"Cookies", a vignette by Lois Greene Stone 

‘Cookies’, a small sign on a wooden table set up in the entrance hall at a local bank, April 2024. Young girls, with a couple of adult supervisors, were selling the snacks. When my eyes first saw ‘cookies’, I immediately thought of computers and sites that use such. Why didn’t I first think girlhood, and scouting, and walking house to house taking orders, putting filled boxes in my bicycle’s basket, and being very careful to match each item at its correct address? Hilly areas had a lot of steps to front doors, and I knew I must hand-deliver as our scout leader instructed us not to leave anything at the stoop. For many houses, I had to make multiple trips to accomplish that. A grown-up act dealt with responsibility; selling cookies brought financial benefits to the troop, but it also provided each one of us a chance to practice math, make and follow a list, be polite to strangers, be brave to ring their doorbells.

The girls in the bank’s lobby were in their usual clothing, grinning with enthusiasm for possibly a contest among troops, I wondered: No uniforms? Inside the bank, I sat in an armchair while my husband went to the window. My fingers felt the imaginary solid wood Brownie Pin, its brown color, as I placed it in the correct place on my starched uniform. The ceremony to promote us from Brownies to Girl Scouts was held around a public pond in our town; Brownies, with lit candles, circled, we ‘flew up’ and became official scouts. Uniforms changed to green, and the pin was metal; my mother still had to starch and press the outfit before each meeting.

In a little jewel box lined with silk velvet I placed my Brownie Pin, for memory. I wanted to earn a felt badge that would then be hand-sewn on my uniform by my mother. Badges granted for summer camp excellence were not affixed to anything and lay in a large scrap book I’d started; a 1943 Certificate of Membership in the Girl Scouts had its own page. I checked to see if merit badges would be awarded for helping the ‘war effort’ during this World War II, learned they would, and found a project. I looked for slivers of foil from discarded chewing gum wrappers and eventually I had enough to roll into a ball. We poured meat or chicken drippings from my mother’s cooking into glass jars. I would load several jars and as many foil balls as fit in my bicycle basket and would pedal to the official government drop-off place. It took many trips, but I got my first merit badge. It felt like the first gold star my piano teacher put on a piece of sheet music signifying my accomplishment with the score.

Plastic was eventually invented, and Brownie Pins were manufactured with a new method. Young teen girls lacked the mutual trust that could form friendships; accumulating the most badges seemed to signify superiority. Fewer girls became Brownies, and fewer who became Scouts stayed with the organization.

“The Battle of the Baritones” on the radio, pitting young Frank Sinatra against Dick Haymes against Bing Crosby against Vic Damone, etc. was what we talked about, and how to sleep on hard metal hair rollers without head pain the next day. Carrying personal 78rpm records in albums to a friend’s house for co-ed parties with dancing replaced thoughts of badges and good deeds.

I don’t know anything about today’s cookie sellers or troop leaders as over the years of my children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren growing up, ¬scouting was voluntarily absent. Yet I smiled with some sense of being linked to these strangers by the cookie table, remembering how I used to feel I was really important during World War II for saving fat, finding and rolling aluminum foil, doing what society deemed to be ‘good deeds’, and having my mother teach me to sew so I could affix each merit badge with my own hands.