A few weeks ago for a Den Meeting activity I took our Wolf Cub Scouts out to pick up trash on a street by our church. Neighborhood cleanup is one of the requirements to earn their Wolf badge. We grabbed a couple trash bags, put on some plastic gloves, listened to a brief lecture about street safety, and then set out up the street to find and dispose of all trash.As we were doing this, cars would zoom by and often the drivers would honk and yell at us. What surprised me was that the yelling was always a positive "Thank youuuuuuu!" as they'd quickly drive past. About 20 minutes in, a truck pulled over and a man jumped out with a camera and started taking pictures of our cleanup. He approached me and told me he was a reporter and then took down our names and had us all pose together. He told us that we would be in next week's issue of a local paper called "The Grizzly Detail" and then left. I had my doubts that we were newsworthy enough to be in a paper, but if we did, maybe it would be a short article somewhere in the middle of the paper, and maybe a picture would run with it.
I was absolutely shocked when I found the next week's issue of the paper to see that there we were, front page, full color, large photo, top story on the August 20th issue. All the Cub Scouts were excited because now they were "famous." Needless to say, all the issues of this paper were snatched up from just about everywhere they were available in our neighborhood that week from proud parents. An online version of the issue can be found here.
We certainly didn't set out to do a good deed to be publicly praised, but hopefully it will show the Cub Scouts that all it takes to be a real hero is to go out of your way to do something good.
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