A kid lost my knife . . .But I got Him Back!

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VorpelSword

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I was a Scout Master for a while in the early to mid 1990s. We did an in-town campout one weekend to break in some new and very young Scouts. One was the youngest of a previous Scout Master of that Troop. They were doing something like fire building, and he asked to borrow my knife. I pulled out a nice lightly used SAK with a few tool;s on it (Model forgotten). Other things were going on and I didn't think of the knife till the early evening.

He didn't have it on him (first red flag-ignored) and rummaged in his bag. Not there. "Its in my tent I guess." (Second red flag-also ignored). In the morning everyone was rigging down and packing up. I went over and insisted on my knife. He turned everything inside out and upside down as I stood there. His dad came over and got a little insistent with him too. I could see that that knife was somehow just unfindable. From previous experience I knew that this kids father might use this as an extreme" teaching moment" and didn't want that. So I brushed it off saying I would look in the grass for it after the camp was packed up.

Of course, I never found the knife and the kid never found it either. Five or six years later, I was presenting him with an Eagle Medal and there were speeches and so on. In front of everyone I gave him a bigger SAK with the BSA logo on it and one locking blade and one other tool. . .a man's knife so to speak. And this is how I "got him back", In presenting it, I retold the whole story. And I had the blade engraved with his name and the occasion. I knew his mom too, and knew that she would enshrine it in the china closet, and he'd never get to use it!
 
“Be prepared” to borrow somebody else’s knife, and not risk losing your own.

Cool story, although I hoped you were going to say the kid and his dad bought you one to replace it.

My dad would have made “Where is your own knife, and why are you borrowing one from somebody else?” the theme of the extreme teaching moment.

Parker
 
My thought was that it was my fault for loaning a knife to an 11 year old and not tending right there to get it back.

At 11, you can expect a lot from a kid, but expectations are all you can count on. Being a duffus with a 30 sec attention span is "age-appropriate behavior" at 11 . . .you just gotta train it out of them.

And after all, he did turn out pretty well, Eagle Scout and so on.
 
VorpelSword said:
My thought was that it was my fault for loaning a knife to an 11 year old and not tending right there to get it back.

At 11, you can expect a lot from a kid, but expectations are all you can count on. Being a duffus with a 30 sec attention span is "age-appropriate behavior" at 11 . . .you just gotta train it out of them.

And after all, he did turn out pretty well, Eagle Scout and so on.
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I was given my first knife (Wenger Nomad) when I was 7. Had it for 30 years until it was borrowed and lost by a family member while I was not home. Kids can be responsible. Still have the Case folder my dad gave me for my 12th birthday.

Kids these days have more demands for their attention. I remember sitting in the backyard listening to Guns n Roses on my cheap cassette boombox and carving sticks into spears when I was 9. Playing inside was for after dark/rainy days.

My sister's kids have a trampoline and they often have to be coerced into using it. Video games have gone from a form of entertainment that was a treat to being a way to keep kids out of our hair.

We had Atari and Nintendo, but rarely had a one player game, and those games we would take turns on, helping each other. We got to play a few times per week, more often if dad wanted to play.
 
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