Decades on, John Pleasants is still ‘digging’ collecting Boy Scouts memorabilia

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RAMSEUR — Ask John J. Pleasants for his coolest piece of Boy Scouts memorabilia, and he’ll give you plenty of options, from gear to art to the downright dangerous.

There’s a canvas uniform from the 1920s complete with an olive green hat, binders full of Scouts patches from decades past and a leather belt from 1910, with a fleur-de-lis and still legible catchphrase on its metal buckle: “Boy Scouts of America — Be Prepared.”

Wall décor includes a 1946 Boy Scouts calendar from Pennsylvania, featuring original artwork by the famous painter Norman Rockwell, who before his iconic run at The Saturday Evening Post got his start as a 19-year-old art editor for the Scouts’ Boys’ Life magazine.

Then Pleasants, 64, pulls out a few items he loosely classifies as “things that wouldn’t pass a safety test today.” That includes an unsettling lamp from the 1930s — it’s a standing Boy Scout with an uncovered light bulb as the head and a brass hat — and a 1940s boxed craft set with toy soldier-shaped molds, paints, a small heating pan and your very own chunks of lead to melt down.

“I can promise you this would be forbidden right now,” he said, laughing.

This spread, laid out on a recent Saturday at Pleasants’ office in Ramseur, is just a director’s cut of his full collection, which has at times filled a warehouse. He’s been collecting various items for decades now, ever since he attended the 1969 National Jamboree in Idaho as a scout himself with North Carolina’s Occoneechee Council Troop 7.

“I started trading patches there,” he said. “Then I got addresses, and then I started writing letters to trade in the mail, at a rate of about seven a week. I was getting patch trades from people that I met all around the country. It was kind of neat.”

The hobby only grew when Pleasants — who grew up in Siler City and earned Eagle Scout honors with his troop — started working at Camp Durant, a summer camp facility for Boy Scouts in nearby Carthage. He built up an impressive collection of Order of the Arrow patches, which represent the Boy Scouts’ exclusive honor society. In most troops, only a select few people got those patches.

“Just like a coin collector,” Pleasants said, “if you go to a big national conference, you want to get (a patch) from every lodge in the country.”

With more than 500 lodges across the United States at one point, and some now defunct, that makes for a tough market where certain patches can skyrocket in value. Take the short-lived Order of the Arrow Calusa Lodge 219 in Bradenton, Florida — Pleasants secured one of those coveted patches around the same time he and his wife, Jenny, were getting married.

“It paid for my honeymoon,” he said.

Patch trading can be “like a big circle,” he said. You build up your collection, sell it off when you’re settling down and could use the money for your family, then build it back up later.

“I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve had patches that I’ve traded, got back, traded again and got back,” said Pleasants, whose three children all graduated from Jordan-Matthews High.

He has a database of 3,000 people he’s traded with, and he created (and currently sells) the Patch Protection System, a waterproof slipcover design for storing patches in binders. But it’s never been just about the money or the collecting, Pleasants said — most of all, he cares about the history.

“I’m much less concerned about keeping it than making sure it goes to somebody that sees it,” he said. “The problem with Scout memorabilia, and the reason I spend so much time trying to dig it up, is not that it’s going to another collector — it’s going into the trash dump. We always say the best scouting museum is the landfill.”

In that sense, he’s as much of a preserver and curator as he is a collector. Recently, Pleasants has focused on gathering old camping gear, such as canvas tents and frying pans.

They “don’t have much value,” he said, but he loves that current scouts in Siler City Troop 924, where he’s a volunteer charter organization representative, will sometimes take interest in using an old canteen or sporting a pair of knee socks from the 1960s.

He donates lots of gear, too, and is always willing to help out museums. Pleasants is also a member of The 1910 Society, an Asheville-based group that created an exact replica of the very first Boy Scout encampment, held for two weeks at Silver Bay in northeast New York.

“I’m actually more into that stuff than Order of Arrow patches,” Pleasants said. “Every kid should know how we started, so that they know why we’re here... I want to tie it all together.”

He usually spends summers attending state and national Boy Scouts conferences, but the coronavirus pandemic has nixed those plans. Pleasants, who sells digital whiteboards for Sharp at his day job, has shifted to Monday night virtual meetings with other local collectors, where they swap stories.

They call it a virtual cracker barrel, a nod to the end-of-day hangouts at Boy Scouts events, where leaders and scouts sit around, chatting and trading patches, sometimes past midnight.

Via Zoom, they can’t share “bug juice” lemonade, coffee and crackers with cheese like usual, or swap patches in person. But for Pleasants, it’s still a strong substitute for the hobby he caught a bug for in 1969 and has turned into a lifelong passion.

“I’m really digging this stuff,” he said.

Reporter Chapel Fowler can be reached at cfowler@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @chapelfowler.