A lifelong Girl Scout shares her experience

Interviewer: Can you tell us about how you continued to be involved in Girl Scouts even as an adult?

Francine: Having a Girl Scout troop is similar to teaching. You're trying to help the girls earn badges and have them figure out what they want to do. 

I had a Girl Scout troop for a long time, and then I was the town coordinator for all the Lexington troops for a couple of years. Then, I worked on the Alumni Board, and then I got involved with a lady named Pat Ross who happened to live in Lexington, who was really into preserving the history of Girl Scouts. 

Together with a couple of other people, we convinced the Girl Scouts that we should have a museum to show some of these things that we had from way back in 1912 when Girl Scouts first began. We had a budget of $100 and one room to display our stuff. We had thousands of artifacts. Now, there’s something like 75,000 artifacts in our archives, and it's remarkable. We have one of the finest and largest collections in the United States.

I volunteer there once a week, and it's wonderful. We have troops come in. It's an all-volunteer group. There's no paid person there, so you have to make an appointment. We have about 20 volunteers, and we have to find somebody who's available the day you want to come. We’ll show you around and give you a tour.

We also have things like fashion shows. We've gone to some nursing homes with these fashion shows, and the ladies there who maybe were Girl Scouts when they were kids love having these fashion shows. The kids all dress up in the old uniforms. 

We have some important uniforms that we keep in reserve that we don't let anybody wear, because they're too valuable, too important. They belong to important people in the Girl Scout movement. We have some pins of Juliet Low. We also have ones from Helen Storrow, a well-known girl scout. She started the Paul Revere pottery for immigrant girls to earn a living. She was a wonderful person, and she was able to get an estate in Waltham for a camp where hundreds of girls come every year.

It’s right in the middle of the city of Waltham, but you're out in the middle of the woods. There's coyotes, there's geese, there's deer, there's all kinds of stuff. There's swimming. They have a pond. They do kayaking. They have a climbing wall. They have archery, all kinds of great stuff. There’s cooking, of course. Even at winter camping, they have cabins that you can go to and camp out. 

It’s a great organization, being that it's worldwide. We have five different world centers where girls can go and meet kids from other countries, get to know different cultures and different customs. It's wonderful.

The one in Africa moves from town to town, from country to country. So every year it's in a different place. I've never been to any of them, but the first one was started by Helen Storrow.

She was very influential in the Boston area, even though she was from upstate New York originally. Her brother went to Harvard University. Once when she went hiking in Switzerland, she saw her brother, and his roommate was with him. His name was James Jackson Starrow, and they fell in love, so she married James Jackson Starrow and moved to Boston.

Interviewer: Can you tell us a little more about what activities the Girl Scouts do? 

Francine: Sure, right now they're doing a lot of STEM stuff. Some of the new badges are quite into STEM, like computers, AI, all that kind of stuff, especially for the older girls, but even the younger girls. They’re doing it on a very low level.

But if you look back at some of the old badges, back in like 1918, they had what they call an Automobile Badge. You had to learn to drive. You had to get an 85% on the written test. You had to learn how to change your tire. You had to learn how to fiddle around with the motors and all of that. Cars were much less complex back then.

Then in 1913 they had an Electrician’s Badge. Well, you think “how can a little kid do that,” but they had to learn to understand how the power source went through the resistant wires to get to whatever they were going to, either cooking or heating or turning the light on. That was just one of the requirements. 

Plus, they have the opportunity to do things with graphic design and computers and all kinds of stuff that I don't even know about because I haven't earned badges in a long, long time. But, it's an amazing thing. 
We have men who are leaders too. It's not just women. We used to call them do-dads, dads that would help out, maybe even run troops, go camping with them. 

You can be a Girl Scout up until you graduate from high school. Have you heard of Christa McAuliffe, the astronaut? She got blown up in the tragic Challenger explosion. Well, she was a Girl Scout as a girl, and she was a leader as an adult. 

We have her leader’s uniform in our museum. She grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts, and then she taught in New Hampshire. But she and her Girl Scout Troop, even when they were adults, used to meet one week per year up at Camp Wabasso in New Hampshire.

We have a place up there called Christa’s House, which has a lot of her artifacts.

So a lot of famous women have been Girl Scouts. Debbie Reynolds, Betty Davis, you probably never heard of these actresses or actors, but anyway, many famous people. So it's a good organization.