Scouting gives teens inspiration

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Richard Sanderson's pickup rolls up with a bed full of Boy Scouts.

Seven Scouts from Troop 167, dressed in their detention garb, climb out.

They range from the early- to the midteens, and all have committed crimes -- car jacking, gang activity, assault. A few would be in prison if they were older.

Once inside their meeting room, they change into Scout shirts.

Sanderson watches. He is a good Boy Scout leader. He was a bad boy thief.

"I got caught all the time," he said.

One time after cops nabbed him, when Sanderson was 15 or so, his Scout leader, Merrill Phillips, drove him to a jail for juveniles and said: "Dick, if you don't change your ways, you're gonna end up here."

Sanderson changed his ways -- and ended up there anyway.

Troop 167 appears to be the only Scout troop in Missouri -- and possibly the country -- whose members are incarcerated.

Although other programs like this might exist, a spokesman at the national Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Texas said he knew of no other anywhere.

At age 67 and after 59 years in Scouting, the burly Sanderson thinks this probably is his last mission.

"I've broken up a lot of fights, and I'm getting too old for that," he said. Of course, not all the fights he breaks up are at Scout meetings. Sanderson also teaches woodworking at the center where scraps are common.

"My wife says I'm too old to tackle these kids."

Years ago in Baytown, Texas, Sanderson saw a large crowd in front of a high school. He thought it could be a fight, so he stopped his car and ran over to help.

Three boys were involved. One, wielding a knife, looked scared.

Sanderson grabbed the student's arm and wrestled away the knife. Immediately school administrators tried to grab the boy.

"No!" Sanderson shouted, stepping between. "You guys had your chance to do something, and you didn't."

He looked at the student.

"He's my boy now," Sanderson said, and he put the youngster in his car.

"Man, you're crazy," the boy told him as they drove away.

"Yeah, I am," Sanderson said.

He drove the boy home and convinced his mother to let him join Sanderson's Scout troop. Three years later the boy made Eagle Scout. He later graduated from Texas A&M. Lennie Kidder is now 51 years old and general superintendent of an engineering firm in Texas.

"I don't know what would have happened to me if he hadn't done what he did that day -- I know I wouldn't be sitting here," Kidder said from his office in Houston. "Yeah, I told him he was crazy, and I meant it because he was just this guy who came out of nowhere.

"But now I know he has a gift. Kids listen to him, and he touches them in ways that nobody had before. He still calls me once a year or so to check up on me. He's a very special man, and he's very special to me."

Pulling Lennie Kidder out of that fight was Sanderson's first experience at dealing with at-risk youth.

"Funny," Sanderson said recently, "somebody would probably get arrested for doing that now."

Sanderson, who has three children of his own, has now worked 30 years with troubled youth, including gang members in San Francisco Bay Area. He's also helped start troops in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya -- work that helped him earn the International Scouter's Award.

At 7 p.m. Sanderson calls the meeting to order. The boys in the troop -- sponsored by the Friends of the Lafayette County Narcotics Unit -- stand for the oath and pledge, and Sanderson prods a couple of sagging elbows for the proper salute.

Troop 167, for obvious reasons, has high turnover. Making Eagle is not the goal.

"I don't get them that long," Sanderson said. "But with these boys, the goal is changing their lives."