Scout Patch Collectors

Tuesday Scouting Hot Finds Newsletter October 14, 2014

In last week’s interview with Todd Kelly he announced he is going to open up a 2nd antique mall booth in Athens, GA. He got me to thinking perhaps I need to expand from the booth that is located only a mile from my house so I’ve started researching other locations within an hours drive. Stay tuned to see if I go big like Todd and double down. If you want to hear the whole story you can listen to the interview on my ScoutingHotFinds.com website.

Yesterday I drove a little under an hour to pick up a small collection that was refereed to me. It was an estate collection that had been purchased five years ago and the lady who bought it finally got motivated to do something with it. The interesting thing was she didn’t know anything about the former owner so I was able to do some forensics based on the patches there.

So what is “patch forensics”? Well a collection of Scouting memorabilia tells the history of what that individual did. If you spread them out and look at dates and where the patches are from you can really nail down that personal history of service in the program.

The first conclusion I reached in examining the collection is that this Scouter was an accumulator. His stuff was not organized in any discernible way and as you know collectors are kinda anal about that. Furthermore, this guy served in the military and was stationed in Korea and Georgia in the 1970s before coming to Fort Bragg in the Occoneechee Council in the 1980s.

The Scouter was a Fox Patrol Woodbadger who got pretty active in Lodge 104 later in life. He attended NOACs from 1998-2002 with the final dated patch in the collection being a 2009 Conclave patch. This matches up with the estate sale timeline from the lady. I’m working on these items all day today and will have them on eBay tonight so I can recoup my investment.

CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE OCTOBER 14 ISSUE OF THE SCOUTING HOT FINDS NEWSLETTER