At the time we moved to yet another fading upstate New York mill town—this one with an open sewer running through its heart—I still clung to scouting like a security blanket. I felt the Boy Scouts would be the one thing I could count on, no matter where I lived. I could not have been more wrong.

I landed at Pleasant Avenue Elementary on my first day, my fifth school in as many grades.  I did my usual—hanging out in the back row, quietly studying my new classmates and teacher.

Miss Giles pulled down a large, window shade-style map of New York State, and beckoned me of all people, to the front of the class to locate Johnstown, my new hometown.

As thirty faces stared at the new kid, I scanned the map for anything recognizable. I located Albany by the star marking it as the state capital. Just below it was Delmar where I had attended kindergarten.

My eyes tracked the Hudson River downstream to Kinderhook, where we had lived next door to the old Martin Van Buren house, and I had marched on Memorial Day in my Cub Scout uniform. We had followed the buglers, drummers, and veterans out to the old town cemetery, where Billy Downing keeled over face-first into the grass. The rest of our troop remained at attention, immobilized by the speeches about ultimate sacrifice.

Due north of Albany, I found Lake George, where I always spent summers at my grandmother’s camp. I followed the lake to its northern end, and the black dot marking Ticonderoga. I first attended the Weedville School, where our janitor sliced oranges and apples for us at lunchtime. The following year for fourth-grade, they bused me to the school attended mostly by mill workers’ kids. One girl wore a freakish Halloween witch’s wig.  Another’s hands were stainless steel claws. Her parents said she crawled onto the train tracks when she was little. Townspeople whispered that the father had slammed her hands in a drawer when she would not stop crying.

I distracted myself by earning gold and silver arrowhead merit badges, mostly by memorizing things—the Morse Code, all the states and their capitals, the makes and models of cars, the Gettysburg Address. One assignment for our Blue and Gold Supper required us to compose an original cigarette jingle. I called mine the “Big O”:

Indians who know now smoke the Big O
Smoke signals go now by the Big O
They’re clear and they’re legible, they get there quick
Even signals sent with the new filter tip.

 The evening of the dinner, our pack lined up in front of our parents and scout masters to deliver our jingles. Everyone before me stole one-liners from existing cigarette ads: ”Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should” …”Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”. Embarrassed to be the only kid to have taken the assignment seriously, I offered, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”.

A sharp clicking sound drew my attention to Miss Giles. She stared at me impatiently with arched eyebrows. One hand perched on her hip while the other tapped a piece of chalk on the blackboard in a once-a-second beat.

“Do we not know where we live?” she asked, prompting a smug tittering from my classmates.

As I said, I expected to find refuge in scouting as I always had in these new strange places. I met my new scout mates on the ground floor of Johnstown’s Methodist Church for my first meeting. Technically we were now Webelos (We’ll Be Loyal Scouts) — the transition phase from Cubs to Boy Scouts. Mr. Simpson, our Scout Master, said we would become real scouts when he took us camping.

I showed up at Mr. Simpson’s house on North Perry Street the following week for our next troop meeting, joining nine or ten other scouts in his unfinished basement. The space had a moldy, fuel-oil smell and corners barely lit by bare bulbs hanging from the low ceiling.

“We’ll be working on our knots tonight, boys. These lally columns are really good for practicing them,” he explained, rapping his knuckles on one of the metal posts.

He introduced a thin, quiet man as his assistant. I may have missed it, but I don’t believe he mentioned the new man’s name.

They started us off with the square knot, half-hitch, and clove hitch — all knots I already knew from tying up boats at Lake George.

“You gotta know ‘em so well, you can untie ‘em behind your backs,” Mr. Simpson said. “So, let’s have a contest!”

With that, he and his assistant secured each scout to one of the metal posts, with their hands behind their backs. I reacted the way I always did in unfamiliar situations. I shifted away from the group to where I wouldn’t be noticed.

“Ready, set, go!” Mr. Simpson shouted.

At first, the two men playfully whacked a couple kids with ropes, as if encouraging them. “Knowing your knots could save your life someday,” Mr. Simpson said.

When his assistant noticed one kid wrestling with his constraints, he whipped the kid hard across his upper thighs. “Concentrate!” he commanded.

“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” a kid named Eric said, clearly eager to be the winner.

“How…about…under…pressure?” Mr. Simpson asked, emphasizing each word with a sharp lashing.

As both men whipped the kids on the far side of the room, I walked as nonchalantly and as quietly as I could to the steps leading upstairs.

“Hey, meeting’s not over,” Mr. Simpson called after me.

“Bathroom,” I answered, as if I really had to go. I took the steps two at a time, ran out the front door, and abandoned the Boy Scouts forever.

Since that time, sexual abuse charges from more than 12,000 men against their Scout Masters have come to light. I feel grateful that my reticence—probably the same survivor’s instinct that helped me cope with constantly shifting schools, classmates, houses, and communities—instructed me to flee that evening. But I also carry feelings of guilt about what might have happened to those boys I left behind. At the very least, I should have told my parents. Perhaps they would have talked to the right people. It wasn’t until decades later I realized that would be giving my parents way too much credit.

It was late in my father’s life while I was capturing his memories on videotape. He spoke of sipping his first beer when he was fourteen years old with his Scout Master in an Albany bar. I commented on how inappropriate that would be today. When he appeared puzzled, I told him how scouting was the glue that held everything together for me as his job took us from town to town—until we arrived in Johnstown and the Scout Master and his assistant tied up and whipped those boys in his basement.

My father listened gravely to my story. When I finished he looked me in the eye, shook his head sadly and with complete derision proclaimed, “You were never a Boy Scout.”

[Author’s Note: Every part of this story is true, except the name of the Scout Master which has been changed to Mr. Simpson.]