Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby

This past Saturday, the Cub Scouts who use our church facilities, invited me to be one of the judges of their pinewood cars. I really enjoyed myself. We had to vote for categories such as: most unusual car, fastest looking car, best block of wood, best use of color, best use of props on car, best driver in the car, best use of imagination and overall best of show. All the cars were set on tracks labeled with their 'pack name.' It was easy to see that the two youngest packs, the tigers and bears, had the youngest boys. Their cars were colored somewhat outside the lines, and not as racy looking; and I was tempted to just chose cars from these two classes because I knew the boys had done most of the work. In the older packs, the wolfes and webelos [for the life of me I don't know what a webelos is, if there is such an animal] you could see the more detailed cars, the smoother edges and better racing designs - the dads were progressing in their racing models, yet the boys get to race them. Before the voting, I talked with a good number of the dads and almost everyone of them admitted to doing more work on the cars than their sons, but most of also said that their sons worked with them, they of course couldn't let their sons run the ban saws, etc.. After speaking with these fathers, my prejudices began to be tempered, and I thought even though I hated to see some of that childhood originality disappear it was replaced with father - son working together, and that's a good thing. I suppose I still tended to vote a little prejudicially, but thank goodness there were two other, more experienced judges, that put me in my place! It was a great experience for me, and they even gave a ribbon and medal for judging.