About A Picnic Basket (& Campfire Girls) - Part II

Both of us were Campfire Girls, she in the early to mid 1930s and I was a Bluebird from 1969 to 1972 and a Campfire Girl from 1972 to 1974.  I always loved to look through her handbook.  I found it so quaint and far more interesting than my own.  I would often take on tasks and challenges to complete from her book even though they were old fashioned and often no longer relevant.  I personally found them very relevant.  I wanted to do what she had done.

Her Indian costume was magnificent.  I remember making ours out of brown paper grocery bags and stamping them with potato stamps.  Hers was "real"!  I was so impressed.

And look at all the beads she earned.  You earned beads by completing certain tasks and accomplishing set goals.  I only earned a small handful of beads but she had a bunch.  That would have taken a lot of work to earn that many.

I love her beaded headband and she even had her name beaded too.  That name patch was once sewn to her Campfire Girl uniform.  I love the thunderbird patch, another thing you had to earn.  I had a few patches I had earned as well.  Not sure what ended up happening to mine.  I still have my Bluebird pin though.

I was a top seller of Campfire Girl mints.  I remember cases of the things sitting in our garage and I would troll the neighborhood with my old rusty and somewhat red Radio Flyer wagon full of mints and sell door to door to the entire neighborhood.  I'd hit up the teachers at school and my mom's bowling league too.  No one was safe.

My favorite chapter

When we moved to Idaho the big thing here was Girl Scouts.  I didn't join because I felt it was disloyal.  I didn't want to be a traitor.  How funny is that?

I checked and there is a museum for Campfire Girls memorabilia in Seattle, Washington.  I'm seriously considering sending her Indian costume to them to put on display and perhaps her beads.  The book, for now, will stay with me.

I haven't finished working my way through it yet.