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Boy Scouts Breakfast Honors Eagle Scout, Banker
BOARDMAN, Ohio -- For more than a century, the scouting movement has enriched the lives of boys across the United States and helped them become men of high moral character. They live their motto, “Be Prepared,” and take to heart, “Do a Good Turn Daily.”
The admonition to do a good turn daily translates into 3,000 hours of community service a year in the Mahoning Valley, said Don Groszek, president of the Greater Western Reserve Council. The movement serves 5,000 families.
The 8th Annual Celebration of Scouting Breakfast at Mr. Anthony’s Tuesday reaffirmed the benefits of the movement has given so many boys in the council, to say nothing of the adults who work with them and who remain grateful for all that being a Boy Scout has brought them.
From Leland Clegg, a retired insurance executive who became an Eagle Scout in 1932, to banker Perry Chickonoski, this year’s Golden Eagle honoree, to Eagle Scout Marcus Massello, a junior at Boardman High School, all reflect how, as Massello put it, “Scouting turns a young boy into a good citizen.”
The breakfast is a fundraiser for the council that had three gold sponsors ($2,500 contribution), Farmers National Bank, Canfield, the DeBartolo Corp., Boardman, and Compco Industries, Columbiana; four silver sponsors ($1,500 contribution), Akron Children’s Hospital Mahoning Valley, Gasser Chair Co., Liberty Township, Boardman Rotary and Boardman Kiwanis; and 18 bronze sponsors ($500 contribution).
The first seven breakfasts raised more than $151,000 for the council, emcee Mark Luke reported, and after the pledges solicited yesterday morning are filled, he expects this year’s breakfast will have raised somewhere between $35,000 and $40,000, roughly 10% of the council’s annual budget.
Theme of the speeches Massello and Chickonoski delivered was how scouting changed their lives and molded their character.
Massello, who has earned 53 merit badges, found that being prepared is far more involved, requires so much more, than he imagined when he joined, whether getting ready to camp at any time of year to developing leadership skills within and without scouting. Not only did he have to be prepared, he said, as a leader he had to ensure others were prepared.
Scouting taught him self-reliance, “how to live off the land [and] how to handle a knife” as well as “mental skills and moral values.”
Chickonoski, who belonged to Troop 101 in Struthers, related how even when he engaged in “less than honorable behavior” while in college, the lessons learned and values instilled allowed him to turn his life around and return to the values he held while a teenaged Boy Scout.
He was candid about his excessive drinking and use of illegal drugs while at Youngstown State University -- “Good study habits interfered with an effective night life,” he found -- dropped out of YSU but straightened out his life, re-enrolled and graduated summa cum laude with a baccalaureate in accounting.
“Even if you make poor choices,” Chickonoski said, “the values of Scouting can get you back on the right path in life. … What Scouting had instilled in me has been the moral compass of my life, led me back to true north.”
Today Chickonoski is a lending officer for Chase Bank in the Mahoning Valley and, despite some misadventures early in their marriage, his wife shares his enthusiasm for the great outdoors and camping.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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