Scouting, Volume 69, Number 4, September 1981 Page: 18
98, E1-E24, [16] p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The History of
Exploring
BY PETER JOHNSON
Illustration by David Strand
Exploring began 69
years ago as a sailing
program for older Boy
Scouts. Today it offers
young men and women
career education and
outdoor adventure in
more than 80 special
interest areas.
SINCE SEPTEMBER IS tradition-
ally the beginning of the Exploring
program year, and many new Ex-
plorers are likely to join your post in
the next several months, it's appro-
priate to look back at the origins of
our Exploring movement.
Today's Exploring—a youth
movement with coed posts and ships
involved in more than 80 different
interest areas—is a program in con-
stant evolution. Begun 69 years ago
as the Sea Scout program of the Boy
Scouts of America, Exploring is the
product of continuous experimenta-
tion and the vision and hard work of
men and women concerned about the
needs of American youth.
"Where are you going? What will
Exploring 18
you do?" Young men and women
have always pondered these ques-
tions. But the Boy Scouts of America
discovered in 1912 that the proverbial
restlessness of youth posed a prob-
lem. As boys got to be 13 or 14 years
old, many lost their interest in Scout-
ing. By 1914, the "older-boy problem"
was being intensively studied.
While all this was going on, two
yachtsmen—Arthur A. Carey of
Waltham, Mass., and Charles Long-
streth of Philadelphia, Pa.—began in
1912 to take crews of boys out for
cruises on their boats. Carey's
schooner, the Pioneer, was the first
Sea Scout ship.
Sea Scouting seemed a worthwhile
addition to the still-developing BSA
program. Carey had gotten his idea in
England from the originator of
Scouting himself, Lord Robert
Baden-Powell, who had developed his
own Sea Scout program that same
year.
Another man who came away in-
spired from a visit with Badert-Powell
was a wealthy artist-sailor-adven-
turer from the then-Territory of
Hawaii, James A. "Kimo" Wilder. He
met Baden-Powell in 1911 and re-
turned to Honolulu to organize a
full-fledged Scout council out of the
handful of Scouts and Scouters then
in the islands. In 1917 he paid a visit to
the New York City office of James E.
West, the charismatic Chief Scout
Executive of the Boy Scouts of
America. One of the most colorful
characters of Scouting's early days,
Kimo Wilder had been raised among
native Hawaiians, traveled widely,
known the sea since childhood, and
was Harvard-educated. He knew
about the small Sea Scout program in
the States, but he saw that if Sea
Scouting was to prosper, it would
have to be expanded to a full depart-
ment of the National Council with a
full-time staff. He volunteered his
services and offered to finance the
new Sea Scout department himself.
West took him on as the first Chief
Sea Scout. The next year all local
BSA councils voted to make Sea
Scouting an "older boy" program for
First Class Scouts over 14 years of
age.
So it was that Wilder was the driv-
ing spirit of a new national program.
In 1935 the Senior Scouting Service
was created with Tom Keane as di-
rector. The new Explorer Scout plan
was an alternative to Sea Scouting
and was for boys who had no leader-
ship positions in the troop and who
might have dropped out otherwise.
Scouting and Exploring got an im-
portant boost in 1938 when Ok-
lahoma businessman Waite Phillips
donated nearly 36,000 acres of his
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Boy Scouts of America. Scouting, Volume 69, Number 4, September 1981, periodical, September 1981; Irving, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth353625/m1/70/: accessed May 10, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Boy Scouts of America National Scouting Museum.