Galloping Sales Got Her to Horse Camp

Load up the red Lincoln for Scouting glory.

Acouple of weeks before Girl Scout Cookie sales officially started, I began hawking cookies by phone, calling neighbors, friends from church and family. I had been in Scouts since I joined as a Brownie several years before. When I advanced to Junior Scout, I sold 200 boxes.

Whether it was from a sense of duty, a desire to be the best or maybe a bit of both, each year my cookie sales grew. The cookie chairman, doubting my ambition, would look dubious when I continued to check out more and more boxes. But with our red Lincoln loaded down with Girl Scout Cookies, Mom and I would take to the road. We headed to the rural areas where other Girl Scouts didn’t think to go and a neighboring town that sponsored Camp Fire Girls, not Girl Scouts.

Almost everyone wanted Thin Mints. When I ran out of those, my entrepreneurship kicked in.

“Have you tried peanut butter Savannahs, Scot-Teas, or lemon, chocolate or vanilla sandwich crpmes?” I’d ask. “They are all absolutely delicious!”

With my mother’s superb help and inspiration, I was the top cookie seller for my council three years running.

The epitome of my cookie salesmanship was in the nation’s bicentennial year, 1976.

My mom, Ruth Landwehr, and I set ourselves the goal of selling enough boxes to end in the number 76. That didn’t happen. Instead, I sold 1,096 boxes of cookies, outselling myself by

20 boxes. My feat was news in my hometown; I was written up in the Winfield Daily Courier.

With my sales record, I applied for and won a Girl Scout scholarship to attend the camp of my dreams in Wyoming, where I worked with horses every day and went on a packhorse trek in the Bighorn Mountains. My sales earned enough to pay my plane fare to and from camp.

After my sales phase, my mom took over the cookie chairman job for a couple of years. We had towering stacks of cookie boxes in our dining room.

Today, at 93, Mom still keeps in touch with her former friends from Scouting. The Girl Scout organization has been good to both of us.

I SOLD 1,096 BOXES OF COOKIES, OUTSELLING MYSELF BY 20 BOXES.

IN THE 1960s AND ’70s, I’d put on my uniform, load my wagon with boxes of cookies, and hitch my dog to the front to pull it as I went door to door. I always managed to sell them. I wonder if my customers bought a box because I was a Girl Scout or...