More than just cookies: Area families keep Girl Scouts tradition alive
Like a grown-up Gerber baby in a Girl Scout vest, pink-cheeked and blonde Paylin German sat in the back of her father’s car surrounded by colorful boxes of Thin Mints, Trios and Lemonades, a Donut Stop sign towering over them in a parking lot just off South Georgia Street.
One of the 5-year-old’s many customers, Cierra Hill, offered to purchase a box solely for Paylin’s own enjoyment. So she crumbled one into her mouth, the chocolate chips melting on her cheeks, as she waved at passing traffic.
“A little over there and a little over there,” said the rookie Daisy scout about all the places she’s sold cookies.
It was 100 years ago that selling cookies became such an anchor for the Girl Scouts of the USA. The first recorded cookie sales of homemade treats was by the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Okla.
The cookie tradition migrated to Amarillo scouts in 1927, according to Amarillo Girl Scout Council meeting minutes. Making their own cookies at home, they sold them to the community, donating what little funds they earned as payments made on a property in the “boondocks” of town known as Camp Amaryllis.
The campsite became Camp Kiwanis after the stock market crash of 1929, when flour and sugar became too expensive and scarce to make cookies. The Amarillo Downtown Kiwanis Club paid off the property, funding the scouts’ camping as one of their own programs.
Natalie Skelly Stephenson, 70
Outdoor education manager and Director of Camp KiwanisIn the 1950s, the cookies came back in a Red Flyer wagon, pulled by Natalie Skelly Stephenson and her sisters in Pampa.
Now 70, Stephenson is the outdoor education manager and director of Camp Kiwanis for Amarillo.
She remembers walking down the halls of Pampa High School, donned in her dark green, two-piece scouting uniform. Her matching hat was placed just so on her brunette hair, she recalls, giving her the couture of an airline stewardess.
“Oh, it’s Girl Scout green today,” the boys would call out at her.
“But I sold more cookies than anybody in town, too, because I sold to all the football players,” Stephenson grinned.
Lisa Harris, 50
Lisa Harris carried her cookie boxes by their cardboard handles in the 1970s, door-to-door in Oklahoma City.
“I would come home from school, call my mom and say, ‘I’m going to sell.’ Now, you can’t do that now, but I would be gone from 3:30 p.m. until after she came home and I would be up and down the blocks,” Harris recalled.
With the beret, socks and other trimmings Harris has from her scouting days, she also has a pin for her shining moment as “Top Seller” having sold 300 boxes in one cookie season.
“I got this ginormous panda bear because I was hitting the streets every day,” Harris said.
So when the top seller moved to Amarillo and started her own family, Harris enrolled her daughter, Alyssa, in a Brownies troop as a kindergartner.
Thus began the days of caroling scout songs at the kitchen sink, teaching melodies to her daughter while scrubbing dishes.
Briley Dockery, 25
Briley Dockery set up her boxes at selling booths, where she said she nearly froze in the Texas Panhandle winter temperatures.
She also monopolized her Amarillo neighborhood, populated by “older” folks in the 1990s.
“I was the only kid in the neighborhood, so every year people were waiting for me to come by and make my spiel,” said the now-25-year-old.
But while she was the only cookie seller in her neighborhood, she wasn’t the top seller in her troop. One scout had a father employed at Pantex. No one could compete with that.
This month, what the scouts call “Cookie Season” was in full swing once again as Paylin and her older sister, Sarah, worked the South Georgia Street travelers.
Tradition with a real future
Current scouts have the opportunity to purchase not a Red Flyer, as once before, but now a waterproof cookie cart for their door-to-door sales. And they’ve adapted with the times: The new cart also includes gluten-free Trios to suit a diversity of customers.
The cookies grew in popularity and prices — 50 cents, 75 cents, $3 and now $4, or $5 for Trios.
Some troop leaders even have a few credit card readers on hand.
“Yes, we are in the current century,” Stephenson said.
The funds stay within a scout’s individual council. Some supports the council, another portion goes to their troop and the girls keep a percentage of their sales to use as Cookie Bucks, funding their own trips to Camp Kiwanis, or “Camp K” as it’s fondly called today.
They can also use those funds at the Girl Scout store or for high-adventure trips.
Cookie Season actually allows all girls, rich, poor and in between, to participate, Stephenson said.
Last year, Harris said she paid $14 for her daughter to go to Camp K. The remaining amount was covered by Cookie Bucks.
With Cookie Bucks, Dockery paid her way to Camp K as well, where the “too tall, too shy” only child found a family in her troop.
“I made friends at Girl Scouts and I got to be brave and I got to be myself,” said Dockery.
Now Dockery shares this with the next generation of scouts. She was hired one year ago as the Girl Experience Specialist in Amarillo.
“Girl scouting is a family through the generations,” Stephenson said.
Generations, built upon a foundation of years and years of cookies.
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