Robert Baden Powell

When Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scout movement at the turn of the century, he warned against the threat of a condition he called "girlitis." Scouts could have fun, allowed the British cavalry officer, so long as it was manly fun. Katrina Yeaw is a girl. Although she does not consider that to be a contagious condition, the 12-year-old blames the organization's institutional fear of "girlitis" for keeping her out of the Boy Scouts.

Combing through the archives of the V. I. Lenin Library, a disenchanted Communist youth worker unearthed a once-banned book that he now hopes will change Russia's future. The book was long denounced by Soviet officials as "bourgeois," and its author, a foreigner, had once spied against Russia. With the advent of communism, those who tried to preach the book's message risked prison, even execution.

Doug Allen has had the sort of fulfilling life in Scouting that I used to read about in Boys Life magazine as a kid: Beginning as a Cub Scout at age 8, Allen found outdoor adventure and camaraderie. He made Eagle Scout at an early age and went on to be an adult leader of a troop that goes on two-week canoe trips into Canada and 80-mile backpack hikes through the Sierra. He included 'Eagle Scout' on his job resumes and wound up with a job building a space station.

For a brief sun-swept weekend in a San Gabriel Valley park, the kingdom of boys was as it ever was. In the shadow of an electric power pylon, 10,000 Los Angeles Boy Scouts swarmed into the Whittier Narrows campsite last month for their annual jamboree, a three-day festival dedicated to the forest lore, rites of passage and cardinal virtues of a mainstream American institution now more than 80 years old. Reminiscent of Norman Rockwell, it was a scene that plays out each summer in 400 U. S.