Who were the first Boy Scout patrol leaders in Seattle?
How the patrol leaders came together
Scouting came to America in February 1910 with the founding of the Boy Scouts of America. By August, adults working with boys in Seattle were seriously talking about forming patrols and troops. As soon as they set up patrols, they would need patrol leaders.
Two meetings were held at Trinity Parish Church, 8th and James, to share information and then start signing up youth. In the second, they split into Seattle’s first 10 patrols on August 23, 1910. Lucky for us, the Seattle Times and PI mentioned eight of their patrol leaders by name.
What is a patrol leader?
Patrol leaders are important to Scouting both in their responsibility, and what they represent.
The fundamental structure and lessons of Scouting haven’t changed from the beginning, so quotes from the 1910 Seattle Times illustrate what a patrol leader was then, as well as what it is now. On August 21 they wrote, “A patrol consists of not more than eight [youth], with a patrol leader.” On August 23, “The scouts are self-governing. They make their own [rules] and elect their officers.”
Patrol leaders are elected from the members of each patrol. They meet together with a senior patrol leader, who is responsible for the entire troop. For example, they pass information to and from the patrol, prepare the patrol for troop activities, model skills and behavior for the Scouts in their patrol, and most importantly, coordinate decision making by the patrol on what to do and how.
By October 1910, Seattle already had more than 500 Scouts. That must have meant 80 or 100 patrols, and the same number of patrol leaders. Over the last 112 years, across Seattle’s many troops there have been thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of patrol leaders. Here is a glimpse, then, of just a tiny faction of our history, but the very first eight.
The patrol leaders
- Cecil Blogg
- Joseph Adair
- Dorsey Lapp
- Everett Hastings
- Stanley McCarthey
- Rutherford B. Hayes
- Oscar Hill
- Otto M. Johnson
Here is a map of where all eight boys lived, and then a profile of their lives:
Cecil Blogg, 1st of 8 patrol leaders
Cecil lived in Eastlake, a block from Lake Union at 2316 Minor Ave.
Although Cecil stayed in place his whole adult life, his parents made big moves. His father Herbert was from England and his mother was from Illinois, for example, but they met in yet another country, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, when Carrie’s uncle was serving as US consul. Later, they all came to Seattle in 1907, including that uncle, Colonel Sylvanus Hance, moving from Connecticut and then Montana.
In 1910, Cecil was a freshman at Broadway High School. He wrote about athletics for the school paper, the Whims. After this, he went to the University of Washington, where he took classes from the School of Mines. He was in crew, and a 1966 article remembered Cecil as “the only man who ever coxswained the Washington crews for four years”.
After graduation, Cecil moved to Tacoma, where he lived the rest of his life. There, his first career made use of his college degree: for more than 20 years, he worked as a chemist, assayer, and metallurgist. For example, in 1929 he took a job at the new Tacoma branch of Hooker Electrochemical Company. Later, Hooker became infamous for their terrible impact on the environment around facilities in other parts of the country.
Cecil abandoned his career in the late 1930s, presumably as a result of the Great Depression. His wife Daisy took a job teaching at Horace S. Mann School, and Cecil in his 40s went back to school, studying at Knapps Business College. This netted him a job in state government, and then a late career at the Internal Revenue Service, where he was president of the local employee union.
Besides various boating hobbies that carried over from his time in UW crew, Cecil was a lifelong lover of stamps. He was head of the Tacoma Stamp Club and president of the Northwest Federation of Stamp Clubs.
Joseph Adair
Joseph lived at 1716 11th Ave, across from Lincoln Reservoir and what is now Cal Anderson Park. His parents were Mary and William, and his father worked as an accountant at Peoples Savings Bank.
Scouting’s idea of getting city kids into the outdoors apparently made a big impact on Joseph Adair.
Born in Astoria, he attended the Summit School (now Northwest School). He was the vice president of the sophomore class of Broadway High School, elected the next month in Sept 1910. After high school he went to work in the lumber industry, first at Puget Sound Mills & Timber Company in Port Angeles.
He was drafted into World War 1, one of the very first Boy Scouts in Seattle to serve in the US military. He served in the 3rd Division, 3rd Field Artillery Brigade, 10th Field Artillery Regiment. It’s not immediately clear how he went to serve in this east coast division, but probably the 91st Wild West Division was full when he was drafted in December 1917, and he was sent to get 3rd Division to full strength. The 10th Field Artillery fought in several difficult campaigns in France in 1918.
After the war, Adair returned to civilian life and to the lumber industry. He was a manager, sales manager, and wholesale dealer and held other positions for places like Hillhurst Mill and J. F. Shark Lumber Company. By the WW2 draft he lost his right index finger in an accident. He worked until at least the 1950s in lumber, but by then he was in Portland, Oregon, where he lived the last few decades of his life.
Dorsey Lapp
Lapp lived on Queen Anne Hill on the top of the counterbalance at 17 Prospect Street, son of Henry and Jane (Jennie) Lapp. His father Henry was in the liquor business, and owned a series of saloons and a liquor sales company. After Henry’s saloon at the Antlers Hotel failed in March 1911, he became desperate over his business. This led to Henry committing suicide in a rented room at the Frye Hotel. Dorsey was still 17 years old.
Dorsey was still a student in 1910. Dorsey’s 1917 draft card described him as short and stout with red hair and light blue eyes.
He drifted through a series of jobs, particularly during the Great Depression. Dorsey tried to sell an improved wireless invention to the British government during World War One. He was a manufacturer’s agent and salesman and then an electrictian in the 1910s. In the 1930s he worked reupholstering car interiors. In 1942 he worked at “Seattle Tacoma shipyards”, a subsidiary of Todd on Harbor Island. But the next year he was working as a taxi driver for Yellow Cab, which he continued in Seattle into his 50s.
Dorsey struggled with relationships. For instance, his marriage to Alice Hartman had a messy divorce with her in 1922, the second time he separated from her. This even included him plotting divorce against her with faked love poems to the husband of a woman he wished to marry. And then, he was sued for divorce again from his wife Estan in 1940, with the common and imprecise cause of “cruelty”.
In his 60s, Dorsey returned to the place of his birth, Chicago.
Everett Hastings, 4th of 8 patrol leaders
Everett’s family lived at 1015 Spring Street on First Hill. Like most women at the time, Everett’s mother Sylvia had no stated profession in the census or city directory. His father Charles was a “right of way agent” for King County, meaning that he dealt with purchasing property for roads. Tragically, Charles died in 1912 after a sudden, severe case of pneumonia. After that, Everett provided for his mother.
Everett was likely a junior at Broadway High School in 1910. Unfortunately the school year book didn’t list names of underclassmen in this period. A later census said that Everett didn’t continue after his junior year, but his September 8th birthday makes it a bit of a mystery what year that was.
After his father died, Everett and his mother moved to Detroit, probably living with a relative. Both of his parents were born in Michigan. He spent most of the rest of his life there, working at the Ford Motor Company automobile factory as a machinist. His mother lived with him, and when he got married in 1918, his mother-in-law and brother-in-law did too.
Unlike Everett’s mother, his wife Ethel and mother-in-law Cora Sutherin both worked outside the home. Cora was a department store sales clerk. Ethel was a bank teller, and later in life worked in a department store like her mother. Ethel’s brother, Lewis Sutherin, was a foreman at Ford with Everett. After the birth of their daughter Jacqueline and son Gordon, the in-laws moved out.
The family lived for some time in Florida during the Great Depression, but returned to Detroit in the early 40s. Then Everett lived out his life with Ethel in Detriot.
Stanley McCarthy
Stanley lived with his family at 829 27th Ave. His father Charles was a master mariner on a steamship, and worked for Alaska Steamship traveling back and forth between Seattle and Alaska.
Stanley was 16 or 17 when the patrols formed, and had been out of school for two years already. While in Scouts, he worked as a clerk at the Baillargeon department store. A few years later he became an electrician, first traveling to Alaska to work at mines near Juneau. Then he returned to Seattle to join the war effort in 1917, working at J. F. Duthie, a shipyard making cargo ships for the war department in the rebuilt mouth of the Duwamish River.
Stanley got deeper into the war effort in September 1917, when he was drafted in the U. S. Army. His service started three months before Adair, making him perhaps the very first Boy Scout drafted in Seattle. He served in the “Wild West” 91st Division in the 371st Infantry Regiment along with many other Seattle draftees. He was severely wounded near the end of the war, reported in the Seattle Times a month after the war ended in December 1918. Perhaps it was in Flanders Fields, where the 91st Division took 1,000 casualties.
After recovering from his wounds, Stanley worked for a time at a poultry farm in Issaquah and then married in 1920.
He worked as an electrician for a railroad in 1930, and then at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton until his death in 1956. When he died he was survived by his wife Violet, six children, fourteen grandchildren, and five great grandchildren.
Rutherford B. Hayes, 6th of 8 patrol leaders
Rutherford lived with his single mother Margaret at 1113 1/2 Howell St. She was a saleswoman at a market.
In 1910, when he became a patrol leader, Hayes was a messenger for the city of Seattle. Within a few years, he volunteered for a year and a half in the U.S. coast artillery. In the late teens he worked as a mechanic for Bon Marche. And then starting in about 1920, and for more than forty years, he was an accountant in the City Water Department until retirement in 1960. He enjoyed his final six years with his wife Ada before dying of a heart attack and being scattered over Puget Sound.
Rutherford married late in life and had no children. This led to him having many hobbies. For example, he joined the Mountaineers in 1921, was a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and was a member of the Genealogical Society of Seattle. His photographs appeared in the Mountaineers magazine.
Oscar Hill
Oscar lived at 710 15th Ave in what was called Second Hill, and is now roughly Squire Park. His father Halvor was a mechanical engineer. Oscar is sometimes listed as Carl Oscar or Karl Oskar Hill. He was an artist, apprenticing in commercial design as a designer of advertising sign cards. He worked for J. C. Corey, which surprisingly still exists today as Corey Sign and Design in Poulsbo.
Oscar died in 1915 of tuberculosis at age 21.
Otto Martin Johnson (Sr.), patrol leader 8 of 8
Otto lived in Ballard at 1418 W 56th St with his mother Alma and father Otto. His parents owned a shoe store where brother his Carl worked. It was at 5329 Ballard Ave, in the New Home Hotel building.
Like many youth at the time, Otto ended school after an 8th grade education. So, he was a plumber already at age 16 in 1910, and he continued the profession in Seattle for much of his life. Switching trades, after World War 2 he became a carpenter, working for a building contractor.
Who the patrol leaders represented
The patrol leaders represented a diversity of economic backgrounds, and children of immigrants versus descendants of colonists. But, they were all white boys.
The religion of some of their families came up in newspapers or records, and in each case they were a denomination of Christianity. However, there was a rabbi involved in the founding of Scouting in Seattle in 1910, so within a month there were Jewish boys in troops as well.
Ethnic diversity came within a decade, and it’s possible that the Collins Playfield group had non-white members that same year in September 1910.
Gender diversity has taken much longer in Scouting in America. After 8 decades, girls joined BSA Venturing crews in 1995. Then, gay youth openly joined in 2013, and in 2017 transgender youth openly joined. Finally in 2018, the first girls joined BSA troops and packs. BSA troops are currently still separated by gender identification.
Further reading
- Elmer Katayama at Camp Parsons opening
- The Start of Scouting in Seattle
- Seattle’s first Eagle Scout
- George Nakashima and Scouting
My series on early Cub Scouts in Western Washington:
- Cub Scouts started in Port Angeles (part 1)
- Camp DYB (part 2)
- Wolf Cubs lost at War (part 3)
- Blue Ox Camp (part 4)
- What did they sing at Blue Ox Camp? (part 5)
- Cub Scout Alphabet
I have a number of additional articles in mind which look at the start of Scouting in Seattle, and activity by Japanese American boys. Some are partially drafted. Those could include:
- The Scout patrol at Collins Park
- Capitol Hill’s first Scouts
- Troops 50 to 59
- Harold Fisher and Troop 52
- Victor Steinbrueck in Scouting