Shortly
after we moved to Potomac, our eldest son joined the local Cub Scout pack, 773,
which is sponsored by Potomac United Methodist Church. The pack our son had joined near our former
home in Virginia was newly established, with just a handful of kids and a
rather harried group of parent volunteers always scrambling to pull things
together. It’s been exciting to be part
of a much larger pack here, with a really talented and committed group of
leaders and an impressive variety of activities.
We were
expecting that the Pinewood Derby at the pack here in Potomac would be pretty
special. But nothing we had seen yet
quite prepared us for the event that unfolded a few Saturdays ago in the United
Methodist Church’s Parish Center.
The Pinewood
Derby isn’t quite as old as scouting itself, but it goes back over sixty years,
when a scoutmaster in California decided that his charges weren’t quite ready
for the then common project of constructing cars out of soapboxes to ride in
down a hill themselves (these were the days before soap came in plastic wrap
and people worried much about liability insurance). The scoutmaster’s idea was to have the boys to
whittle or cut a car out of a small piece of pine, to nail on some simple
wheels, and then to race the cars down an inclined track.
