The Duffle Bag
By Larry Day

Mom sewed my duffle bag out of material left over from slip-covering our old couch — again.  Back in 1950, the fabric’s narrow brown and wider orange stripes looked all right on a couch stuffed into an alcove in our old, dark, high-ceilinged apartment in Idaho Falls.     
           
It’s pathetic that I didn’t see the ridicule coming.  I was a socially clueless, bucktoothed, pompadoured, 14-year-old dork who had just hit it lucky — I was going to the Boy Scouts of America National Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.  Nearly all our contingent, about 300 scouts, was composed of Latter-day Saints from the Upper Snake River Valley.
           
At first, going to the jamboree had seemed impossible.  The 1950 national jamboree was to be the first one after World War II.  Valley Forge was the symbolic and culturally perfect venue.  I lived with my parents in an LDS ward that was four blocks wide and five blocks long.  My sister was on a mission.
           
Rich people lived in our ward.  At least I thought of them as rich — doctors, merchants, pharmacists, lawyers, government employees.  My dad was a telephone company lineman.  Mom was a housewife.  We lived in an old five-unit brick apartment house that had been built before the city passed residential zoning laws.
           
All of the affluent scouts in my troop were going to the jamboree. The anticipation was palpable.  It would involve a weeklong train trip across the northern states, a week in Valley Forge, and a return trip through the southern states back to Idaho.  The trip cost $300.  I didn’t even tell my parents about the jamboree.  I knew we didn’t have the money.
    
One evening I came home from my paper route. Dad was reading the paper and Mom was fixing supper. I came in, threw my newspaper bag on the sofa and clumped into my room.  When Mom called me to eat, I yelled that I wasn’t hungry. She came to the door.
           
“What’s the matter?”
         
“Nothing.”
        
“What is it?”
       
“NOTHING.”
       
“Tell me.”
       
“Everyone in the troop except me is going to the Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge this summer.”
      
 “How much will it cost?”
       
“Three hundred dollars.”
       
“Oh.”
       
“Yeah.”
       
“Come eat your supper.”
        
The next day when I came home from delivering papers, Mom said she had called Mr. Huffman, the circulation manager at the Post Register.  I was his favorite carrier. I’d had a paper route since I was eleven.
           
“You have two hundred dollars in your trust fund,” Mom said.  The newspaper withheld a small amount from each carrier each week and put it in the trust fund.  The carriers called it the “don’t trust you fund,” because it was designed to protect the company if a kid quit and skipped with the weekly collections.  The carriers collected from the customers every week and turned the money in on Saturday morning.
         
“They won’t let me have it until I quit.”
           
“Mr. Huffman said you can withdraw all of it now for the jamboree.”
           
“I’d still be a hundred dollars short.”
           
“Grandma Hickman gave me a hundred dollars for emergencies.  This is an emergency.”
             
I spent the next three weeks in wonder and euphoria.  The scouts who were going to the jamboree — not everyone in the troop was going — had developed a fellowship, and now I was included.  The jamboree fee included two uniforms — shorts and shirt, neckerchief and belt, knee socks and a small back pack, all standard issue Boy Scouts of America stuff. 

Each scout had to supply his own duffle bag.  I didn’t have a duffle bag and didn’t think about the fact until two days before train time.  I was over at a friend’s house.  He was packing his duffle bag.  It was an official, khaki colored bag with the Boy Scouts of America logo on the side.  I froze.
           
“How much did that cost?”
           
“Twelve dollars.
         
“Where did you get it?”
           
“At Pennys.  We bought the last one.”
         
I left him packing his duffle bag and stumbled across the street to our apartment.
        
“Mom, I don’t have a duffle bag.”
       
“We’ll buy you one.”
       
“They’re all sold out.
       
“I’ll make you one.”
       
“Could you do that by day after tomorrow?”
       
“I think so.”
       
The train was scheduled to leave Idaho Falls at 9:30 a.m. It was a fine June day. Our Boy Scout Region leaders had chartered a Union Pacific passenger train for the trip. It started up valley in St. Anthony or somewhere and stopped in Idaho Falls before heading for the great adventure.
           
I was joyful when Mom and Dad and I drove up to the depot in our black 1936 Plymouth.  This would be my first trip outside Utah and Idaho.  I hopped out of the car and ran to the train platform where other scouts in my troop were standing with their parents.
           
Mom called to me, “Don’t forget your stuff.”
          
“Oh, yeah.”
          
I ran back to the car and I grabbed my striped sofa-fabric duffle bag, my backpack, and my accessory kit. Mom had made me an accessory kit with the same fabric. It had places to tuck in a toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb, and a bar of soap.  It rolled up and snapped shut. 

I still didn’t have a clue what I was in for.
           
None of the boys said anything about my duffle bag until all the hugging, weeping moms and the hand-shaking, back-slapping dads were back on the platform. The train whistle blew and we began to move.  My duffle bag was in an overhead rack with the other standard issue Boy Scouts of America duffle bags.
           
“Hey Larry, let us see the clown suit you’ve got in that gaudy bag,” yelled Fred, the troop big shot.  He and I had clashed a couple of times.
           
“Yeah,” piped in his cohort.  “Show us your clown suit.”
         
Five or six guys began to chant, “Clown suit. Clown suit.  Show us the clown suit.”  Others picked up the chant.  Someone stood on a seat and pulled down my duffle bag.  I wrestled it away from him. I wanted to jump off the moving train with it.
         
Then our scoutmaster came through the door from the other car.
           
“What’s going on?”
         
Silence.
         
“Larry?”
           
“Nothing.”
         
“Okay.  Okay, guys. Listen up.”  He began to read us a bunch of rules and regulations.  Then he reminded us about the fun stuff — Chicago and the Natural History Museum, Detroit and a baseball game at Tiger Stadium, New York City and the Empire State Building, Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell.  Then we were on to Valley Forge and a week at the national jamboree.
           
“President Truman will be there,” he said.
           
The scoutmaster went back to his car.  I was glad that no one picked up the “clown suit” chant again because if they had, I might have jumped off the train at Pocatello.
           
I had a good time on the train trip, even though my duffle bag continued to attract jeers and jibes.
           
Our contingent was met in Philadelphia by a fleet of school buses that took us to Valley Forge.  The camping equipment was loaded on trucks that led the convoy.  We were told that our personal gear would follow.

We arrived after dark.  The bus driver dropped our troop off at the assigned camp site in the middle of a grassy field.  Tent poles, tent halves, ground tarps and sleeping bags were all stacked up in the middle of the compound. We set up our tents by moonlight.  We were exhausted and ready for bed, but our personal gear hadn’t arrived.
           
“Where’s the truck with our stuff?” someone asked.
           
Just then our scoutmaster came back into camp.
         
We gathered round.
           
“There’s been a mix-up,” he said.  “Our gear has been dumped over there some where.” He pointed into the darkness.   “Form up and we’ll go look for it.”
           
We followed him. We came to a huge mound of duffle bags — all standard issue Boy Scouts of America gear.  Scouts from who-knows-where were digging through the pile, looking for their duffle bags.. 
           
“This is a mess,” said our scoutmaster. “I’ll stand by while you look for your duffle bags.  When you find your bag, bring it to me.  I have to confirm that it’s yours.  The other scoutmasters are doing the same. Then you can go back to camp and go to bed. We have a big day tomorrow.”
           
I heard a collective groan from the boys around me as they walked toward the formidable mound of identical duffle bags. As I moved forward I saw, sticking out of the mound about halfway up, the brown and orange stripes of my humiliating duffle bag.
       
“There’s my duffle bag,” I yelled.   No Christmas present ever looked as wonderful as that ugly homemade sofa-fabric duffle bag.  I retrieved it and carried it to where the scoutmaster was standing. He smiled.

“No question about the ownership on that one,” he said.  “Congratulations. Go on back to camp and get to bed.”

I don’t know how long it took the other scouts in my troop to find their duffle bags because I was fast asleep before the first one made it back to camp.

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