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Answer:True!
Daniel Carter Beard (1850-1941),
known to millions of Boy Scouts as "Uncle Dan," was a prominent Progressive-era
reformer, outdoorsman, illustrator, and author. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on
June 21, 1850, Daniel was a gifted artist and a bookworm as a child. He loved
the great outdoors and formed a club called the "Boone Scouts" with his friends.
Beard graduated from Worrall's Academy in Covington, Kentucky in 1869 with
a degree in engineering and worked as a surveyor and engineer. In the early
1870s Beard and his family moved to Flushing. After working for a few years
at the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company, he made his living as an illustrator.
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Beard's
drawings graced the pages of dozens of newspapers and popular magazines,
from the New York Herald to Harper's Weekly, and from St. Nicholas to Godey's
Magazine. His work attracted the attention of Mark Twain, who hired Beard
to illustrate The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's Court (1889).
Beard became interested
in the plight of urban youth while touring tenements in the Lower East Side
in 1878. Upon reading a sign with the words "No dogs or children wanted,"
he wrote: "I thought to myself that the fools have built an immense city
without any place for the young at all."
He actively campaigned
to create new urban parks and playgrounds for healthy outdoor recreation.
As editor of Recreation and later of Woman's Home Companion magazine, Beard
founded a nationwide scouting program for boys, known as "The Boy Pioneers"
or the "Sons of Daniel Boone," in 1905. Beard's group
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"Merlin" from:
Illustrations to Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New
York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1889.
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merged
with the Boy Scouts of America in 1910. More than one million boys joined the
Scouts while he served as National Commissioner for thirty years until his death
in 1941. Beard's other accomplishments included teaching at the Art Students'
League of New York, serving on the Board of Education, establishing an outdoor
school for boys, and writing dozens of books. He loved to explore the Queens
countryside, and he first met the woman he married, Beatrice Alice Jackson,
while hiking. |
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your
thoughts, reactions, memories. Send us your photos, drawings, pictures of
your grandchildren, urls.
If you think you can do better than this, send us your questions (with answers,
please.) We were all there; let's be here, too.
© Rosemarie
E. Falanga
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