Sometimes heroes don’t wear capes, but they are just quiet individuals who help without much notice or recognition. There is several people to come to mind when I think of this, one of them is Mark Orlovsky. Mark and I have known each other for a long time, all through Scouting. Mark and I are the same age by a few months and have been involved in many aspects of scouting. As a youngster, he was a camp staff member when I went to camp. He went off to college and worked summer camp during the summers and then became a professional scouter serving as our District executive for many years. When I was just starting out as a Scoutmaster, he served as a mentor in that role. Mark told me, he would come to troop meetings at Troop 161 when he needed to be reminded what scouting was all about. As a professional, you can get bogged down with all the “paperwork” of scouting and Mark told me he enjoyed seeing the program working as it was designed. Mark left professional Scouting and began to work at Modine here in Racine, raised a family and I would occasionally see Mark at the hardware store or other places. Then as his son was old enough for scouting, I would run into him at Blue and Gold dinners and then his son joined Boy Scouts at Troop 161. Mark served a couple of positions in the Troop till becoming committee chairman. One thing he always did as committee chair is he and I would sit down and discuss my role in the troop and ask if I was still having fun doing it, he wanted to make sure the program was not burning me out. As a professional, he saw a lot of that. He also instilled that in the committee chairman after him as well. When his son Mitchel was working on Eagle, I knew he was nervous if Mitchel would finish but Mark did a great job putting that in Mitchel's hand, not his. As a father who was raised in Scouting and an Eagle Scout himself, I knew that Eagle Scout for his son is something he wanted more than anything but understood the value of his son making that choice, not dad’s. I consider Mark a good mentor and a good friend. I cherish the time and lessons we learned together. Thank you Mark, for making me the Scoutmaster I am.
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