Scout Patch Collectors

Sunday Scouting Hot Finds Newsletter April 13, 2025

Matt Delk and I talked recently about his idea to put together a traveling display of Scouting memorabilia. This got me to rethinking my ideas about this idea and last week an idea popped into my head. I explained it extensively in the Patreon video that was published yesterday. But I’ll touch on some of it here.

For the first decade of buying collections I never sold an Eagle medal. Part of it was I didn’t want to decipher Terry Groves ID system. But more to the point I actually felt a tinge of guilt selling a medal that someone worked so hard to earn. I understood how they ended up in my possession through estates or downsizing. But I just put them in a box for a long time.

In college I took an archaeology class that taught me when someone pulls an artifact out of the ground it can lose all context. It loses whatever connection it had to people who left it there and all the objects around it. So to translate this over once I break up the medal from the collection all that history of “WHO” earned it is lost. I felt the same way about the MB sash and similarly went about a decade before I sold one.

I have three giant poster racks with maybe 75 panels between them. My idea is to have a display of Eagle Scouts from all over the country. I’ll keep their medal, sash cards and a few other pieces of memorabilia to share where they are from and what they did. But I want to go further and have a QR code on the display where I have their obituary, maybe a short interview with them or their loved one. Just something so anyone viewing the display could learn more about how becoming an Eagle Scout influenced their life.

CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE APRIL 13, 2025 ISSUE OF THE SCOUTING HOT FINDS NEWSLETTER