The Adventure Starts Now!

The adventure starts with Cub Scouting, a year-round family program designed for boys in the first through fifth grades, or 6 to 10 years of age. The program emphasizes shared leadership, learning about the community, family understanding, character development, citizenship training, and personal fitness.  Young boys grow up fast. Give your son a valuable gift by encouraging him to join Cub Scouting today. The time you invest in him today will make a difference in the person he becomes tomorrow.

On July 27, 2010, in Fort A. P. Hill, Virginia, the Postal Service™ issued a 44-cent, Scouting commemorative stamp, designed by Derry Noyes, Washington, DC.

To create this original design, illustrator Craig Frazier, Mill Valley, California, depicted the images of two different scouts in clothing and accessories that are often part of the outdoor scouting experience — hats, packs, boots, and binoculars. At first glance, one sees the large silhouette of a scout peering through binoculars. Within this figure is another scout perched atop a mountain taking in the vista. “I wanted a level of discovery to be portrayed in the stamp itself,” Frazier recalls.

He continues, “The small figure and landscape indicate very hard, directional light coming from low on the horizon — either early morning or late afternoon. The sky has that pale blue to indigo transition that happens only at those two times of day.”  Frazier has three previous U.S. stamps to his credit, including the 2006 Love stamp that featured two blue lovebirds.

The post office released this stamp to mark the centennial of the Boy Scouts of America.  Scouts from all around the country will be in attendance Tuesday when the U.S. Postal Service issues a 44-cent stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scouts of America.  The first-day ceremony will take place at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia during the 2010 National Scout Jamboree.

The Boy Scouts of America were founded in 1910, just three years after British general Robert Baden-Powell launched the Scouting movement there. The Boy Scouts of America had the stated goal of teaching boys “patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values.”

The design follows a trend in which the actual event being commemorated is not specified. There is no “Centennial of Scouting” or “1910-2010” as might have been written on earlier stamps.

This has been a year of celebration for scouting emblems: the patch designed for the Jamboree says “100 Years of Scouting” and shows the traditional fleur-de-lis with Eagle emblem of the Boy Scouts of America and a more contemporary logo with “BSA” and a stylized eagle -- the BSA’s theme is “Celebrating the Adventure, Continuing the Journey” for the centennial; and, earlier this year, the U.S. Mint issued a commemorative silver dollar that included the images of three Scouts, the Boy Scout emblem, the years 1910-2010 and the motto “Continuing the Journey.”

An estimated 110 million Americans have been Boy Scouts, with more than two million achieving the highest rank of Eagle Scout, including astronaut Neil Armstrong, former president Gerald Ford, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and basketball Hall of Famer and former U.S. senator Bill Bradley.