OK spoiler alert! Today I'm telling the whole story of how I came to work with a Hollywood Costumer named Danielle to help outfit the actors in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans. I took my family to see the movie on Thanksgiving Day. I had really been hesitant to do a video about my involvement until I saw the final cut. You never know how things are going to turn out and I wasn't sure if they would have made changes since my involvement was more than a year ago. But the uniforms were awesome, the portrayal of Sammy Fabelman's time in Scouts was awesome (can you tell I am a child of the 80s?) a ..read more

Ted Thompson was like many Boy Scout memorabilia collectors when he ran up against a collecting roadblock about five years ago.  His main interest was council shoulder strips but when he got down to a final list of the twenty-five toughies he had to come up with something new to pursue to keep his passion for the hobby going.  He remembered the words of his camp counselor, "if you ever get any Project S.O.A.R. patches pick them up for me."  Before long he had all the national issue items and was on to digging through trade-o-ree bins for council and district issued event patches ..read more

Nick Wolf, the Patch King, has a Top 10 list just for folks headed to the Jamboree.  As a veteran trader of several Jambos now Nick has come up with ten important tips he shares with the listeners.  I was able to sprinkle in some stories and commentary on Nick's list to give you some good examples.  The bottom line is that anybody going to the 2017 National Scout Jamboree at the Summit Bechtel National Scout Reserve would get something helpful from his tips. Certainly his list is not all inclusive and so if you have some you'd like to share please leave them as a comment.  ..read more

Today on the podcast I welcome Nick Wolf who many of you know as the "Patch King".  After using some customized patch trading blankets at the 2015 National Order of the Arrow Conference Nick set about seeing if he could design and produce a patch trading blanket for the hobby.  After six months of developement he released his blanket which features room for up to 30 different flap/CSP shaped patches along with a zipper system to keep them in place.  Since then Nick has also released a matching blanket that is the perfect size for OA two-piece sets and is about to come out with o ..read more

Listen in to hear the wisdom of Uncle Nick.  My interview with Nick Loesch will trace his history in the hobby and get his impressions on how it's changed over the years.  Nick attened the 1964 Jamboree as a boy and caught the patch collecting pretty hard.  It was at the 1965 NOAC that he burned a Blue Heron Lodge flap to make a point about boys ripping off each other while trading.  After taking a break from the hobby to raise kids Nick jumped back in the late 1990s and never looked back.  He started on eBay in 2001 and has been a regular on the TOR circuit for years ..read more

The collectibles category lives on eBay.  Amazon? Forget about it!  Try doing it yourself with your own website?  Good luck!  So when eBay updates their fees and policies twice a year buyers and especially sellers need to pay attention.  In this episode of Scouting Hot Finds Radio I am going to break down the changes eBay is rolling out to the marketplace on May 1, 2015.  For the most part it's a story of carrots and sticks.  Some of the changers are meant to entice sellers to behave in a way that eBay sees as healthy for the site.  Other changes are mea ..read more

The last several episodes of Scouting Hot Finds Radio have focused on unique strategies that people in the hobby of collecting Boy Scout memorabilia have used to feed their habit. Today's episode of the podcast takes the question to one of the young guns in the hobby Nick Wolf of the Connecticut Yankee Council and Owaneco Lodge 313. Nicknamed the "Patch King" by his own lodge brothers because at such a young age he seemed to be loaded with tons of cloth, Nick has developed a unique social media strategy to turnover his inventory. I have been buying/selling for a long time and I got lots of gr ..read more

When the Boy Scouts of America announced they would be building a permanent Jamboree site in the hills of West Virginia Todd Kelly started making some trips to the "Mountain State" to scope out locations for a Trade-O-Ree. One of the results of that venture was deciding to rent out a booth in two different antique malls in nearby Beckley, West Virginia.  Along with his partner at the time Todd got into the business of selling Scouting collectibles at an antique mall.  It's been almost four years since he dipped his toes into this strategy and Todd is now doubling down on this idea ..read more

Chris Jensen of Streamwood Inc. has been in the Boy Scout memorabilia hobby since the 1960s and as a full-time memorabilia dealer he has hosted more than forty trade-o-rees including ones for the National Order of the Arrow Conference (NOAC).  In August of 2015 the Order of the Arrow will be holding it's 100th Anniversary NOAC at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.  Streamwood will be running a NOAC trade-o-ree for the three days leading up to the event on August 1-3.  In this interview Chris Jensen goes over all the details for the Big Monster NOAC TOR.  W ..read more

My guest is Bob Sherman who is a well known figure in the hobby of collecting Boy Scout memorabilia.  Some have taken to calling him the "camp patch man" as he has been writing the camp patch column in the ISCA Journal for a whopping 22 years now.  The focus of our interview tonight is discussing the brand new edition of the Camp Book II that has just been published and is available as a PDF either through instant download or CD on eBay.  The book comes in at 1250 pages but you can still purchase it on eBay from my partner there RadarBSI.  One of the key things about the Ca ..read more