I know they call it the “web” because you can follow one link that leads to another and then another. Sometimes when that happens it’s ten o’clock in the morning when you begin clicking and then you look up and it’s two-thirty in the afternoon. That’s what happened to me a few days ago when I started looking at a ham radio related site that had a link to something that had a link to something else and next thing I know, I’m staring at a Boys’ Life magazine from 1966.

Scout Life (formerly Boys’ Life) is the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Its target readers are children between the ages of 6 and 18. The magazine‘s headquarters are in Irving, Texas.

I was a Cub Scout for a year or three. I remember joining, I just don’t recall the details of my un-joining so I’m not sure exactly how much time I spent in Pack 51. I recall enjoying the trips and the projects. It was a swell time. And I do remember always looking forward to the next monthly delivery of Boys’ Life magazine, a publication packed with essential knowledge for a young fellow who needed to know how to set rabbit traps and identify birds in the neighborhood.

How I got from reading an article about an antenna to going back in time six decades is a mystery for another day, but flipping through the PDF pages of that old magazine brought up several more interesting memories. One of them being those clever advertisements intended to coerce a youngster to sell a newspaper. Admittedly, I had never even seen a GRIT newspaper to that point in my life, but I was certain I wanted to get rich selling them door-to-door. That was it. My life’s work was set in stone, I was going to become a newspaper salesman - just as soon as I could get my Dad’s permission to launch such an ambitious career!

Dad never agreed to those future career plans and wouldn’t sign the necessary permission slip. Being a World War II vet who grew up during the Great Depression he was always wary of plots and plans to “get rich quick” so I suppose his reluctance was to be expected…

I was surprised to discovered that GRIT is still being published:

Grit is a magazine, formerly a weekly newspaper, popular in the rural U.S. during much of the 20th century. It carried the subtitle “America’s Greatest Family Newspaper”. In the early 1930s, it targeted small town and rural families with 14 pages plus a fiction supplement. By 1932, it had a circulation of 425,000 in 48 states, and 83% of its circulation was in towns of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.

In fact, I recommend reading that Wikipedia history of the publication as that’s pretty interesting too (do these web links ever end?). I found it interesting enough that I bought a single edition of the now magazine and really enjoyed it.

Now I’m left to wonder if I might not be a wealthy newspaper tycoon about now had I only been permitted to sell GRIT - America’s Greatest Family Newspaper.