Saturday, October 24, 2009
At the 2007 LLDC the lodge leadership was informed by the scout executive of a new policy approved over the summer by the OA National Committee. This strict policy banned all forms of flaps issued to commemorate honors such as Brotherhood and Vigil flaps. The scout executive informed the lodge officers that Santee would be following the policy. The lodge chief informed the lodge members about the situation and it was decided that at the 2007 Fall Fellowship a decision would be made in the business meeting as to how to move forward. The lodge voted to continue selling the current inventory of flaps rather than enacting any drastic measures. As 2008 rings in it is unclear what the lodge body will decide to do regarding possible changes to a one size fits all combination honors flap.
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
In the Fall of 2004 Duncan Norton proposed a new standard issue flap designed by Kyle Hughes to replace the Moritz ordeals. The reasons stated for changing was that some people wanted to go back to the original Audubon bird from our first issues. There was also an itch for change as the Steven Askin’s S12 had been around for nine years. The changes for the Brotherhood and Vigil flaps were not approved until the next fellowship in Spring 2005. There was a delay in selling the new designs since the lodge still had an inventory of the flaps from Moritz. It appears as if it was not until Fall 2005 before the new flaps were sold. Vigil flaps were not sold for many more fellowships because of inventory in the box. When the Vigil flaps were ordered they were lost. At this time it is believed that the lodge adviser simply can’t find them. None of them have turned up. These missing Vigils would be Krelman made flaps to match the Ordeal and Brotherhood flaps. However, by the time the decision was made to order another batch of Vigils fate would have them come from yet another patch company. During 2006 the BSA decided to license their memorabilia so that only patch companies who paid the BSA royalties were allowed to produce patches for councils and lodges. This new merchandise would have the BSA seal on the back noting it as an officially licensed product. At the time that the new order of Vigil flaps was being placed the Krelman Company had not obtained it’s license. Therefore, the new run of Vigil flaps were ordered from the A-B Emblem Company. These new Vigil flaps were sold for the first time in 2007.
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
One of the concepts that became a part of the lodge lexicon during this time was the idea of a patch being the lodge totem. This was a concept that the scout executive brought and basically said that the one flap that you wore – the Ordeal flap – was the “lodge totem”. This was the flap that could be restricted and sold only to lodge members. All other flaps he considered to be special issues including the Brotherhood and Vigil flaps. The new trader flap also fit into this category. By taking the proverbial trigger off the conservative ways of the lodge in just the year 2003 the lodge had three new special issue flaps. It should be noted that from 1997 to 2004 the lodge executive committee made all decisions regarding memorabilia without consultation with the entire lodge through a business meeting. In fact many brothers lamented that business meetings lost their cantankerous flavor during this period of ECM power. Some will point to the Fall 2007 business meeting – 10 years in the making – as the possible return of youth led great debates about the memorabilia of the lodge.
The first special issue of 2003 was a first for Santee. Jay Carlson designed a “Night Vision” set that would have a special 65th anniversary flap accompanied by three fellowship segments called by many chevrons that would fit under the flap making eventually a full pocket set. His original design called for the use of iridescent glow-in-the-dark thread which was a new curiosity in the early years of the new century. However, when the price quote came back excessively high for this thread the lodge staff adviser squashed the idea and instead ordered the set with regular embroidery. We will never know what the “Night Vision” set would have looked like glowing in a dark space. Even so the set was popular with Arrowmen and many purchased the flaps as they were reordered at least once and sold out by the end of 2003.
Santee hosted the 2003 Dixie Fellowship at Camp Coker. The ECM supported by the Dixie Committee voted to have two flaps available to brothers in conjunction with this event. The first was the Dixie Service flap again designed by Jay Carlson. This flap had to be earned by a brother taking part in Dixie work weekends. The flaps were not distributed until the event and sales were tightly controlled by the staff adviser. The other flap issued for the Dixie was a conclave delegate flap. Ironically, neither of these Dixie issues was allowed to use the words Dixie Fellowship by order of the scout executive. The 2003 Conclave Delegate flap was sold at the event. There was a reorder on this flap because of confusion over when and how they were sold to members. It was also during this time that the lodge began using the Krelman Company again to create its patches. The Dixie Adviser David Surrett became the lodge adviser shortly after the Dixie in April. Since Krelman was used to issue the Dixie memorabilia they were given the lodge’s business. It is worth noting that the ECM in later years approved delegate flaps for the 2005
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
The Death Flap and Island & Trader Flaps
 Death Flap |
After the summer of 1999 Santee Lodge was in turmoil. The lodge chief had been removed, the lodge adviser had resigned (the third in three years) and the scout executive decided to suspend operation of the lodge and reorganize it. During the shut down a district executive who had worked at Camp Coker in the summer of 1999 decided to order a batch of three dozen flaps because the lodge had been closed down. The Death Flap was an all red ghost flap with a black border ordered directly from the Stadri Company and delivered to the council office. He gave out the flaps to various people such as other members of the professional staff and some adults in the lodge. Eventually all of the flaps were collected back up from the people and turned over to the scout executive. David Lee and Jimmy Duffy later burned the flaps behind the dining hall at Camp Coker. However, of the 36 flaps made only 32 were burned. No one seems to know the whereabouts of the 4 missing Death Flaps. |
 Stadri Flap Sold on eBay without rolled edge border or plastic backing |
Eventually several of the death flaps surfaced on the Internet auction site eBay and were sold by a trader out of Missouri. It was also during this time that some of the Stadri patches including the One Arrow Vigil showed up on eBay for sale by a Canadian wholesale patch dealer. Apparently he got patches from Stadri’s overseas supplier (some missing the border and plastic backing) and sold them starting at $3 each. |
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The story of the Death Flap is also the beginning of the story of the "Island" flaps. When the lodge was reorganized after having missed the 1999 Fall Fellowship and 2000 Winter Banquet the first event was a February workday held at Camp Coker. The executive committee met and voted to undertake the project of turning Belk Island into a new staff city area. A motion to sell the Death Flaps as a fundraiser was debated at the meeting. However, the majority of the youth on the committee voted the idea down and no decision was made for a fundraiser.
At the first fellowship after the reorganization in the spring of 2000 the business meeting saw the issue of the Death Flap come to a close. The lodge voted to ask the scout executive to destroy the flaps.
 Jumbo Island Flap |
The next day at a long Sunday morning executive committee meeting a compromise was reached to meet the goals laid out in the budget to support the island project. The youth finally decided to create a brand new fundraising flap. The flaps were to be sold for $100 to adults and $50 to youth who provided at least 10 hours of service to the camp. The design was done by David Lee, the interim lodge adviser and sent off to the company. However, the first run came back looking "jumbo". In fact there was some question as to whether they were more of a back-patch than a flap. |
 Regular Island Flap |
The decision was made to order another set of flaps and this time make sure they were the standard size. The executive committee later decided anyone buying the Island flaps would get both the Jumbo Island flap and the Island flap for $100. At the 2001 Fall Fellowship the executive committee made the decision to drop the 10 hours of service requirement and sell the flaps to youth for $50. After over a year of selling almost none of the patches the Executive Committee voted to drop the adult price to $50 and the youth price to $25. By the time this order of slap was completely sold out the price had dropped all the way down to $10 for the Jumbo and $5 for the regular Island flap. Ironically, staff city was never built on the island but the money did go towards the construction of the staff city birdhouse cabins below the dining hall. |
 F3 - Trader Flap |
At the 2001 LLDC in August the executive committee approved a new "Trader Flap" for the lodge. The vote came at the direction of the scout executive in order to have a Santee flap available for open sale in the Florence office. Several designs were drawn up around tables in the dining hall. However, the design which won out was from Brian Howe who used his computer to take the classic Santee twills and create a white twill. Brian added an fleur-de-lis under the "WWW" but otherwise kept the same look as the twills. The youth approved his design because it was very traditional and also because as a twill flap it would not be as desirable as a fully embroidered Santee flap. The flaps arrived in time for the 2001 Fall Fellowship but a little bit of controversy came with them. The Moritz patch company had switched the bird that Brian had proposed and used the bird from the 2001 Fall Fellowship patch to the surprise of the executive committee. Another impact of this change was to drop the fdl that Brian had added to the classic twill look since the 2001 Fall bird has a hidden fdl in the parakeet's neck. The committee met on Saturday to decide whether to sell the flaps anyways or send them back. The committee decided to send sell them anyways. Randy Dargan wisely made a motion in the business meeting that night that if the patches were reordered that they should keep the design that Moritz sent them instead of going back and using Brian's design which would have made another lodge issue. |
The original order of the Trader Flaps was for three hundred. Most of them were sold at Fall Fellowship to Santee brothers who were not used to being allowed to buy a Santee Flap open sale. Some flaps were taken by the Staff Adviser to be sold in the council office which of course was the first time this had happened in the lodge. By January 2002 all the flaps in the first run were sold out. The lodge eventually reordered 400 more in the fall of 2002. There is no variation in the second run. The last trader flaps were sold at 2006 Fall Fellowship.
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
After a decade as the sole flap of the lodge the reign of the S10 came to an end in 1995. The flap had been along for so long it was simply known as the “current”. At the Spring Fellowship in 1995 Harrison Penn and others finally accomplished what two Jasons (Collins and Spangler) and one Gowder couldn’t: getting enough votes to bring down the S10. To accomplish this he returned to a simple idea that Jason Collins had tried in 1989 which was to update the classic design with a sharper look. Steven Askin’s new design replaced the palm tree on the “current” with a true palmetto tree and used a unique bird from the Audubon print which had never been used on a flap. Harrison Penn was helped in his push for a new flap because the quality of flaps that the lodge was getting from the Midwest Swiss Company was going downhill. Instead of the modern computer generated patches Midwest Swiss used an older embroidery system. Former lodge adviser Jay Hodge first explained this problem during the debate regarding Jason Collin’s design in 1989. Jay said that whenever the company ran another loom it made a copy of the last template and so as time went by the details were getting fuzzier. By 1995 there was a very noticeable difference between the first crop of S10s and the ones that were coming in. In fact the last loom run had some horrible looking examples in it that were sold out of the lodge store. This probably helped seal the fate for the old “current”.
Although the idea was around in 1995 it was another couple of years before the change to the S12 ordered from Krelman grew into to a three-flap system. Ironically, this is the exact same thing that happened in 1978. The lodge had a white background flap (S2) and decided to use that as the Ordeal Flap and add a black background Brotherhood and blue background Vigil Flap. In this modern case the S12 was to become the Ordeal flap with the S13 being the Brotherhood and S14 being the Vigil Flap. The biggest hurdle in creating a three-flap system is that it requires a change of the lodge rules, which can only be accomplished in a lodge business meeting with a 2/3 majority to win. In the Fall of 1996 he had to get a larger percentage of the vote to be successful. In the end the vote was not really that close as many of the older Arrowmen who were Vigil supported the resurrection of the three-flap system in the lodge. Later a change was made so that each Vigil brother could purchase a second Vigil Flap every year for $75. In later years Arrowmen was also allowed to purchase additional ordeal flaps for $15 each. These policies were probably set by the executive committee or by the Key-3 and were never voted on the by whole lodge.
Scott Alexander took over as Lodge Adviser from Porter Stewart at the Winter Banquet in January of 1997. One of the things on his plate was ordering the new flaps. However, the bids sent out to the Krelman Company (who produced the S12) came back very high. Two prototypes were ordered by the adviser to compliment the ordeal flap which was already being produced by Krelman. However, the decision was made to order the new flaps instead from a company that the council was using for many of its patch orders. The Stadri Company got the business and the flaps were first sold at the 1997 Summer Fellowship. When time came to reorder the S12 Ordeal Flap instead of using the Krelman Company the flaps were ordered from the Stadri Company. Of course the new loom was a variation which got the designation of the S12b.
The musical chairs of patch companies and variations was just beginning however. The Stadri Company lost the council’s business when the 1999 camp patches didn’t arrive until 3rd week and in poor quality. Therefore, at the Fall Fellowship of 2000 after the reorganization of the lodge the new loom run of Ordeal flaps were not ordered from Stadri but from a new company, Moritz. This Moritz Ordeal was given the designation S12c and has some slight variations from the others. Strangely enough in a little over 5 years the lodge had produced three varieties of the same Steven Askins design from three different companies.
Of course when time came to order the overdue loom of Brotherhood and Vigil Flaps (no Brotherhood flaps were available at the 2000 Fall or 2001 Spring) they were ordered from Moritz. This order created two new variations the S13b Moritz Brotherhood and the S14b Moritz Three Arrow Vigil. The first loom of Brotherhood Flaps from Moritz sold out at the Summer of 2001 but were reordered several times during the next five years.
The One Arrow Vigil Flap has perhaps the strangest story of all Santee Flaps. Originally, this batch of 144 flaps was a reorder from Stadri on the S14 Vigil Flap. However, somehow in the ordering things got mixed up. One story says that when time came to reorder flaps the Assistant Scout Executive sent the company a Vigil Flap that he had in his possession to show the company what we wanted. The story goes that the executive had a protoype from Stadri with the Vigil flap looking exactly like the Ordeal Flap except with a blue background. Whether this story is true or not (the prototype has never been seen by collectors) the flaps came back with one arrow just like the Ordeal Flap instead of the three arrow Vigil triangle look in the design.
Now given the fact that the flaps were wrong it might make sense to have them sent back or destroyed. The lodge had learned back in 1969 what happens when you send flaps back to the company (see Double Black Flap) and the executives said no more flaps were going to be burned (a botched order with no plastic backing from Stadri were burned by the executive committee around 98-99). Therefore, the flaps were put in the lodge store and the first ones were sold at the Summer of 1998. However, given the restrictions on the Vigil Flap less than twenty were sold at that fellowship. Basically, the lodge year begins with LLDC in September and most everyone had already bought their ONE flap for the 97-98 lodge year. When the lodge store opened at the 1998 Fall Fellowship there were 127 of the flaps in the inventory. The flaps were also sold at the 1999 Spring Fellowship. However, (and here is where the story gets stranger) during summer camp in 1999 some of the flaps got missing. In September the Scout Executive shut down the lodge and everything was frozen until Spring of 2000. The flaps were not sold during the 2000 lodge year for whatever reason. The lodge officers who served during the reformation of the lodge in 2000 received them on their plagues handed out at the Winter Banquet in January of 2001. Although about 22 flaps were left no decision was reached as to their fate and so at the 2001 Spring again none were sold. At the 2001 Summer the new run of Vigil Flaps from Moritz was in but still the One Arrow Vigil Flaps were kept back. Finally in October of 2001 the executive committee decided to put 1 up for auction at Spring 2002, hold 5 back for the lodge collection, give the four new inductees at Fall 2001 a One Arrow Vigil, with the remaining flaps to be sold first come to Vigil brothers at Fall 2001. In the store line at that fellowship Vigil brother literally drew from a brown paper bag to decide whether they would get a new Moritz Vigil flap or one of the coveted One Arrow Vigil flaps. Truly, this is the strangest story of any Santee Flaps. What probably accounts for the bizarre twists in this story is the turnover of lodge leadership during this period and the lodge being shutdown from September 1999 to February of 2000.
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
Santee Lodge was again hosting the Dixie Fellowship in 1983. James Potter, who was the lodge staff adviser, was given permission to design a special staff item for Santee members to have at the Dixie. He designed and ordered a flap for brothers to wear at the Dixie. The background of the design was blue and it contained the words, "DIXIE HOST". The 300 flaps were sold at the pre Dixie weekend and at the Dixie Fellowship.
Another flap designed and ordered by James Potter was for delegates to the 1984 Dixie. Without consent of the lodge, Potter ordered a flap that used the color orange in place of the traditional red outside border. This color went with the spirit theme of the 1984 Dixie delegation from the lodge which was, "Orange you glad we came". The flaps were sold three per delegate at the Dixie. Although the origins of this patch are unofficial it has always been considered a lodge issue since Potter was the ex-staff advisor and the flaps were sold to lodge members.
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US $60.00
