Briefs - Beltsville

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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 �� 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)
JIM STACY continued from page 12 did an outfitter-arranged five-day kayaking trip from Nova Scotia’s Pleasant Bay to Bay Saint Lawrence. Nights were spent primitive camping on the Bay’s rocky shore. Situated on the world-famous Cabot Trail, Pleasant Bay is a whale watcher’s paradise. Deciding to shift their adventures southward, the brothers proceeded to a hiking- cum-kayaking voyage to Big Bend National Park, in Texas. Big Bend covers over 800,000 acres, ranging from less than 2,000 feet elevation along the Rio Grande to nearly 8,000 feet in the Chisos Mountains. Relying on the Stacy knack for impeccable timing, they were fortunate to visit when the normally low flowing Rio Grande had sufficient water to support kayaking. Ply the Inland Passage from Washington State to Juneau by ferry, anyone? Hike the Chilkoot Trail? Jim and Harry Stacy have been there, done that. Views are incredible, Jim says. Famous for its role in the Klondike Gold Rush, the Chilkoot Trail covers 33 rugged miles through the United States and Canada. Rising sharply from sea level to almost 3,500 feet before dropping to about 2,000 feet at its terminus, the trail is accessible only by foot. A National Historic Site in both countries, the brutal trail normally requires three-to-five days of backpacking. The Stacys completed it in five. Not to be outdone by her adventurous husband, Sara Stacy (or Sara Anne as Stacy sometimes refers to his wife) has taken up skiing with Jim in Pennsylvania. We had never skied, explained Jim, but we took lessons and practiced. They expect to go west some year soon, take up skiing in the Rockies or other mountains. She has accompanied Jim to two Elderhostel courses: one to learn about Philadelphia, another to Quebec featured (You guessed it!) hiking in Quebec and Vermont. Not one to ignore his volunteering duties, Stacy helped construct two permanent log shelters on the Application Trail, one in Maryland, another in West Virginia. He biked 400 miles along the Erie Canal, from Buffalo to Albany, New York. And then there was a relatively easy 37-mile Bike New York trip starting in lower Manhattan and touching all five New York boroughs before ending at Fort Wadsworth, on Staten Island. And what are a few 2005 adventure highlights? Well, there was participation in the Annual Society for Industrial Archeology Conference, held this year in Milwaukee. Coming up soon, the Stacy’s will be off for a week of cultural enrichment at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. September will find them in France’s Le Puy hiking a section of the famous pilgrimage route of Saint James of Compostela. Between adventures, Stacy concentrates on learning to launch and sail his recently acquired sail boat and attending to Super Harry Homeowner duties around the house. �� JULY 2005 • The BELTSVILLE NEWS • Page 13
Page 1 and 2: The Beltsville AN ALL-VOLUNTEER NEW
Page 3 and 4: Letters to the Editor ICC is Fine,
Page 5 and 6: Neighbors from page 4 CBCNS Welcome
Page 7 and 8: Beltsville Briefs Continued from pa
Page 9 and 10: Club News continued from page 8 LIO
Page 11: Fabric artist, Elizabeth Morisette,
Page 15 and 16: State News State Announces Surplus
Page 17 and 18: AREA EVENTS FLEA MARKET Saturday, A
Page 19 and 20: ��

Briefs - Beltsville

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