Figure 1.--Here we see boys at an American Scout Camp headed ror a swim. Notice the round camp patch. There is no accompanying information. So we don't know where the camp was. It looks at some where in the North. American Scouts mostly wore long pants, but at Scout camps the uniform was mostly long pants. The photograph is undated, but looks like the late-1950s. Color photography was not common in the 1950s because it was expensive. A lot of the color images were transparencues (slides). This was a Kodachrome slide.

An important part of Scouting was summer camp. Outdoor activities are especially important in Scouting. Cubing included a lot of games and indoor activities. For the older boys there was an interest for greater challenges and this inevitably involved outdoor activities. Summer camp was especially important in the 1950s because Scouting was so popular in America and more boys were involved than ever before. In addition, the Scouting movement advanced to the point that that facilities at existing camps had been improved and expanded substantially and more camps were opened. In addition the booming post-War economy meant that more families could afford to send their boys to the local Scout camps. The cost was usually relatively modest. Scouting was largely a middle-class movement. Even before World War II, the high wages compared to Europe that many working-class Americans had begun to make the transition to the middle-class, especially skilled workers. After World War II with rising wages, even unskilled workers could make this transition. The genius of mass production and the assembly line is that unskilled workers could be employed, all they needed to do was to master one small step in the assembly line.This transition was seen in the merger of he AFL and CIO (1955). Workers participated in the very middle-class move to the suburbs. All of which meant more boys participating in Scouting and enjoying a Scout summer camp experience.