When I was young, my family subscribed to Boys' Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. One issue presented the design of an unusual tent, which they called "The Hickory Tent". It was a simple tent with an odd geometric shape. At that time my father, brother and I made a little paper model of it.

Some twenty-five years later, all I remembered was a really cool tent. I didn't even remember the year for sure. It became a hobby to try to find the design again. Research libraries and university libraries didn't subscribe to Boys' Life, but public libraries usually did. After awhile I got used to the drill: first the local librarian would always ask, "Why do you want an old issue of Boys' Life?" Only after I explained would they say that they didn't have room to keep more than a few years of back issues, let alone back twenty-five years.

Finally one year I was in Washington DC for one day, and I tried the Library of Congress. Here I encountered the only librarian who didn't ask why I wanted a back issue of Boys' Life. Since I wanted it, she wanted me to get access to it. Then as now an ordinary citizen could make use of this library but could not remove anything from it. (Only members of the US Congress and various other officials may check out books.) Because of the time of my request, I had one chance to request something. If they found it, I could look at it; otherwise I could try another day, but I had only this one day. The librarian I talked with tried to help me succeed. The big problem was that we needed to guess the size of the issue in question. The entire run consisted of at least two sizes, which would be in two separate locations (to save on storage space). If we guessed wrong, the answer "Not on shelf" would come back, and that would be the end of it. The catalog said the smaller size, but she and I both guessed that the larger size was printed in 1950, which turned out to be right. I had guessed it was an issue sometime in 1950, and that by luck also was right. (I had retrieved three years of issues, though.) After a couple of hours, there were the bound volumes. It took only a few minutes to locate the design in the volume for 1950.

The tent was just as strange as I had remembered: made from a single rectangular piece of material (actually, they sewed together two 36-inch-wide pieces), with two superfluous triangular patches folded under, two parts of one side tied together, and two points suspended from above. I made careful notes. Here is a copy of those notes:

Click here for a larger picture.

My visit to the Library of Congress was thirty-five years ago. Now with the Internet the world has changed. In the past two days, using search terms "boys life hickory tent", I found two references to old materials on eBay, both past their sale date. On the front page of one of the manuals for sale ("Litepac Camping Equipment") was a picture of the tent.

A few weeks later I discovered that the entire manual mentioned above has been scanned and is online at this link, with the manual itself at Litepac Camping Equipment (manual).

Now just another month later, I find that the entire September issue of Boys' Life, including the pages describing the tent, is available from google books at this link using the same search terms. (By mistake I had written "August" in my notes.)

Last modified: 2010-07-28