A Scout’s-eye view of history

Eric Leake

Friday, Jan. 14, 2005 | 4:55 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

January 15 - 16, 2005

Tucked amid doctor and lawyer offices in an unassuming business park on Charleston Boulevard are the makings of the world's largest Scouting museum.

Hundreds of thousands of pieces of Boy Scout memorabilia are temporarily housed here. A small percentage of the cache is open and on display as the museum plans and raises funds for a permanent home.

Dr. Robert Horne, executive director of the Las Vegas International Scouting Museum, walked among the displayed pieces and could tell the story behind each.

"There are just so many stories," he said, before starting another one about the Shah of Iran, who he said was an enthusiastic supporter of Scouts before he was deposed and the Scouting program there was suspended.

Horne, wearing a tie striped with the Boy Scout insignia, paused for a moment in talking about individual pieces to speak about the collection and museum as a whole.

"It is the dream of my lifetime," he said.

Horne founded the Las Vegas International Scouting Museum with his personal collection in 1997 and it opened in 1999. Since then, prominent collections from around the world have been acquired and donated to the museum.

Fundraising and plans are under way to build a 55,000-square-foot home to showcase the entire collection in the largest Scouting museum in the world. And on Wednesday, the museum foundation awarded the inaugural Lloyd D. George Family Values Award to Southwest Gas CEO Jeffrey Shaw and his family at an event to benefit the project.

Tony Romo is the museum's director of development. He and many of the people involved in the museum are also Scouts -- not former Scouts, but Scouts always.

Romo said that at the heart of the Scouting museum is the effort to record the stories behind each piece, the merit behind each badge.

"So it's not something stodgy from the past, but it's real, living, and affects you right here and now," he said. "Every little piece tells a story."

Romo pointed out some of his favorite pieces -- a poster from the jamboree held in France two years after World War II, a needlepoint of the Boy Scout insignia made in a concentration camp.

He told a story related to him by former secretary general of the Boy Scouts Dr. Jacques Moreillon that when people die their stories too often die with them, like libraries burning.

"He said, 'Build this museum. Without it people will say the stories never happened,' " Romo said.

Working to catalog all those stories and the museum's collection is consultant Dr. Edward Rowan. He said there may be as many as half a million pieces but only 110,000 are yet in the database.

Bare wall is scarce in the museum's display room, where the collection charts the movement since British Lord Robert Baden-Powell founded it in 1907.

Pieces are collected from around the world -- from Libya to Malaysia and Lithuania. And there is a Scout connection to most major world events.

"What a museum does, any museum, is it uses its own prism to look out on the world," Rowan said. "And what the prism is here is Scouting."

Rowan previously curated a Scout museum in New Hampshire before coming to Las Vegas. He said the city with all its tourism is a fitting place for the museum, though only a couple of tourists a day generally visit the museum at its current location.

The museum's mission is to promote the core traditional values Scouting has retained over the century.

"That's the great thing about the program, that the core values stay the same as it evolves," Rowan said.

He said he expects this period of Scouting history to be remembered as another that saw the organization slowly change with the times while remaining the same for the kids.

Twenty-eight million Boy and Girl Scouts are now in more than 200 countries around the world, according to museum figures. The United States has the second-largest Scouting program behind Indonesia.

Horne said it is the internationality of Scouting and its potential that so impressed him at his first world jamboree.

"It is a movement and we think one of the greatest movements for peace the world has ever seen," he said.

Horne told stories of Israeli and Palestinian Scouts camping together and of combating Scouts sparing each other lives' during war.

"This is what Scouting is all about. It's the story of individuals and how a movement has changed their lives," he said. "A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout."

Horne tells one more story about a recent favorite addition to the museum's collection.

The piece is a map of Afghanistan carved of stone and carried by hand from that country to Geneva, he said, by Afghans who want to be Scouts in a story yet without an ending.

The Scouting museum is open Monday through Friday by appointment. For more information, call 878-7268.