ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 24, 1997 TAG: 9703240102
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETTY HAYDEN SNIDER THE ROANOKE TIMES
Sunday's reunion shows some girls are never too old to be good Scouts.
Girl Scouts don't use signal flags much anymore - e-mail is a more popular mode of communication - but they still sing campfire songs and earn badges.
Sunday, several generations of Roanoke-area Girl Scouts gathered at the Holiday Inn-Airport for a reunion that celebrated 85 years of Scouting.
Along with a fashion show of the Girl Scout uniform through the ages, a sing-along and a fancy multilayer cake - but no cookies - the crowd enjoyed a "visit" with the first Girl Scout.
Liz Stout may never have been a Girl Scout, but she can look the part. Wearing a khaki dress and wide-brimmed ranger hat, the 72-year-old Stout made a fairly convincing Juliette Gordon Low.
For the uninitiated, it was Low who started the Girl Scouts, originally the Girl Guides, on March 12, 1912, in the carriage house behind her Savannah, Ga., home.
Stout, who grew up in Vinton but later moved "all the way to Roanoke," said she never had the opportunity to join the Scouts. After she graduated from National Business College, she heard about a job opening at what was then the Roanoke Girl Scout Council.
She worked there for 44 years, in a variety of jobs, until retiring in 1988. Now she volunteers for the Scouts and serves on the Virginia Skyline Council's archives committee. "Sometimes I feel like I'm an archive," she said as she smiled at the dozens of young girls.
Stout clearly knows her Girl Scout history. She shared a steady stream of stories about the organization's early days that stirred memories for some and enlightened others.
A crowd favorite was the story of the way Low crashed her car and ended up in a family's dining room at meal time. No one was hurt, so she backed up the car and drove on to her brother's house to ask for advice.
Her brother, a lawyer, asked her what she had said to the family.
```Nothing. I didn't want to disturb their evening meal,''' Stout related with a chuckle.
Roanoke's Girl Scout history was well represented by Jean Prillaman Kessler.
Kessler, 68 and still a Girl Scout at heart, left her family's Presbyterian church in 1938 to join her best friend's Methodist congregation because it offered a Scouting program and her church did not.
She stayed in the Scouts until she was 17, and the program helped improve her self-confidence, she said.
"I was always bashful in school, but when we got involved with Scouts, I just yakked and yakked." She made friends she still has today.
Along with fond memories of the camping trips they used to take, roasted marshmallows included, Kessler remembers making a Pot of Gold, a dish she still fixes.
It's a simple recipe: Heat some tomato soup, roll out some bread dough, wrap the dough around small pieces of cheese and drop them in the soup.
They used to eat Pot of Gold on camping trips. "We just had a good time."
A new generation enjoys Scouting for the same reasons.
"I thought how fun it would be to meet new friends and to go hiking and to go out in the woods," said 10-year-old Whitney Camper. Camper, born with the perfect Scouting surname, was enthusiastic in her approval of the Girl Scouts. She plans to stick with it.
Whitney's mother, Keys Camper, was a Brownie when she lived in Abingdon. Her family moved to Roanoke when she was 10, but she didn't join a new troop.
"I regret maybe that I didn't stay in it longer," she said, but she's glad Whitney is so interested, because Scouting is a "very good influence, and, hopefully, she'll learn some concrete values she can take with her."
Keys Camper even learned a lesson in her Brownie years. After the troop leader told them about cookie sales, she ran around Abingdon taking orders.
The only problem was she, didn't have an order form.
"I was so excited about selling the cookies that I didn't wait for the form." She just kept a tally of how many of each variety to order.
When the cookies were delivered, she had to go door to door asking, "Which ones did you order?"
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY THE ROANOKE TIMES. Elizabeth Stout, wearing aby CNBuniform of the 1919 style, acts the part of Girl Scout founder
Juliette Low. color.