Moved from the Bronx to Saddle Brook, N.J. in February of 1958. Life was very different in the suburbs than the inner city. Recreation in the Bronx consisted mostly of playing stickball, building scooters out of a roller skate a 2x4 and an old wooden milk crate, pitchin' pennies or nickels and climbing on the 3rd Ave El. When we got to Saddle Brook I found that none of these activities, that I was so fond of, were being enjoyed by the youth at that time. There was Little League, football, and Boy Scouts. My parents were eager to get me involved in some sort of sport or the Boy Scouts, but didn't have any money to pay for the uniform and required foot wear for the sports that were available to people my age. I've always had a tendency to migrate toward people of questionable character and activities that were frowned upon by polite society, so my mother thought that I should become a Boy Scout. She reasoned that the Boy Scouts would teach me some wholesome values, and she was right, their motto is “A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent". When we got to Jersey we had just about enough money to pay the mortgage and eat in those early days, so my father borrowed the money from my Aunt May to purchase the required uniform. My cousin John was a Boy Scout. He belonged to Troop 222 at St. Philip's School on Saddle River Road in Saddle Brook, so that's were I ended up. It was all just so different from what I'd been accustomed to. It didn't feel right to me. I've never liked rules, and there were a lot of rules to follow. Well, I wasn't there very long when the Troop leader announced that there was going to be a Boy Scout Jamboree, not just any Boy Scout Jamboree but the 50th Anniversary Boy Scout Jamboree. It was being held behind Nabisco on Route 208 in a large field. Being from the Bronx, with all its brick and mortar buildings, massive concrete sidewalks, and cobble stone roads, I had never seen so much open space in my young life as there was behind the Nabisco Plant. I was excited and ready to start exploring, but that notion was quickly put to an end. Our Troop Leader made it clear that my cousin John and I, being the newest members of the Troop and lagging far behind our peers in merit badges, would be doing the cooking and cleaning the pots and pans for our Boy Scout Troop while we were at the Jamboree. They gave us a pot the size of a swimming pool and 50 cans of ravioli, told us to gather up some wood, build a fire, open all the cans of ravioli, put them in the pot, heat them up, and then serve them to our Boy Scout Troop. Now if there's only one thing you learn from living in the Bronx, it's how to cut thru a bunch of useless steps that only serve to create more work for yourself. John was ready to start opening up the ravioli cans to pour them into the massive pot when I stopped him. “Look here cousin, we're not gonna do it that way, we're gonna start a fire, put the ravioli cans into the fire, and when they're hot we'll take them out an serve them to the Troop.” My plan seemed reasonable enough, so we proceeded to use my method instead of the Troop Leader's. It worked out great, the raviolis were hot, we didn't have any pots to clean, and the food was ready on time for our troops to be fed. This is where things started to go wrong. Back in the late '50s cans were made of tin and the seams were sealed with lead. The ravioli looked fine, but the lead and tin from the can leached into food making everyone that ate it deathly sick. John and I were the first to eat so we got sick first. They didn't know what was wrong with us, but we kept throwing up, so they must have thought that we had contracted a virus and took us home. I don't know how the rest of Troop 222 did that day, and John and I never told anyone about our time and work saving scheme, but I'm sure that we weren't the only ones that were sent home with lead poisoning that day. A short time after that incident my cousin John, Johnny Paladino, Mike McAllister and me were banned from Troop 222 for sneaking out of a meeting and hiding under the stairs at St. Philip's in order to get out of a project we had been assigned. Like I said, “I wasn't cut out to be a Boy Scout”. © Jimmy McKee SBHS '65, March 13, 2021

The Rope | The Hut | Saint or Sinner | Brother John's Unusual Request | A Friday Night Party at Mike's

A Brook Tale

Celebration & Inspiration

"Great Green Globs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts" performed by Mika Seeger.