Digging the Stoners

They are not exactly Norman Rockwell's image of Boy Scouts, but then they do not inhabit a Rockwellian America. The 60 members of Boy Scout Troop 503 live in a ghetto of South Brooklyn, and they call themselves the "Black and Puerto Rican Stoners" to indicate that they are as hard and as solid as stone. Their uniforms are Army-type fatigues, combat boots and green berets. In addition to being "trustworthy" and "loyal," the Stoners promise to "have ethnic pride," and they pledge allegiance to the flag with clenched fists over their hearts. Their oath: "On my honor I will do my best to help my brother and sister at all times, and to help build up my community and my nation."

At one time the Stoners, and similar ghetto troops in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, would have been alien to I the Boy Scouts' essentially white, midI die-class orientation. Today they epitomize the Boy Scouts of America's search for "relevance." Foremost on Scouting's list of reorganized priorities is reaching the ghetto youth, who traditionally rejected Scouting because it seemed just another white do-gooder organization or had little relation to his city existence.

No Jive. With this goal in mind, the national Scout organization has been working hard to make its troops more pertinent in the wilderness of the inner cities. Instead of learning how to map the countryside, city Scouts map out their subway and bus systems. Last year, in recognition of the often matriarchal nature of inner-city black society, Scouting executives broke a 59-year tradition by recruiting women as Scoutmasters and older girls as Scout leaders.

The B.S.A. has also faced up to the drug problem: last May, after Scouts at a conference in Denver admitted having experimented with drugs, a new pledge was devised in which Scouts forswear the use of drugs and promise to try to get non-Scout friends to make the same commitment.

Whether anyone in Scout headquarters envisioned troops such as the Brooklyn Stoners is another matter. Certainly their chant would startle some suburban Scoutmasters. "Stoners, Stoners, hard as we can be. Stoners, Stoners, for real. Dig on me. Never victims of a needle high. Hard work, cleaning up dirt and a forward strive, no jive. That's cur high."

But so far, Scout brass have taken a pragmatic line. "The boy in the ghetto had no real basis for many of the things we talked about," says national Chief Scout Executive Alden Barber, "so we had to make the program acceptable to him."

Treating Rat Bites. However unconventional they may be in dress and tone, the Stoners do not entirely rule out the traditional. Their Scoutmasters --mostly young Viet Nam veterans--do instruct them in camping and field survival. This month the troop will journey to Camp Alpine, N.J., to hike, camp and cook out. But it is still the allure of survival in the city that seems most attractive to the Stoners. "I dig the Stoners because they teach us how to live in the city," says Ricardo Reed, 14. "They teach us how to treat rat bites and stuff like that."

The appeal is a broad one, and the Scouts are using it elsewhere across the country. In Philadelphia, the B.S.A., unsuccessful for years in organizing troops by neighborhood areas, found that it was able to organize by blocks if the effort was centered on projects such as cleanup campaigns. In Cincinnati, a Scoutmobile threads its way through the ghetto, serving as a troop meeting place, a recruitment office and a library. Says George Freeman, director of the B.S.A.'s Washington Bureau: "We are no longer a white middle-class movement."

Scout executives faced another problem in rural Foster Center, R.I. James Clark, 16, a Life Scout with 22 merit badges and an exemplary record, was refused promotion to the rank of Eagle Scout by his local council because, in the words of Council Head Robert Parkinson, "we cannot in clear conscience allow anyboy to the rank of Eagle Scout who is an admitted atheist."

As it turned out, Clark's father was an atheist. No one had bothered to ask the young Scout his views. When Scout authorities did, he admitted that he had no formal religious affiliations, but allowed that "very likely there is a controlling power over us all. One should do his duty to God, whatever that is --not what organized religion says it should be, but what one really believes." That was enough for Parkinson, who last week endorsed Clark for the Eagle rank "without reservation."

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