ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 08 Dec 2020

Follow Following

Junior Woodchucks

#education

Who was a child between the sixties and seventies did not have Wikipedia or Google to inform himself. He learned from school books, which were then called subsidiaries, listened to sound fairy tales, leafed through childcrafts, read the best sellers in the compendia of Selection from Reader's Digest and did school research on encyclopedias in installments (La Motta, Le Muse, Galileo), duly bound and on display in the library of every family that intended to rise from the magma of ignorance.
But there was also another small source of information, full of original ideas, charm and adventure: the legendary Junior Woodchucks Handbook, in the 1969 edition.
Arnoldo Mondadori published eight volumes from 69 to 89, edited by Elisa Penna (cartoonist inventor of Paperinik) and Mario Gentilini, with illustrations by Giovan Battista Carpi. In 91 a manual Maxi was also released with the best of six volumes.
The Junior Woodchucks are a scouting group invented by Disney, based in Duckburg. It includes the nephews of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, Qui, Quo, Qua (with their Davy Crockett hats) and the chief named Grand Mogol.
If Nonna Papera's manual was designed for girls and presented tasty recipes, Junior woodchucks handbook remains unforgettable and universally appreciated by both males and females. In fiction, it represented the compendium of all the knowledge preserved in the library of Alexandria, which has come down to us through numerous vicissitudes that had enriched its content. There were notions of history, geography, survival: from the construction of a bridge, to the lighting of a fire, to the translations of the same sentence into various languages. Confidently known as the Infallible, it was supplied, in pocket format, to the young woodchucks who used it to solve intricate cases.
The actual manual, the one printed by Mondadori in 69, had Disney characters as protagonists and was a practical aid for every child. It possessed its own didactic charm, including secret codes (such as the legendary Dada Urka), information on how to build a kite or a whistle, explanations on the Morse alphabet and the main knots. However, it also contained concrete suggestions with a moral intent typical of the time, on how to present the school report to parents or not to abuse the telephone. It was designed for the outdoors and taught respect for nature and animals.
It made us dream of adventures bigger than us, talking about vanished civilizations, hieroglyphs and distant places, it taught us how to do things with our hands (a bit like the mythical volume number 9 of Childcraft) making us feel less alone, suggesting that, if we we were in difficulty, abandoned to ourselves and without the presence of an adult - perhaps lost in a forest with no orientation - we would have found support in the little book, ready and pocket-sized, capable of explaining how to solve problems by ourselves, finding our  resources, activating our hidden energies. Those same energies that were nothing but the strength to grow and become, for better or for worse, what we are today.