Google Books is accumulating scanned issues of Boys' Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, and new ones have popped up almost every day this week.

Heinlein sold a lot of fiction there. Click this to look it over:


I like seeing these stories with their original illustrations. They can be captured if you know the trick of fishing a PNG out of your browser's cache.

Stories include "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon," "Tenderfoot in Space," "Satellite Scout" (Farmer in the Sky), "Tramp Space Ship" (The Rolling Stones), and more.

Me, I'm drooling over the March 1964 issue with Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer" and Robert McCall's illustrations of solar-sailing yachts. Photoshop can take the color out of that damned blue newsprint the story was printed on.

I've also discovered stories in "Donald Keith's" Time Machine series previously unknown to me.

Jim, there can be disappointments, but there are also surprises. I re-read a number of childhood favorites with my kids, or when they were reading them so we could discuss them, and many stood up quite well, and/or revealed new pleasures. The greatest surprise was "The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" which I distinctly recalling reading more than once as a child -- but had no memory of the Michelangelo strand of the plot! I had fixated on hiding in the museum and living there.

I started a new topic for the Time Machine stories:



Also, I wrote an account of them for my blog and rounded up links to the scanned versions:

Thanks for posting this find. The Heinlein stories are great, of course, but I must admit the cover for "Sunjammer" is what I really remember from that time in Boy's Life.

In the late '70s (April 1978 to September 1979), Boys' Life did a comic serialization of Heinlein's "Between Planets" that I still remember.

Here's the direct links, so you can enjoy the story in full:

It's nice to have the universal and issue-complete resource, but the complete BL series has been here on the Nexus site for some time, too. Some may find this "encapsulated" version easier to reference. Or not. In any case, thanks for the links to the relevant pages in the Googleverse.

I think Heinlein had stopped writing for Boy's Life by the time I started reading it, about 1960, but apparently he started some kind of tradition, because another s.f. series of Scout stories ran then. I don't recall the author, but the stories were all about a single patrol and they were always humorous.
Sound familiar to anyone?

I think you're almost certainly referring to the Time Machine stories, by Don... Somebodymumble. There's another thread here discussing those. I enjoyed them a great deal both in the magazine and in collected book form, although I was aware that they were pretty "candy box" stories. None of the grit and reality of Heinlein's stories.

I'll check out the Time Machine stories, but I still think it was something else. Only character I remember was a fat Scout who always got into trouble.

well around here it is greeted with great glee and stolen back and forth, and shortly thereafter we will be er, treated, to endless recitation of really really old jokes ---Boys Life just has an entirely new audience generated every few years.