Troop 2277

Brownies.  The word implied little pixies, elves and magical things.  I wanted to be one and so did most of my friends. And when I was seven I joined up.

Two mothers volunteered to be our leaders and troop 2277 was born. This being Los Angeles, and near Hollywood, our investiture was sprinkled with the fairy dust of glitter.  For a reason unknown to me, Troop 2277 was going to be the lead story of the family section of the Los Angeles Times.

In our brand new uniforms, we practiced our pledge and our one-hand salutes. When the day came, we assembled in the back yard of Mrs. M’s house and a photographer showed up.  We were a little group of para military baby boomers dressed in brown felt hats, earnest in our beliefs and not yet jaded by the thought of selling cookies outside of grocery stores. In the picture that was on the front page of the newspaper section I am either the only one getting the salute correct, or the only one getting it wrong. 

Some of us stayed a part of 2277 until we were 17 years old. It wasn’t for the scouting experience, trust me. It was because we were friends. We survived poison oak, first kisses at a beach campout, baked biscuits in coffee cans, grunion running, eating a tube of Alka-Seltzer without water and dancing a very bad version of the hula to “Little Grass Shack” in front of a packed auditorium.  We also dealt with death.

I first learned about communism while “camping” on Mrs. H’s shag carpet. The girls slept in sleeping bags, lined with cozy flannel decorated with flying ducks and hunters.  I claimed the spot under the dining room table, and as the evening wore on the adults started talking about “reds.” I could not fathom why it would be better to be dead than red.  But it certainly sounded frightening; especially when one adult added that there was a “red under every bed.”  At least I was under the table, not the bed.

For years we raised money to go to the Girl Scout chalet in Zermat, Switzerland.  It was the thought of the cool, clean Alpen air that inspired more car washes than I can remember. Years of them.

When the remaining stalwarts graduated from high school, Troop 2277 finally retired. We counted the funds that had been growing for eleven years. There certainly was not enough to take us to the real Matterhorn, but we’d been to Disneyland enough times to know what it was like.  Instead, now college students, we flew up to San Francisco for the weekend.  The year was 1969 and we couldn’t have gone to a cooler place.