For those who have never golfed (and you have my full admiration for your wise life choices!), a golf course can look like a scene from an old oil painting of an idyllic countryside. The rolling green of the fairways, usually a nice sprinkling of mature trees, the sun reflecting in a million directions off the ponds set up as water hazards.

But for those who play at golf (and here I refer to the majority of regular golfers who cannot shoot a score under 100 on a regulation length course), that seemingly bucolic scenery hides memories of frustration, anger and often unexpressed rage.

The culture of golf is one of genteel, upper class civility. Swearing is frowned upon, yelling is prohibited, and throwing a club after yet another missed shot will get you banished from most courses.

As someone who both plays at golf, and who spent half a year patrolling the links at Fallbrook Gof Club in San Diego County as course marshal, I’ve both experienced and witnessed the rage that can arise in the most seemingly peaceable settings.

And it’s not always the golfers who are angry …

When I had the morning shift, I had to arrive before dawn – which varied timewise depending on the season. In the summer, I had to arrive by about 5 a.m., but could wait until 6 in the winter.

The first order of business (after getting a large cup of coffee) was to get in my cart and drive around the perimeter of the course to ensure everything was in order. Sometimes local teens would have a party on the course overnight and I’d have to clean up all the empty beer bottles before the first golfers arrived; other times, a tree might have fallen during the night, and I’d let the groundskeepers know.

Mostly, though, I saw deer enjoying breakfast in the early light, and occasionally a small pack of coyotes would trot by.

One morning, when I was driving past the water hazard on the 16th hole, I saw something curious: A Harley was parked on the side of the road.

This particular water trap was actually a small pond, about 20 to 30 feet across. The owner, Blair, kept koi in there — expensive goldfish of which she was very fond.

As I pulled up, I saw that the Harley’s rider was there — a stereotypical biker: Large, well-muscled, full beard, tattoos, leather vest. I parked the cart next to him and saw he was assembling a fishing rod out of the leather saddle bags on his Hog.

Now, if I let him catch Blair’s koi, I’d not only lose my job but a friendship I valued as well — Blair had hired me as a favor when I’d been laid off.

On the other hand, I really didn’t want to get into a confrontation with a biker, something I’m neither built nor equipped for.

He looked up as I got near, but then looked back down at his rod. I greeted him with a “Hey.” He grunted in reply, not even looking up. After a second, I pushed the non-existent conversation along with a “What’s going on?”

He finished getting his pole assembled, and finally looked at me. “I’ve driven by this pond so many times over the years, telling myself I have to come fish it some day. I decided to sneak by on my way to work today.”

Then things got a little aggressive.

“You have a problem with that?”

Great. I’m going to get my face bashed in before I can ever grab breakfast at the course café later.

But one thing I’d learned over the years is that nearly all Americans are united in our hatred of lawyers and insurance companies. Rather than get into a debate, I just laid my cards on the table.

“I’ve no problem with that — so long as you checked in at the pro shop and signed the liability waiver.”

I could see he was tensing up, and looking angrier than I wanted. I hurried my end of the conversation along.

“Our insurance company is run by bastards. We can’t have anyone on the course who hasn’t signed in.”

Now he was clearly pissed.

“Are you kidding me?” he said, just glaring at me. (As I recall, there were profanities included in that exchange.)

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“Look, this is a small, family-owned company. We can’t afford to take the risk.”

He thought about that for a second, and then his shoulders drooped and he shook his head slowly. Another proud American defeated by the system.

“I don’t have time for that,” he said. “I have to get to work.” He began taking his rod apart and putting it back in his saddle bag.

As he threw his leg over the bike, he looked at me and said, “Damn insurance companies and lawyers are ruining this country!”

With that, he rode off — and I still had all my teeth.

-30-

I only worked as a part-time golf course marshal for less than a year, and yet I saw so many crazy things in that time that I can only guess at the stories longtime marshals must have to spin.

It was Fallbrook Golf Club, working for my friend Blair and her father, Larry.

But I hardly ever saw them.

When you’re marshal, you belong on the course. I’d check in with the starter in the pro shop, copy down the start times of each group, and how many were in the group. The pro shop was up on a hill next to the first tee box, and above the driving range, with the 10th tee — the first hole on the back nine — across the parking lot by the far side of the driving range.

The biggest “theft” we had was locals walking on to the 11th tee, out of sight of the pro shop, and playing the rest of the back nine without paying.

The bigger risk was that if they were injured without checking in at the pro shop first, our insurance company might try to weasel out of reimbursement.

So I would take my list of all the groups on the course, start at the ninth or 18th green, then work my way back. As I drove my cart against the flow of play, I’d check to make sure a twosome only had two, a threesome only had three. I was also looking to make sure there were no large gaps between groups — nothing annoys golfers more than slow play.

Nowadays, with cheap cameras and drones, course security is probably a much more efficient proposition. But this was 30-some years ago, when course security meant getting in your cart and patrolling the course.

So I generally interacted with the starter, and any groundskeepers on the course.

And, of course, the golfers.

Most of the regulars got to recognize me, and vice versa.

And if something out of turn came up, they had no problem waving me over.

It might be a big branch coming off one of the giant oak trees on the course. A broken sprinkler head leaking onto the green. A club left behind by a previous group.

But sometimes it was a bit more.

One afternoon, a foursome of regulars I recognized were waiting to hit their approach shots on the signature hole six — a beautiful, wide 490-yard par 5 with a giant oak about two-thirds of the way down the fairway placed so that it required some smart decision making.

The group ahead of them was still finishing up on the green when I drove over to find out what was up. One of them pointed back behind them a couple hundred yards where a single was waiting for them to hit onto the green so he could hit his second shot.

Only apparently he wasn’t actually waiting.

They pointed to three or four balls laying around us in a random pattern, and said the single was hitting into them.

That is incredibly dangerous. The insurance company the course worked with sent out a newsletter every couple of months with actuarial tables about dangerous accidents on golf courses. There are lightning strikes, drunks crashing golf carts, fights — all kinds of mayhem that comes with the territory when your customers are human beings. But every year around the world, a half-dozen or so people were killed by being struck in the head by a golf ball. And, of course, tens of thousands of others are injured by being hit in the head by a golf ball.

Okay, admittedly it’s not as dangerous as lawn darts, but you do not intentionally hit a ball at other people. That will get you banned from most courses.

I told the foursome that I’d stick around and watch. I also radioed back to the pro shop and asked Blair what to do. She said she trusted me to handle it.

I drove over to the tee box at 5, putting some trees between me and the single, and parked my cart. After about 30 seconds, sure enough he hit a ball into the foursome. I drove right over to him and asked what he thought he was doing.

“They’re playing slow — you need to get them speed up!” he told me angrily.

I explained that they were waiting on the group ahead of them, which was behind another group, and that there were no gaps — everyone was playing to a three and a half hour round, right where they should be.

Then I said, you can’t be hitting balls into the group ahead of you regardless.

“You act like this is some fancy country club,” was his reply. “It’s a little trash course.” (It wasn’t — we hosted high school matches, a stop on a minor league pro tour, and occasionally qualifiers for larger tournaments.)

At that point I told him to throw his bag in the back of my cart, he was done, I’d take him to the pro shop for a refund.

“F— this and f— you,” he said, “You just lost a customer — I’ll never play here again!”

Which I thought to myself the owner was probably going to make official anyway when he got to the pro shop.

He refused the ride, hoisted his bag over his shoulder and began walking back toward the clubhouse and parking lot. I followed at a distance to make sure he didn’t interact with the foursome, and when he got up to the clubhouse, he never went in — he just got in his car and left.

Another day, I was patrolling the back nine, and I saw that what should have been a twosome on 12 was now a threesome — two in a cart (which I showed) and a single walking, which I did not have.

The two in the cart were regulars I recognized, so I asked them about the single.

Don’t know, they said. He just showed up at the 11th tee box and asked if he could join them.

I drove across the fairway to where he was getting ready to hit his second shot. He looked to be in his late 30s, well dressed, with expensive clubs. He saw me come up in my red cart with “MARSHAL” stenciled across the top of the windscreen, and pulled his club back down.

“Hey there,” I said. “I’m not showing you on the starting sheet — can I see your receipt from the pro shop real quick?”

“Oh sure,” he said. “Let me get that.” He walked over to his bag, made a great show of unzipping each pouch and poking around. Finally, he stood up and and said, “I think I left it in my car.”

No worries, I told him. Let me drive you over there and then I’ll bring you back here — you won’t miss a hole. But our insurance policy requires that only folks who had registered were on the course.

We put his bag in the back, and I drove him back to the parking lot. He couldn’t remember which car was his as we drove around the lot — and at that point I’m really struggling to stay professional and not laugh at him. I stopped the cart so he could remember which car was his. Suddenly he jumped out of my cart, grabbed his bag, and sprinted to an older BMW, threw his clubs in, and raced out of there as if I was going to chase him down in my cart!

As a meme on social media put it not too long ago, “I used to be a people person, but people ruined it for me.”

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Some years ago — when I was, as they say, “underemployed” after a round of layoffs at a streaming video startup — some friends offered me a part-time job as course marshal at Fallbrook Golf Club, which their family owned. That since-closed course was set in the canyons north of San Diego, in avocado country, with houses dotting the canyon tops along the fairways.

Joe Kinsey’s recent Screencaps column in Outkick where readers shared stories of errant golf shots jogged a memory of a similar shot I once witnessed at Fallbrook.

A course marshal, for those unfamiliar with the sanctioned torture that is golf, is a combination of security officer and course ambassador. My main job was to make sure that everyone was keeping up with pace of play — that they weren’t falling too far behind the group ahead of them, causing slow play for those behind them. But encouraging faster play without angering already frustrated golfers is a delicate business.

On the days the men’s and women’s clubs played, however, it was more relaxing. These clubs blocked off a whole morning each every week, and we didn’t let non-members mix in with them. And as regulars, the club members understood pace of play.

But a marshal is not a rules official (thank goodness!), so when the men’s or women’s clubs were playing, my only real job was to make sure nobody else was sneaking onto the course.

One day, the men’s club was playing on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, and I was watching a foursome of older, retired guys on the 13th tee. It was a tough par 4, with a fairway that narrowed rapidly as you approached the green. There was a house way off to the left of the tee box, and about 40, 50 feet up on the top of the canyonside. One of these older, retired guys jacks his shot at a hard, 45-degree angle — but otherwise it’s a beautiful shot: High, arcing, long. We’re all watching to see if it will actually hit a house that may have never been hit in the previous 40 years that course and house were both there.

BAM.

He just nailed it. We all stood there in a kind of silent admiration of what we’d just seen. And, also, to wait and see if anyone came out to yell at us.

Nothing.

Either no one was home or perhaps they were too stunned to react.

And while it remains one of the most impressive mis-hits I’ve ever seen, it was nowhere close to the most memorable shot I ever witnessed at Fallbrook.

That would have been another day the men’s club was playing, and we were on the 16th tee — a medium-length and straight par 4 which required a decent carry over a small manmade pond right in front of the VERY long tee box which usually had the tees placed at the very back.

A restroom building was off to the right of the pond, with the men’s room on one side, the women’s on the other. To grant privacy, a 6-foot high cinder block L-shaped wall was wrapped around the entrance on each side, and the doors were kept propped open during the day for ventilation.

While the pond / water trap wasn’t large, it’s prominent placement right in front of the 25-yard-long tee box made it act like a bit of a ball magnet. There was also a creek to the left of the fairway past the pond, with tall, mature California oaks all along it (and lots of poison oak in the underbrush to boot) — anything hit in there was lost. So even the regulars tended to push their shots to the right off the tee, while also trying to avoid topping their drive into the water.

I was sitting in my red marshal’s cart waiting for the current group to finish teeing off so I could continue my rounds, and watched as one guy topped AND sliced his shot, spinning it off at a weird angle to the right, toward the bathrooms. Defying the odds, it cleared the privacy wall and soared through the open door INTO the men’s room, where we could all hear it richocheting off the floor, ceramic sink and metal stall.

Everyone starts cracking up — the guy who hit the shot (although I’m sure having to take a penalty stroke and a drop didn’t cheer him any), the rest of his foursome, the next group waiting behind them — and, of course, the marshal.

But just a few seconds later we hear angry yelling, and another golfer comes racing out, still pulling his pants up, screaming at us. “THAT’S NOT FUNNY! YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY?” He stopped, and swinging his head around, glared at each of us in turn as if daring us to laugh again.

Turns out he was playing 12 or 13 on the other side of the bathroom, and was sitting in the stall taking care of business when that ball — riding, what, 2 or 3 million to 1 odds? — came bounding into his private domain.

Scared the you know what out of him, I’m sure.

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As course marshal, I pulled him aside, explained what happened — and quite reasonably pointed out we could get a thousand golfers to stand on that tee box for the next 10 years hitting shot after shot at the bathroom and never have it go through the door again.

He finally calmed down, buttoned his pants, and headed back to his waiting group.

While he never did laugh that I could see, I have a sneaky suspicion than in the years that followed he shared that story with his golfing buddies — to great laughter.

-30-

As mentioned last year in this space, I worked at the admissions desk at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park in college.

My job was simple: Sell people admission tickets when they presented themselves at the entrance.

That was it.

The administrative office answered the phone calls, and we had full-time security guards to handle any other issues.

All I had to do was add up the total, put it in the register (cash-only at the time, in the early 1980s), and then push the button on the old movie theater ticket dispenser for each ticket sold. (The tickets then were like old carnival ride tickets — small orange things with the cut-out corners.) We also sold traditional Mexican candies at the front desk from a glass display case, but all of the other souvenirs were sold in the gift shop next to the exit.

About the only hard thing I ever had to do was put in a new roll of tickets in the dispenser if it ran out, and maybe call the janitor if a visitor reported a mess in one of the bathrooms.

Ralph — a tall, wiry guy in his 40s — was head of security. He had the look of a career soldier to him. He was ex-Army, but still a senior NCO in the National Guard.

Dan, a retired Navy CPO, handled weekend security and took over when Ralph was on summer drills with the Guard.

The third guard, Tim, was about my age — and had exactly the wrong disposition for a security guard. A good and kind man, Tim couldn’t intimidate the first graders who came through. He was perpetually worried — and his default reaction to any kind of situation was to immediately call Dan or Ralph to deal with it.

I remember one otherwise slow weekday, Tim was on duty solo — Ralph training with the Guard, and Dan having the day off (we were open six days a week, Monday being our dark day — along with most of the other museums in Balboa Park).

I heard Tim’s running before I saw him — he came racing from inside the museum to the entry desk where I sat and said, “Jim — something is happening! Can you please deal with it?”

I looked at him.

“You’re the security guard, Tim.”

“But there’s a homeless guy in the cave man exhibit! And he’s moving stuff around!”

“Did you tell him to get out?”

“Yes, but he ignored me.”

I was getting paid minimum wage, and I was pretty sure Tim was getting paid a whole lot more than me. Plus he’d gone to some security guard school and even had his official card. Now, it was a museum, so our guards were unarmed — but still.

Tim looked at me, pleading.

“Please? I’ll watch the front desk.”

“You’re the trained guard, Tim.”

“But you’re in ROTC!”

Oh, okay, well THAT settles everything then, I thought to myself. I was slotted to be a missile launch officer for the Air Force upon graduation — at which time I’d be trained to sit in a deep hole in the ground with a key on a chain around my neck hoping the president never called.

I gave in.

“Fine. If I’m not back in 10, call the cops.”

I headed up to where the Neanderthal / Cro Magnon exhibit was on the second floor.

It was a large diorama in which our curators had used mannequins to illustrate how prehistoric humans had lived in Europe during the Ice Ages, based on archaeological digs. It was basically a re-creation of a small settlement of a handful of families.

And while visitors walked through the fake plaster caves, the actual exhibits were roped off to block access.

As I approached the exhibit, I saw that there was indeed a seemingly homeless man standing in the exhibit. He was moving different pieces around when I came up.

“Sir — could I get a moment with you?” I said, in what I hoped to be a kind voice. Most homeless in my experience were dealing with their own demons, and were generally not intentionally dangerous to others, and so why stir up a hornet’s nest?

He stopped what he was doing and looked at me.

“This exhibit is all wrong,” he said to me, with a note of defiance.

“I don’t know enough about that to argue with you,” I replied. “But I can’t have you in the exhibit.”

“But it’s all wrong!” he repeated.

“You’re probably right,” I said. “But our insurance is pretty clear that only our curators are allowed in there. Heck, even I’m not allowed back there and I work here.”

“Oh.” He thought about this for a minute.

“Look,” I said. “Why don’t we go downstairs and you can write a note about the mistakes you see and I’ll make sure the curators see it. Does that sound fair?”

He thought again, then smiled.

“Yeah, that would be great!”

I walked with him back down to the admissions desk, where Tim was pacing nervously.

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“Should I call the police?” he blurted out as we walked up.

“Why?” I asked. “Our visitor here is just going to write a note for the curators, that’s all.” I then nodded my head at him to get lost.

The guy wrote the note and then left with no further problems. And I did send his note with Tim later that afternoon to the curators — along with a note from me letting them know one of them would need to go up and put the exhibit back in order.

-30-

In college, my friend Lisa got me a job at the anthropology and archaeology museum in San Diego’s Balboa Park. I worked the admissions desk — it only paid minimum wage, but it was usually slow enough I could get my homework done.

And there were some characters who worked there! I still fondly recall Diana, the middle-aged woman who worked in the exhibit about Native American villages and would slide me warm tortillas from the corn she ground for the school children who came on field trips. She suspected, I think, that I was a poor college student (which I often was!) and wouldn’t let me pay the 50 cents for the tortilla.

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With the curators usually ensconced in their offices working on our next exhibit, I mostly interfaced with the security guards during my shift. Ralph was the head of security — he was in his 40s, tall, leathery, an NCO in the National Guard.

Dan worked part-time as security when Ralph was off. Retired from the Navy and older than Ralph, Dan was working on his master’s degree in anthropology and would eventually become a part-time curator at the museum after he graduated. Both Dan and Ralph were capable of handling any kind of museum security breach (and you’d be surprised at the number of people who think they’re authorized to walk into an exhibit).

Tim was about my age — and was easily frightened by any kind of confrontation or potential confrontation. Several times when Ralph and Dan were off and he was working by himself, Tim came running up to the entrance and asked me to go deal with something while he watched the desk. (And the best of those incidents is fodder for another column another day.) He seemed to think my being in ROTC made me comparable to Ralph and Dan in capability.

Dan was my favorite, because he’d come stand by the “college boy,” as he called me, while working on his crossword in the morning paper. He had the paper rolled up and stuffed in one back pocket of his trousers, and a small pocket dictionary in the other, his small golf course scorecard-type pencil tucked behind his right ear where you could plainly see it given the Navy regulation haircut he kept even in retirement. When it got slow, Dan would come over by my desk, hitch his pants up so he could rest his one foot on the ash tray at the museum entrance (no smoking inside), and then run clues by me when he got stuck.

Only as a last resort — when he and I were both stumped — would he refer to his crossword dictionary. It was of a type sold back in the 1980s and before, with common crossword puzzle clues listed in alphabetical order in the front, and a standard dictionary in the back. Once Dan found the word he needed, he’d read the definition out loud — and we’d both learn something new.

One day when Dan was in a particularly foul mood, and had snapped at me or Tim over some small slight, I looked at him and said, “Man, you’re a curmudgeon today!”

“A what?”

“A curmudgeon.”

“Spell it,” he said, while reaching for his ever-present dictionary.

I did.

He slowly leafed through the entries until he found it, read the definition, then slowly closed the dictionary and glared at me.

“I don’t need some five-dollar word to call ME a son of a bitch!”

With that, he turned and went back to his rounds keeping our exhibits secure.

-30-

Reading about the arrest of Garth West, one of the ringleaders of the scams that target senior citizens, not only was a nice bit of good news, but it reminded me of a story of my Mom, who passed away a year ago this month.

Mom kept her land line and her directory listing, in case friends from out of town wanted to get ahold of her. When I was a newspaper columnist — and got an unlisted number so my wife didn’t have to deal with the anonymous death threats — Mom got a lot of angry calls from people who disagreed with whatever I’d written, and felt entitled to express this by wishing death upon me or my children.

But the last few years, she was getting the scam calls.

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“Grandma?”

And she found delight in playing along.

“Yes, Bobby, is that you?”

(Mom had no grandchildren named Bobby ... not that she ever told us, anyway.)

“Yes, Grandma, it’s Bobby! I need help!”

“What’s wrong, Bobby?”

“Oh, Grandma, I’m in jail and need bail money right away!”

“Well, Bobby, you never paid me back the last time I loaned you money.”

“I know, Grandma, but I promise to pay you back this time!”

“And you skipped my birthday, Bobby — that hurt your Grandma very badly.”

She’d string this along for 10 minutes or more before the scammer would finally realize HE was being scammed, and hang up.

I asked her why she did this, and she said that as long as they were on the phone with her, they weren’t taking money from someone else without the wherewithal to protect themselves.

Personally, I think she just enjoyed it.

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When my second child was in first grade 23 years ago, he brought home a flyer his best friend, James, had given him: “Come join Cub Scouts!” it read, with an invitation to a pack meeting at a nearby school a couple of nights later.

When we walked into the multipurpose room at the school for the meeting, it felt like chaos. I’d been a Cub Scout as a kid in Ohio, and then briefly a Boy Scout, too.

But my recollections were time-worn and hazy.

This?

More than 100 elementary school-aged kids were running around yelling and playing while the adult volunteers got the room ready for the meeting. There were some home-made cakes being set up on folding tables along one wall for a silent auction, and a couple of older women were setting up their sewing machines in the back of the room to sew patches on uniforms for a small donation to the pack.

As we stood there, me overwhelmed, my son saw his friend and dragged me over to where James was sitting with a few other boys from their class. James’ mom introduced herself, and said she would be the boys’ den leader this coming year and looked forward to having my son in her den.

While we were chatting, the room suddenly started to quiet. I looked up and a couple of adults in Scout uniforms were standing center stage — holding their right hands up with what looked like a World War II “V for Victory” sign.

As soon as the room had quieted — and it took less than 15 seconds, with not a word said nor a single “hush” — the meeting opened with a prayer and a flag ceremony.

I think it was the fact that two adults holding up two fingers could quiet over 100 kids without saying a word that sold me.

We signed up that night.

I was too cool, in my mind, to be one of the dorky Scout leaders. I took my son to all his weekly den meetings, and the monthly pack meetings at the school. We joined the den for field trips, went on a couple of Pack campouts, baked a cake for the annual Blue & Gold Banquet, built our first Pinewood Derby car together, and when he earned his Wolf rank the next year, I proudly pinned his rank patch on his blue Cub uniform.

But I had zero interest in taking on any volunteer duties that would require wearing the adult BSA uniform.

My son lost interest in Cub Scouts after about three years, so he didn’t finish his Webelos rank nor bridge with his buddies to a Boy Scout troop.

A few years later, though, another friend in middle school talked him into visiting his Boy Scout troop, and we were back in it for awhile. This time, I was more active, volunteering on the troop committee — helping plan budgets, fund-raisers, assisting on outings. I took some adult training, and even went along to summer camp.

And after my son lost interest in Boy Scouts after earning his First Class rank, I figured I’d done my part.

When I remarried some 15 years ago, it was a package deal: two more children came into my life. And when my stepson — in first grade — brought home a flyer asking us to visit a Cub Scout pack, I couldn’t help but notice it was the exact same pack!

When we showed up a few nights later, I found that the pack had shrunk considerably in the years since my older son had been in it. There were fewer than 20 kids in the pack, and only about five boys in his den.

But that first year — Tiger Cubs — was great fun. We went on hikes, camped at the local Moose Lodge park, and built our first Pinewood Derby car together.

As we were finishing up that first year, and preparing to bridge over to Wolves, we learned that our cubmaster was bridging over to Boy Scouts with his son.

Somehow I’d shared that my older son had been in the pack a decade earlier — and so the local Boy Scout field representative decided I was the perfect person to become the new cubmaster.

There being no graceful way out, I donned that olive drab uniform for the first time since I’d been a Boy Scout.

Over the next three years, we grew the Pack back up over 50 boys before my step-son bridged over to a Boy Scout troop and we continued our scouting journey there.

In fact, based on our success in growing the Pack, I was offered a job as a field rep for BSA, I job I held for almost six years.

This past Saturday morning, we held a farewell Blue & Gold Banquet for my old pack at the Moose Lodge. The school lockdowns during COVID-19 made it impossible for us to get on campus and recruit new families. And due to the ongoing national bankruptcy case involving the national Boy Scouts of America organization, the only thing most parents we did meet with knew about Boy Scouts was that it was involved in a sex-abuse lawsuit.

Without new families to replace the last den of boys bridging over to Boy Scouts, there was simply no way to continue. When our charter expired on Dec. 31, the pack ceased to exist.

Some 40 folks were there Saturday to say goodbye to our old pack. Among them were some of the volunteer leaders from when my older son and I first joined in 1999 — as well as some of the former Cub Scouts, now with facial hair and deep voices and even wives in tow. And some of the former boys who had been Cubs when I was cubmaster were there, too — bringing me up to speed on all they’d done in the years since: college, first jobs, new hobbies.

As everyone was introducing themselves and finding a seat, I stepped onto the stage in the hall at the Moose Lodge and held my right hand up with the two finger forming not a Victory V — but, as I’d learned 20 years earlier, forming wolf ears, because if you’re listening then you’re not talking.

It took a bit longer than usual, but as folks noticed the “quiet sign” was up, the chatter stopped.

We opened with a prayer and the pledge. We took photos, ate pizza, and enjoyed camp-fire Dutch oven cobbler — cherry, apple and peach.

Mostly, we shared stories — pointing out to each other where each of us were in a slide show that covered more than 30 years of Cub Scouting: Our pack tradition of always entering a float or marching in the local Christmas parade, summer camp and Scout Fair, the great Winter Camp of 2013 when a bunch of kids from San Diego froze their little behinds off during the coldest weekend in Idyllwild in half a century (and had their first snowball fight!).

At the end of the day, we took our pack flag off it’s pole, folded it carefully, and had some of the former Cubs present it to the Moose Lodge leadership as a memento of three decades of Cub Scouting in our town.

I share this story not because there was anything special about our pack, our families, our time together — but precisely because it is so very ordinary.

Over the past four years, our local Boy Scout Council has shrunk by about two-thirds. All sorts of troops and packs (and Venturing crews and Sea Scout ships and Exploring posts) have struck their colors for the last time, and put their unit flag into storage at the church, veteran’s hall or service club where generations of kids had gathered for weekly meetings, assembled in the parking lot before heading off to camp, received their Arrow of Light and Eagle awards.

When I was hired as a field rep for our local Scout council, we had 16,000 kids in Scouting in our county. Now, it’s about 4,000.

Nor is Scouting the only youth organization that is rapidly shrinking.

A few weeks ago, we were clearing out the garage and I found my youngest daughter’s two old softball mitts. I called her old coach to see if he had any girls that might want a good leather glove but couldn’t afford one. He was glad to take them, and said they’d be at the indoor batting cages that night.

When I stopped by, I asked how the local fastpitch softball league was doing. He shook his head slowly and explained that the girls from my daughter’s old team were now on a 14U travel team. After the COVID restrictions were lifted, so few girls came back that the league could only field a single 14U team — which meant that every week they’d be playing a team from another league. At that point, he said, it made more sense to just form a travel team.

A few weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the legal and liability issues that are hammering youth enrichment programs across our country.

The above two examples illustrate the loss this presents to the next generation of kids in communities all across the country: Fewer sports teams, fewer Scouting units, fewer dance troupes and youth theater companies.

Fewer opportunities to get away from video games and TikTok and learn new skills in the physical world.

The saddest thing about all this just might be that most of the kids coming into that age group now will never even realize what it is they’ve missed.

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The week before last, I was gifted with a warmly rewarding evening I didn’t even have on my calendar.

I was texting with the head of the Cub Scout pack my Moose Lodge sponsors — the Cub Scout pack both my boys went through, the pack where I was cubmaster for three years.

The pack will not continue in 2023 — with the COVID lockdowns we were not able to get on campus to recruit at the schools we draw from, and with the sexual abuse lawsuits against the national BSA organization, those parents we could reach were understandably hesitant.

So after 60 pears, Pack 640 will be no more. Hundreds of kids came through the pack over the decades — that adds up to hundreds of Pinewood Derby cars built by hand, thousands of nights spent camping under the stars, probably tens of thousands of badges, belt loops and arrowheads earned.

These are all life-enriching experiences that kids in our little corner won’t be as likely to have moving forward, as the nearest packs will be a couple of schools over.

So that was weighing on me — because I’ve seen first-hand how the Scouting program can positively impact kids when delivered the right way.

As we were wrapping up our text exchange, Shelley asked if I was going to attend the Eagle Court of Honor that night for Brayden — one of our former Cubs.

I hadn’t heard about the event, and texted back that I didn’t want to crash — and then she replied, “Well, his mom wants you to come; she had lost your phone number.”

This was about three hours before the event started.

I got home from work, changed back into my old cubmaster uniform, and headed over to the church where the event was to be held.

Shelley’s husband, who had replaced me as cubmaster, was there. So were Brayden’s three scoutmasters, his Eagle advisor, and other volunteers who had been involved in his Scouting career.

At the table with all his Scouting memorabilia, Brayden had the Pinewood Derby cars he’d built in our pack, all his handbooks, and his Whittling Chip — signed by my wife — allowing him to carry a pocket knife to Scouting events at age 8.

When a kid comes into Cubs, we don’t know where the adventure will take them. Most kids who join Scouting stay an average of three years (similar to the numbers for youth sports, music, dance, etc.). Very few will go on to earn the Eagle rank — or the comparable ranks in Sea Scouts, Girl Scouts or Venturing. There are a lot of badges to earn, hiking miles and camping nights (or sailing days) to accumulate, leadership roles to fulfill, and a significant community project to organize and supervise.

But for those who earn their Eagle — or Quartermaster, Gold, or Summit awards — you know they’ve learned some important lessons. Perseverance. Sacrifice. Leadership.

Brayden achieved all those.

Raising the next generation is the single most important thing we do in this life — but doing so only rarely happens in the kind of well-planned-out lesson we idealize.

During all those hectic pack meetings and campouts, where I was running around trying to keep everything on track, Brayden was quietly (or not so quietly, knowing Brayden!) absorbing what the other leaders were instilling.

Many times, simply being present in our children’s lives, and providing them opportunities to explore different options for their own futures, yields rewards we never even knew we were planting.

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After dropping out of Cal Poly Pomona — where I was majoring in, of all things, agricultural engineering — halfway through my first quarter, I moved back to San Diego with my folks and got a job at a fast-food joint downtown by City College. Horton Plaza was not yet a redeveloped shopping mall, and what would become the Gaslamp Quarter was still flophouse hotels and industrial warehouses.

It was a tough neighborhood.

But my manager at the Jack in the Box offered me a 50 cent an hour bonus to work the graveyard shift — 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and at a time when the minimum wage was $2.90 an hour, that was a big deal.

As I said, it was a tough neighborhood. Getting robbed a few times, and having a coworker attacked by a homeless guy who hopped the counter to help himself to free coffee, led me to apply to San Diego State.

I started back in January of 1981, and at the start of the following fall semester, enrolled in Air Force ROTC. My granddad and mom’s older brother had both served in the Air Force, and I just loved reading about World War II aviation.

I loved the camaraderie, the teamwork. I made honor cadet my freshman year, was accepted into the Arnold Air Society (the Air Force’s honor society for college students), was one of two Air Force cadets assigned to the all-service color guard at SDSU (alongside two Army cadets, two Navy midshipmen, and two Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class candidates), and was tabbed for a good leadership slot my sophomore year.

Unless Uncle Sam has offered you a full-ride four-year scholarship, you don’t find out if you’ll be offered an officer’s commission until midway through your sophomore year of ROTC. But I had (mostly) good grades, was working on an aerospace engineering degree, and was near the top of my class in all the military criteria: PT, leadership, had perfect scores in my ROTC courses. The senior cadet who commanded our cadet flight even appointed me his senior NCO cadet — top of the sophomore class. I picked a missile launch officer slot for my preferred career path knowing I had zero chance of a flight slot given my bad eyesight.

I just didn’t realize how bad my eyesight was.

I failed the eye exam portion of my military physical.

That, and changing my major after failing to get a B in calculus after two attempts, made me far less valuable to the Air Force — not when interest was high. (A typical freshman class in AFROTC at San Diego State in the early ’80s was about 80; only 25 of them would be commissioned four years’ hence.)

My eyes were (and are) corrected to 20/20, but my vision fell below the Department of Defense threshold of -10 diopter prescription. It turns out that I was high on the risk chart for retina detachment, and Uncle Sam understandably didn’t want to take that risk — or cost.

I applied for a waiver — and was told it would take six months to a year to get reviewed.

So that next fall, my junior year, I enrolled in Army ROTC’s freshman program there on campus — figuring that if I got my waiver, having a little bit of infantry training couldn’t hurt.

Army ROTC was pretty different from Air Force ROTC. For one thing, the Army expected you at field training every other Saturday morning at a reserve base on the south side of then Naval Air Station Miramar. (The base was located on land that is now the intersection of Interstate 15 and state Route 163.)

We’d be there before dawn, in our fatigues. The senior cadets would start us off with a two-mile run — and not in the sneakers, but in combat boots. Then we’d move into a classroom to go over whatever skill we’d work on that day: Field-stripping an M-16 carbine, reconnoitering by map, learning to use terrain to mask small-unit movements, first aid, using a LAW rocket against enemy armor.

For a young guy in great health (outside the spectacles), it was spectacular fun with a great group of people.

And not that I’m competitive or anything, but if they were going to have a contest on who could tear down an M45 standard issue pistol and put it back together the fastest while blindfolded? I wanted to be first.

Whenever I did well, the major who was in charge of these weekend training sessions would about lose his mind. As I recall, he was a helo pilot who hated the Air Force — and having an Air Force washout take the Army class while waiting for a possible Air Force waiver just drove him nuts. He hated the way I called cadence. Hated the way I marched. I don’t think he was particularly fond of the way I breathed.

One Saturday morning, we got to practice throwing dummy grenades. They were the same size and weight as standard-issue frag grenades, but solid steel with no explosives. I don’t think they even had a real pin.

In the classroom, we learned the three throwing positions: Standing, kneeling and prone, and the proper technique. (Like most civilians, I assumed you tossed a grenade like a baseball — but a grenade is significantly heavier, and you’d ruin your shoulder and elbow pretty quickly trying to throw a grenade that way. Instead, you lob it, your elbow locked in place as you swing from the shoulder and hips.)

We moved from the classroom out to the practice range, where there were targets set up for the three positions. I did pretty well in both standing and kneeling, to where I had one of the top scores. The prone position is used from behind a low bit of cover — a fallen tree, a small trench, etc. Here, they had laid out a small berm of railroad ties: to toss the grenade, you roll toward the obstacle so that only your throwing arm is ever exposed.

You can’t even see the target from the prone position — you have to eyeball it before lying down, and then toss in that direction.

Somehow, the half-blind Air Force reject landed all five grenades in the target area.

I thought the major was going to pop a vein in his neck.

“Are you soldiers going to let a #%@! Air Force puke show you up in throwing grenades?” he screamed at the other cadets who hadn’t finished yet.

I felt bad for them — and was sure they were going to be ticked off at me.

But at the end of the day, when the major had dismissed us and we were walking to the parking lot, the senior Army ROTC cadets came over with big smiles to shake my hand and congratulate me.

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While I never did get my waiver from the Air Force, and turned down an offer from one of the Army officers to try to get me an Army commission (he was a reservist on temporary active duty — but a newspaper reporter and editor by trade, and thought I was showing promise writing for the student newspaper on campus), I still remember both the Air Force and Army cadets as some of the finest people I ever got to team up with.

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My 1980s vintage BSR floor speakers were put to interesting use one evening at work. I was employed at a streaming video company around the turn of the millennium. At this company, you were pretty much fair game on your birthday.

For Keith’s birthday, one of our programmers somehow got access to Keith’s work computer — on which Keith had thousands of MP3s to listen to while working. The programmer, Doc, backed up all of Keith’s music files, then replaced each MP3 with a country-western song — while preserving the original meta data, so when Keith got to work the next morning (on his birthday) it still looked like his alternative, punk and thrash were as he had left them.

Except every time Keith went to play Green Day, he’d get Waylon Jennings. Bad Brains was now Johnny Cash. Queensryche had become Alan Jackson.

To fully appreciate the inside joke you’d have to know that Keith hated country music. Hated it.

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When it was our buddy Jeff’s birthday coming up, Jeff was careful to take his computer offline — and to lock the door to his office when he left the day before his birthday.

Unbeknownst to Jeff, I had those big floor speakers in the back of my station wagon. We got a ladder from maintenance, carefully lifted a ceiling tile in the hallway outside his door, crawled up into the ceiling and placed those two speakers aimed down at his desk - being careful to ensure they were snugly contained by the suspension cables holding up the ceiling. Then we ran a spool of speaker wire from the speakers to Doc’s office, dropped the speaker wire down a corner, out of sight of his office window, and connected them to a spare stereo and CD player we had.

After replacing the ceiling tiles, we vacuumed the hallway carpet outside Jeff’s office — and there was no sign we’d been up to anything.

Jeff’s birthday arrived, and nobody said anything. We had our morning standup staff meeting, grabbed coffee, and headed back to our own workspaces.

You need to understand this: Jeff hated reggae. Jeff hated reggae with a passion that made Keith’s dislike of country seem almost like admiration.

On cue at about 9 a.m., Bob Marley began blaring from Jeff’s ceiling — followed in short order by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh.

Jeff said nothing. Well, not at first. Finally, about 40 minutes into it, he slammed open his door, looked up and down the hallway, and said in a loud, threatening voice, “Enough! Turn this crap off NOW!”

Which seemed reasonable.

But the Scottish bagpipe music that replaced the reggae? Yeah, maybe not so much.

Tip Jar

After 20 minutes of that awful noise, Jeff again came out into the hallway and yelled “STOP!”

I suppose, in hindsight, the opera that replaced the bagpipes might have been, well, cruel. I’m pretty sure Jeff just put his head down on his arms on his desktop and wept.

At least it wasn’t Yoko Ono!

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When not working as a newspaper reporter or editor, I’ve held down a variety of other jobs through the years: a summer apprenticing to a carpenter, flipping burgers, washing dishes, and for awhile when I got sick of the whole newspaper racket in 1990, selling tires at Price Club (precursor to Costco) in San Diego.

One winter afternoon in the baseball off-season, Hall of Fame umpire Doug Harvey came in to get a new set of shoes on his car. Since I was working the register while the other guys were doing the tire-busting, I got to chat with him. It was a slow weekday, and a couple of other guys joined me and Mr. Harvey on the folding chairs in the waiting area.

The question came up: Why did relatively few managers argue with Harvey compared to other umpires?

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“Because I know the rule book better than any manager!” he said with a laugh. He also said it was hard work memorizing the new rule changes each season, but he felt that was the foundation for everything he did on the field: He HAD to be the subject matter expert. And so he memorized every rule, and could recite it back as needed during a game. He said he expected every ump on his crew to do the same.

He told us that whatever we chose to do in life, we should give 100 percent — not because the company we worked for necessarily deserved that effort, but because it would define how others saw us. That there was no shortcut to success. That the only two choice in life are hard work or make excuses, and that making excuses would wear you out faster than hard work.

As the two guys who put the tires on his car came in to let him know it was ready, he made sure to give each of us guys working in the tire shop that day his business card. I’ve kept it ever since, in my baseball card collection. (Which I cannot find as I write this — when I do figure out which safe space I put it in so I wouldn’t lose it, I’ll scan the card and share it here.)

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