Briefs - Beltsville

Page 12 • The BELTSVILLE NEWS • JULY 2005
JIM STACY
continued from page 1
of Jim’s youth.
Scout summer camps and an
unforgettable week at the great
Philmont Scout Camp in New
Mexico hold special memories for
Jim Stacy. As an adult, just as
Stacy’s sons Russell and Clark
were approaching Scouting age,
Jim became Scoutmaster for Beltsville’s
venerable Boy Scout Troop
1033, sponsored by the Emmanuel
United Methodist Church. Succeeding
the enormously successful
Ted Ladd, whose leadership turned
out a steady stream of newly minted
Eagle Scouts, Stacy quickly
put his own stamp on Troop 1033.
During a 10-year span as Scoutmaster,
Stacy would see 17 Troop
1033 Scouts, including both sons,
elevated to Eagle rank. He would
take the Troop to nine weeklong
summer base camps and three trail
camps at the Goshen Scout Camp,
in Virginia. It might have been
the apex of his Scouting career,
Stacy returned to Philmont for a
week in 1992 as an adult leader
who had been specially selected
by National Capitol Area Council
Boy Scouts of America. He was
delighted to see the great Philmont
Scout camp again, this time
through the eyes of an adult Scout
leader.
Asked why he values Scouting
so highly, Stacy goes through the
usual litany of boys learning organization
and leadership, etc., etc.
But he and long-time Assistant
Scout Master Paul Kepple, who
overlaps the tenure of both Ladd
and Stacy, will quickly tell you the
greatest lifetime benefit for young
Scouts may be the social skills that
they learn. In the outdoors, boys
basically are on their own—there’s
no readily available mom or dad to
run to, no sympathetically minded
classroom teachers to hear sad
stories, no kindly Uncle Bob to
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Left to right: Ted Ladd, Eagle Scout Mike Williams, Jim Stacy,
and Paul Kepple.
smooth over bruised feelings with
a quick trip to the local ice cream
emporium. Instead, Scouts, under
the benevolent eyes of leaders
like Jim Stacy, learn to socialize,
to grow with their peers. That’s
what Scouting really is all about
according to Stacy-boys learning
to live, to adapt, to grow together
into well-rounded young men.
Jim and Sara Stacy are about
as Beltsvillian as it gets. Both
studied for six years at High Point,
graduating in 1960. The school
was a junior high and a senior
high in those days. Sara is the
daughter of the Beltsville Agricultural
Research Center’s Wallace
Bailey, who still lives in the family
home on Howard Road. Jim,
the immigrant, having come over
from Takoma Park, now has lived
here long enough to call Beltsville
home. They raised sons Russell
and Clark here. All four members
of the Jim Stacy family now hold
degrees from the University of
Maryland at College Park.
College was a fun time for Jim
Stacy. He learned plenty about
operating a slide rule and lots of
other good stuff. But he learned
nothing about computers, had no
real knowledge of computers, and
had little interest in them. Unbelievable
as it now seems, Stacy
failed to take a single computer
course at the University of Maryland.
He graduated from Maryland
in 1966.
In college, Stacy made sure
there was ample time for the outdoors.
He became active in the
Terrapin Trail Club, an informal
group dedicated to rock climbing,
camping, hiking, and spelunking
through dark caves. He still does
all these activities with the exception
of spelunking, which he gave
up for the pleasures of breathing
above-the-surface fresh air.
One year, Jim and two college
buddies packed up their motorbikes
and shipped them to England.
After flying over to London
to recover the bikes, they spent
the next 90 days tooling around
big chunks of Western Europeall
managed on the $3 per day
that they had allowed for food,
gas, and such other incidentals as
renting campgrounds for cooking
and sleeping. Turning bravado
in Germany, each of the buddies
snipped a souvenir hunk of barbed
wire from the notoriously dangerous
fence that then separated East
Germany from the West. Looking
back, Stacy now wonders how
they escaped being shot on the
spot.
After college, Stacy hired on
first as an intern and then permanently
with the Department of the
Army, where he first learned about
computers and computer program-
ming. The life of a computer programmer
wasn’t exactly a walk in
the park in those early days. There
were no monitors, no disk drives,
no desktops, no laptops-only hulking
mainframes featuring banks
of blinking lights were available.
Jim concentrated on general information
technology-which for him
translated into writing computer
programs to track vast quantities
of Army personnel and other
data. One such program required
over 2,000 punch cards. A single
misplaced punch on a card, not to
mention one misplaced card, was
sufficient to wreck an entire data
base program. To acknowledge
that Jim Stacy handles detail well
is to understate the obvious.
During the course of a 32-year
career with the Department of the
Army, Stacy completed numerous
educational and training programs
including: a Masters Degree in
Automatic Data Processing at
George Washington University, a
one-year study program for government
managers at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology,
and an Advanced Management
Program at the National Defense
University.
And what adventures have Jim
Stacy and wife Sara been up to
in recent years? Well, quite a lot
actually ... A dizzying sample follows:
To celebrate brother Harry’s
retirement, the Brothers Stacy and
two other men organized what they
came to call the Maryland-Arizona
Expeditionary Group. Their
maiden adventure was a 10-day
hiking trip into the Grand Canyon.
No packaged deal, no casual stroll
over the beaten path was good
enough for these hardy guys. No
way! Entering the famous Canyon
from the rugged Kaibab National
Forest, packing all provisions,
they hiked to the Canyon floor,
explored for days, then re-traced
their way out through the National
Forest. The Expeditionary Group
remains active, always ready for a
new adventure.
A bit later, Jim with son Russell
brother Harry took seven
days to hike the challenging John
Muir Trail, in California. The trail
passes through some of the finest
mountain scenery in the United
States. Surrounded by 13,000-foot
and 14,000-foot peaks, lakes, canyons
and granite cliffs, the 211mile
trail runs southward from the
Yosemite Valley, terminating at
14,000 foot-plus Mount Whitney,
the highest peak in the lower 48
states. Their quest to scale Mount
Whitney flamed out when one of
the hikers came down with altitude
sickness at 10,500 feet.
Still later, the brothers (perhaps
succumbing to the tiniest fragility)