AppleJax
My Scout Nickname

The year was 1967. My brother and I decided to join the boy scout troop our father was a member of when he was a kid, Troop 3. It happened one night in San Francisco's Chinatown. We had just finished a supper at one of our family's favorite restaurants when my father bumped into one of his old scout buddies. One thing led to another (a house party and a post-summer camp picnic at Camp Lilienthal in August) and my brother and I found ourselves giving up Friday nights to fraternize with a group of boys mostly older than us. There were three other "rookies" that joined that September during registration. The five of us were thrown into this Rookie Patrol led by two other scouts who did their best to lead us.

We became known as the Falcon Patrol. Our flag had the hand drawn logo of that famous Atlanta football team.

It was during the first Camporee (overnight camp) in the Fall that each one of the rookies got their nicknames. Many were named after famous cartoon characters. One scout was given the name

Pogo

, another was named

BooBoo

, and one named after the friendly ghost

Casper

. But do you remember when a new Kellogg's cereal first came out back in the sixties? I mean

Apple Jacks

. The advertising character logo back then was an apple with a face and tie that danced to the Apple Jacks jingle.

The "junior leaders" thought my head resembled that of the dancing apple and "AppleJax" (a nice 8 character DOS name) was born. It stuck, and I've grown somewhat fond of the name. Fond enough to use Applejax1 (someone got to "AppleJax" first) as my username for my Geocities site -- the site that eventually evolved into this one.