Reunion stirs up scouting stories

CHAPEL HILL -- When Scoutmaster Paul Trembley would say he was planning a co-ed camping trip with the local Girl Scout troop, friends responded that he was crazy.

It was 1968, and the idea sounded to a lot of people like a recipe for trouble.

Trembley remembered the guys at work razzing him: "They said, 'I'll see you in nine months.'"

There were no problems with that first camping trip to Sunset Beach. Nor were there any problems between the girls and boys for the next nine years when Chapel Hill Boy Scout Troop 835 and Girl Scout Troop 59 traveled the world together to ski, hike, canoe and camp.

About 50 of those scouts reunited for the first time Saturday to share memories and honor Trembley and troop leader Jean Holcomb, whose experiment in co-ed scouting - daring for those times and rare even now - helped shape the lives of dozens of young people.

"This was the most unique scouting experience that has ever been," said Holcomb, who, like Trembley, is now an octogenarian.

Trembley and Holcomb didn't have the official blessing of their troops' parent organizations. Scouting in the U.S., unlike scouting in other countries, is not co-ed.

But Trembley and Holcomb had the blessing of their scouts' parents. The boys and girls sold peanuts in the stands at UNC-Chapel Hill football games to raise money to buy a bus, canoes and a trailer. The troops still held separate meetings, but often took field trips together.

On trips, boys and girls shared all the work and responsibilities - not dividing duties along traditional gender lines. Photos from a 1973 canoe trip to Quebec show teenage boys and girls dragging 78-pound canoes through thick black mud.

"It was a mutual respect. It's a value system that was instilled by these two leaders," said David Swanson, 53, a landscape architect.

The trips - far-flung and adventurous - kept teenagers interested in the troops at a time when the values espoused by scouting weren't exactly the hip thing among 1960s and 1970s teenagers.

"It kept us in scouting longer when it wasn't cool to be a scout," said Dr. Lorrie Basnight, 52, a pediatrician in Greenville who was a member of the Girl Scout troop until about 1975.

The troops had members who adopted hippie personas and unkempt haircuts. There were nerds and squares. But in the mountains of British Columbia, the boys and girls got along like brothers and sisters, she said. Nobody worried whether scouting wasn't what kids at school thought was cool.

"It let you take on the role of who you wanted to be," Basnight said.