Mt. Gilead senior achieves goal of earning all 134 scout merit badges

By Eve­lyn Long -

Lewis Mesaros, 17, has achieved a goal that only 185 other Boy Scouts have reached.

A ded­i­cated Boy Scout, he has earned every one of the 134 merit badges the BSA offers to Scouts. The jour­ney has taken him on many adven­tures, learn­ing times and trav­els to his­toric sites across the United States.

The Mount Gilead High School senior and rural Card­ing­ton youth, announced his inten­tions of earn­ing those badges dur­ing a fam­ily meet­ing when his mother, Audrey Mesaros-Gale, read a news story to her two sons about a scout who had earned every badge. Lewis announced that he wanted to do the same thing — earn every badge.

Lewis, fol­low­ing his older brother, Eddie, joined the scout­ing pro­gram when he was six years old and a first grade stu­dent. He was a Tiger Scout with Mount Gilead’s Pack 56. He never missed a den meet­ing dur­ing those five years as a Cub Scout and com­peted in the Pinewood Derby races and brought home a grand cham­pion tro­phy sev­eral times.He par­tic­i­pated in the cake auc­tions, and the space derby races and earned many Cub Scout Belt loops and pins and every WEBELOS activ­ity pin offered.

Bridg­ing over to Boy Scout Troop 30, Card­ing­ton, his out­door activ­i­ties increased and included camp­ing. His first Sum­mer Camp was high adven­ture where he attended with his troop, a tour of many places on the East coast includ­ing vis­its to Nia­gara Falls, the Harley David­son Fac­tory, the Base­ball Hall of Fame and Her­shey Park.

His youth­ful age restricted him from par­tic­i­pat­ing in most of the activ­i­ties the older boys were doing but he was able to join them in other adven­tures such as white water raft­ing and pan­ning for gold. It was dur­ing this trip that he earned his first merit badge, Geology.

He attended merit badge events in West Vir­ginia, Ken­tucky and Ohio and the most dif­fi­cult and costly merit badge to achieve was Scuba Div­ing where becom­ing a cer­ti­fied Scuba Diver was required. “That was my favorite badge,” said Lewis. The eas­i­est was schol­ar­ship where main­tain­ing good grades in school and being a good stu­dent were most impor­tant. The last of the merit badges that he achieved was Search and Res­cue where his quest to earn them all would have been com­plete ear­lier had it not been for the addi­tion of the new merit badges which included S & R, Invent– ing, Weld­ing and Kayak­ing. Also included in the 134 merit badges are the 4-Historic Merit Badges (Sig­nal­ing, Track­ing, Pathfind­ing and Car­pen­try) brought back temp– orar­ily in 2010 in cel­e­bra­tion of 100 years of scouting.

Dur­ing his Boy Scout career Mesaros attended the 2010 Boy Scout National Jam­boree, held for the last time at Fort A. P. Hill in Vir­ginia. He attended this event with a group of scouts from the Heart of Ohio Coun­cil. He had phys­i­cally pre­pared for a year so he could com­plete one of the most dif­fi­cult treks at the Philmont BSA Reser­va­tion in New Mex­ico, also with a group from the Heart of Ohio Council.

Earn­ing the James Stew­art award intro­duced him to an icon of the movies. This award has been estab­lished by the James M. Stew­art Museum Foun­da­tion with the con­sent and coop­er­a­tioin of the BSA Penn Woods Coun­cil and the fam­ily of James M. Stewart.

The pur­pose of this award is to intro­duce the boy scouts to the life of a great Amer­i­can, James Mait­land Stewart.

The Jimmy Stew­art Museum, located in Indi­ana, Penn­syl­va­nia, offers this award to a Boy Scout who has exem­pli­fied the char­ac­ter­is­tics nec­es­sary to live the life of a good cit­i­zen. Scouts are required to com­plete the Jimmy Stew­art Museum quiz dur­ing a tour of the museum, write an essay of not less than 500 words on being a good cit­i­zen and do a cit­i­zen­ship project in their com­mu­nity in honor of Stewart.

Once the require­ments have been com­pleted, doc­u­men­ta­tion is turned into the museum where the require­ments are reviewed and if accepted, a medal­lion and cer­tifi­cate will be issued to the scout.

Mesaros’ Eagle Project was a foot­bridge on one of the trails at the Head­wa­ters Out­door Area in Mount Gilead where he raised the money to pay for the com­plete cost of his project and recruited mem­bers from his troop, fam­ily and friends to help com­plete the job.

Other awards he has earned as a scout include God and Me, God and Fam­ily; God and Church, Leave No Trace, Cen­ten­nial Recruiter, Charles in Space Award, Boys Life Pedro Read­ing, Junior USA Shoot­ing Team, Mas­ter Angler, Emer­gency Pre­pared­ness, U S Her­itage, World Con­ser­va­tion, Den Chief, His­toric Trails, Paul Bun­yan Woods­man, BSA Kayak­ing, Fifty Miller and BSA Scuba awards.

He has earned four com­plete series of Eagle Palms and will com­plete his fifth and final series in March. His lead­er­ship posi­tions in scout­ing include Scribe, Assis­tant Senior Patrol Leader, Den Chief and Senior Patrol Leader.

Fol­low­ing scuba div­ing, his favorite badges earned were Climb­ing and Archi­tec­ture. He stud­ied weld­ing under the tute­lage of Tim Weiler. “The Philmont trip was also a favorite,” said Lewis, the son of Ed Mesaros of Mount Gilead.

Lewis is active with the music pro­gram at Mount Gilead High School where he plays trum­pet in the jazz, march­ing and con­cert bands. He is a mem­ber of Simon Ken­ton Coun­cil, Ash­ley Troop 94 of the Boy Scouts. He is also eli­gi­ble to con­tinue his affil­i­a­tion with the scouts by join­ing the Ven­tur­ing Crew until the age of 21.

“I loved every minute of it,” said Lewis, in ref­er­ence to his quest to earn all the merit badges. “I’d do it all over again.”

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Feb 20 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.