Western New York Traders Association 27th Anniversary Trade-O-Ree & Auction

When: September 19-20, 2008

Friday 5pm until ?

Saturday 9am til 5pm -

AUCTION Saturday 1:30pm

Where: NORTH Forest Presbyterian Church, 300 North Forest Road, Williamsville, NY 14221

All Proceeds to Benefit Greater Niagara Frontier Council B.S.A. Scout Camperships & B.SA. Council Museum Fund.

Food, Beverages & Snacks Will Be Available

You can find a flyer with more details here.

Thanks to Don Izard for providing the information.  this is a regular TOR for me, hope to see many of you there.

Want to learn more about Scouting around the world? A source I never considered was Wikipedia. Wikipedia describes itself as”

Wikipedia (pronunciation ) is a free,^[4] multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a blend of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,^[5] it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.

One of the resources available on Wikipedia is the Scouting Portal . The Scouting Portal contains links to Scouting News, Scouting by Country, Scouting Lists, Biographies and much more.

Take some time and check it out.

In an earlier post about becoming a patch dealer I linked to a column by the owner of Mile High Comics.  Further along in his series about opening up a retail shop is some of the philosophical reasons to become a comics retailer, which I think, can also be applied to our hobby of Patch Collecting.

Another very positive task you will be taking on if you decide to become a comics retailer is safeguarding the future of comics as an institution. We are both blessed and cursed at this moment in the history of comics. Our blessing is that the comics being produced today are among the best ever created in the entire history of the medium. Never have we had so much wonderful talent producing comics of all kinds. This truly is a era which supersedes even the Golden Age in terms of brilliance.

Our curse today is that print runs have fallen so low that there is significant risk that the entire business and culture of comics may lose critical mass, and implode. At this very moment there are perhaps 1,000 dedicated comics retailers who are holding back the forces of the apocalypse.

What are you doing to hold back the forces of the Apocalypse?

In comics it is the demise of the independent comic retailer, the graying of the comic reading audience and the reduced print runs which could spell the end of the comic book.  A graying fan base and the failure to bring in new younger readers, sound familiar?   

If you have looked around the room at any number of recent trade-o-rees, you see too many gray beards and not enough youth.  While it seems that many of the youth who attend NOAC’s and National Jamborees get bitten by the patch bug, for too many,  it is a one-time occurrence.

What can you do to promote collecting amongst today’s Scouts?

• Provide patch displays at parents nights and other troop level, district and council level events.
• Become a counselor for Collecting Merit Badge - include displays at merit badge fairs
• Provide venues to encourage trading at summer camp.
• Visit local Scout Museums as part of the troop program.
• Use memorabilia to explain and illustrate the history of scouting in your troop and local camps.
• Provide a trading venue at OA Lodge and Section events.
• Host, sponsor or help staff a Trade-O-Ree.
• Educate the scouts you come in contact with about the patches they have or seek to acquire.

Perhaps most important, bring Scouts with you to events where trading will occur.

What else can you do to hold back the forces of the apocalypse?

The International Scout Collectors Association has published a number of Memorabilia Checklists to aid the collector. The checklists ( at this time) include, OA Lodge Checklist, Council CSP Checklist, OA Lodge / Council Cross Reference Checklist, OA Sash Checklist and OA Handbook Checklist. All are available in a number of electronic formats including Adobe PDF, MS Word, Pagemaker, MS Excel and HTML.