Girl Scout Cookies: Still Bringing Smiles

The latest cookie to be introduced by the Girl Scouts is fittingly named Savannah Smiles. This moon shaped, lemon flavored, dusted with powdery sugar, cookie marks the 100th anniversary of Girl Scouts with style!

One hundred years…my own memories of scouting date back to the mid-1960s, almost a half century ago. It seemed that each year revolved around cookie sales to neighbors and friends. We began the annual event with a sales pitch and reminders. The price per box was 50 cents, an hour’s worth of babysitting. My reward was the single box of chocolate mints that I would carefully stow in my dresser.

When it was time to sell Girl Scout Cookies, we would dress in our green uniforms, felt berets, and our badge sashes and set out to hit the cold pavement. In our neighborhood, that meant circling the cul-de-sac, walking up and down the hilly streets, skirting bicycles, and greeting neighbors as they tended their early spring gardens.

It was a time when we still knew many of our neighbors. Most would order a box or two; we would carefully record each order, pressing down with our yellow pencils on the printed form.

The last stop was always the electronics’ factory where my father worked, not a huge enterprise, but large enough. Therm Electric was set back on an industrial lot above the residential section of the South Hill of our modest college town community.

It was here that I received my first taste of the business world. My father, smiling and greeting his co-workers, would walk with me from desk to shop. We become partners. Only now as I look back across the years, do I see the pride that gleamed in his eyes.

At Therm the numbers of sales increased ten-fold. It was a challenge to keep up with the orders. My security came from my father. I did the work while my father’s presence, his white dress shirt and striped tie, gave me courage…the strength to tally, to submit, and distribute the completed orders.

Almost fifty years later when I hear that ‘it’s time to buy Girl Scout cookies’, I recall those early years, the colorful boxes of Thin Mints, Tagalongs, the Trefoils… my father’s shining eyes, the sweet freshness of simpler days, all there in Savannah Smiles!


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