backyard, had a backyard menagerie of crows, squirrels, snakes. Once Lincoln smiled at him as he ran alongside the President's open barouche.

At an age when modern kids are only eligible to be Tenderfoot Scouts, Dan and his gang were running the Union pickets, ducking Minie balls in No Man's Land along the Licking River outside Covington, sneaking into Union trenches, sniping at a Rebel gang across the river with rocks, scrap iron, shotguns loaded with nails and gravel.

Turned down at Annapolis because of a crooked trigger finger, Dan became a civil engineer, spent the next five years getting in & out of trouble as a map maker for insurance companies through the South. When he went to Manhattan in 1878, sold a water color of a fish for $25, he decided "darned if I'd work any more."

Dan Beard makes it clear that modern boyhoods are no match for his, but he is far from thinking that modern youngsters are going to the dogs. The wiry 89-year-old declares his favorite remark applies as well to the present generation as to any of its predecessors: "I'd rather be an American boy," says old Dan Beard, "than President of the United States, or anything else in the world."

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