A remote community in far western Washington State imported Cub Scouts from Canada in 1923. They apparently inspired national Scout leaders to formally adopt Cub Scouting in 1928.
Update: On June 10, 2023, Pack 4686 of Port Angeles celebrated its 100th Anniversary at Elks Lodge 353. Sol Levy’s pack continues to this day.
“Father of Cub Scouts” Sol Levy
Sol G. Levy had personal experience in Scouting. He grew up in central London, and joined the London Boys Brigade as a youth. The Boys Brigade baited him with a simple promise: he’d be able to feel grass under his feet for the first time. His family was poor and he lived on hard cobblestone streets. The only grass he could see was in parks with signs warning for everyone to keep off. At Hampstead Heath he took off his shoes and ran with joy.
The Boys Brigade dates from the early 1890s, but Robert Baden-Powell’s book Aids to Scouting in 1899 influenced the organization. Levy was a member of the group when Baden-Powell returned to England in 1903 and attended their annual gathering. This convinced Baden-Powell to address the needs for youth learning and adventure, leading to his experiment at Brownsea Island in 1906 and publication of Scouting for Boys in 1908. Levy was there in London at a pivotal time for Scouting, experiencing it from the inside.
Levy’s family moved to the United States in 1904 and after moving from Chicago to Duluth to Seattle, he found himself a business owner and father in Port Angeles.
Levy brings Cubmaster Parkes
Sol Levy wanted his son Leon, age 9, to join Scouts. However, Boy Scouts started at 12 in America, since the Wolf Cub program in the UK for boys 9-12 hadn’t been adopted yet. But just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Wolf Cubs were on display. Cub Scouts, also referred to as Cubbing, started in Great Britain in 1916. By 1920 it reached the far west of the British Empire in Victoria.
Sol Levy’s autobiography in his papers at the University of Washington describes his effort to start a Wolf Cub unit.
Levy and other Port Angeles business leaders witnessed activities of Victoria Wolf Cubs in 1923. Levy was introduced to W. W. Parkes, the Cubmaster of a pack in Victoria’s James Bay neighborhood, where ferries still arrive from Port Angeles today. Like Levy, Parkes came from London.
(Levy reports that Parkes was a Cubmaster in London. However, Parkes immigrated to Canada in 1910, before Cubbing began. It is possible that he took that role after serving in the UK air corps prior to returning to Victoria after World War One.)
Levy convinced Parkes to relocate to Port Angeles and start a pack for his son Leon. He also convinced the local Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, and the parents of several dozen boys to contribute to a monthly $150 salary for Parkes. Parkes, a practicing architect, set aside his profession and dedicated himself to Cubbing.
Growth and Cub Scout activities
The Wolf Cubs operated on the same system that they do in the UK today. The youth were split into groups of six, each with a “sixer” appointed as their leader. The pack had a “senior sixer”, who was the youth leader for the pack and worked directly with the Cubmaster.
The Pack grew to 80 Cubs by the late 1920s, lowering their entry age to 7. Their activities included an elaborate summer camp at the mouth of the Elwha River (see article), lots of singing, parades, performances, and games.
Levy was a member of the Seattle Rotary, and a founding member of the Rotary in Port Angeles. So when Seattle hosted the district Rotary convention in April 1928, Levy had the idea of having his Wolf cubs demonstrate their various skills to the Rotarians. 52 boys wowed the 2,000 men with parading, marching, singing, bugling, and performing. They took a break to broadcast on KOMO radio on the evening of April 22nd. The morning of the 23rd they put on a peace play, “presenting a boy’s viewpoint of international good will.”
For more details on the Rotary activities, see the article Wolf Cubs lost at war.
The pack appeared on local radio twice. First was on KOMO radio in Seattle when they visited for the Rotary convention. Second was in Victoria on CFCT radio. Across both performances they included a kazoo band, drum and bugle band, bugle calls, a Wolf Cub song and alphabet, Rotary songs, recitations, dialogs, and speeches addressed to other boys listening.
Did Cub Scouts start in Port Angeles?
In his 1972 autobiography, Levy refers to himself as the “so-called father of Cubbing”. In another spot he quoted a national BSA profile that said he started Cub Scouts in the Pacific Northwest.
The sentiment made it into contemporary papers, including the 1929 Victoria Daily Colonist which said, “Last summer Boy Scouts of America officially recognized the Wolf Cub movement, this decision having been reached, many people people contend, by observance of the wonderful results attained by the Wolf Cub work in Port Angeles”. Much later in Sol Levy’s son Leon Levy’s 2007 obituary his family wrote, “he became the first Cub Scout in the country”.
There were many earlier Wolf Cub packs in America, in places like Harrisburg, PA (1916), Butte, MT (1917), Barre, VT (1917), Dallas, TX (1919), Boise, ID (1920), and Salem, OR (1920). With Idaho and Oregon in the list it’s not accurate to say Sol Levy’s group was even first in the Pacific Northwest. And separate from Cubbing, there was the Boy Rangers program that started in 1913 in New Jersey.
With no good history available of Cubbing in America in the 1910s and 1920s, it’s unclear if Sol Levy’s group was uniquely successful in duration or size or the enthusiasm of the Cubs.
However, the real question simply should be whether Levy’s claim is true that BSA Chief Scout Executive Dr. James West decided to formally adopt Cubbing after witnessing the Port Angeles group in Seattle in 1928. If so, then it’s fair to call Levy the “father of Cubbing”, and his son Leon the “first Cub Scout”.
Leon appealed to the Rotary audience in 1928 “for help in organizing boydom on a world-wide basis”. Several months later, Dr. West, who had been resistant to the idea of a program for younger boys, implemented Cub Scouts in America.
Levys move to Seattle
As his son grew, Levy’s focus shifted as well. He became a Reading merit badge counselor and enlisted the Seattle Public Library to sign off merit badge requirements.
Levy joined the Chief Seattle Council (Seattle Area Council) executive board in 1928, after his family moved to Seattle. He became president of the board in 1947, when it still included part of Snohomish County and all of Alaska. He was leader for Seattle as host of the BSA National Meeting in 1948, with special guest Lord Rowallan, Chief Scout for the British Empire. They formed a lifelong friendship at the event.
Levy became chair of region 11 executive board in 1954, joined the national board in 1955. He received the Silver Beaver in 41, Silver Antelope in 49, and Silver Buffalo in 1955. Since its inception in 1926, the Silver Buffalo has been given to less than 800 people.
Who was Cubmaster W. W. Parkes?
Biographical details of W. W. Parkes are hard to find. No descriptions of his personality or pleasures remain.
His full name was William Woolstencroft Parkes, and was 5’10” with blue eyes and light brown hair. Parkes was born in Stockport, England near Manchester on July 1, 1889, son of Alfred Withinshaw Parkes and Emily Frances White. He spent some time living in London. He came to Canada in 1910.
Parkes served in the Canadian engineers, presumably as an architect, for six months in 1916. He was drafted to the Canadian army in 1917 an served in No 1 company, 11 MD, 2nd Depot Battalion, B.C. regiment. After discharge in 1918 he joined the UK Royal Air Force a month later. During his service he listed his mother as next of kin, who lived in Laheen, Old Colwyn, North Wales. Parkes himself lived in Victoria, BC already, working as an architect. His uncle Thomas J. Parkes lived in Canada in Sherbrooke, Quebec in 1923.
Parkes traveled to Port Angeles via Seattle in October 1923. He listed his profession as architect in the 1926 city directory. He ran Camp DYB, a Scout-focused youth camp near Port Angeles as late as 1934 (see article). Levy made it a point to mention that Parkes was a bachelor. Parkes moved with the camp to Wildcat Lake near Bremerton in 1936. In 1942 he lived and worked at Lakeview Riding Academy at Wildcat Lake near Bremerton, perhaps the continuation of Camp DYB.
Parkes does not come up in searches of architects active in British Columbia or Washington in the 1910s to 1940s, or in newspaper searches.
A short article promoting his youth camp, Camp DYB, in 1924 called Parkes “one of the deepest students of boy psychology in the country.”
Parkes died on January 5, 1948 in Bremerton, Washington.
Sources
- Victoria Daily Colonist archives
- Sol Levy papers via UW archives
- Seattle Times archives
- Seattle P-I archives
Further reading
- Camp DYB, 1925 Cub camp in Port Angeles (part 2 of this series)
- Wolf Cubs lost at war (part 3)
- Blue Ox Camp, Seattle’s Paul Bunyan themed camp (part 4)
- What did they sing at Blue Ox Camp? (part 5)
- Cub Scout Alphabet
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