The Tale of Sanhican F1
Posted in Patch Collecting by John E. Pannell on March 10th, 2008 at 12:47 am 
Collecting first flaps have been a popular specialty in this hobby in recent years. Many are quite rare and difficult to find. Some newer ones are almost as common as toilet paper. In a very rough sort of way, one would expect the older first flaps to be harder to find but sometimes that is not so. Some old first flaps are still quite common, nearly a half century after they first appeared. The Sanhican 2 F1 is one of these.
Blue Book says the 2 F1 was issued in 1957. The next two issues of this lodge, F2 and S1, did not appear until 1969. For 12 years the F1 was the only flap available from this lodge. One would logically expect that there would be many varieties of this issue as it was reordered throughout the years but Blue Book lists only two, both based upon the twill: TLR (twill left rough) and TLS (twill left smooth).
Ed Dworak has recently been sharing with me his recollections of his time in this lodge when this flap was in current use. He has given me permission to share his recollections with the readers of this blog. He has this to say about the Sanhican F1:
During my life time I would conservatively estimate that I purchased at least a thousand 2F’s.
During my time as a officer of Sanhican Lodge, about 3 and a half years, Chapter Secretary, Lodge Secretary and Lodge Chief, the one person I “butted” heads with the most was Rev. Harold W. “Pop” Keller. “Pop” was Sanhican Lodge Adviser from 1941 until 1961. After retiring “Pop” continued as “Lodge Adviser Emiretus” and Advisor to the Lodge Treasurer.
“Pop” kept all of the lodge records, would send out membership renewals and was the sole keeper and orderer of lodge flaps. The lodge would run out of flaps several times a year and then “Pop” would order more. He was dead set on only ordering 250 at a time. I contacted the manufacturer and we were paying 28 cents apiece and were selling our flaps for 50 cents. If we ordered 500 flaps at a time, we would only pay 24 cents per flap.I couldn’t win increasing the order because “Pop” would always state “We’ve always done it this way!”
The flaps came from the manufacturer bundled in groups of 25. Every once in a while we would receive misprints/mistakes or whatever you want to call them. Whenever we would report errors to “Pop” he would let the manufacturer know and they would give us credit on the next order but we would just continue to sell the irregulars.
During my career I purchased several bundles of flaps in which the entire bundle were misprints. I attached several images of patches and in each case there were a least 25 or more of each variation. ..
..I’m sure they’re were more misprints but these were the ones I purchased and as I stated at least 25 or more of each of these were sold.
Ed must have been quite the active trader or collector in his youth! It also explains why this flap is still so common almost forty years after it was supplanted by a later issue. Lastly, given the frequency with which this patch was reoordered, we can expect to see lots of minor variations of the types generally not mentioned in a work of Blue Book’s scope.
The thread breaks, “misprints” as Ed calls them, he mentions are shown throughout this post. According to him he had bought at least 25 of each of these errors. Ed doesn’t say if he still has them all or if some has since been traded away. Even if he kept his, I think it is safe to assume some are out there as curiosities for collectors to find today.
Adults who act a certain way because “We’ve always done it that way!” are in my opinion prime reasons why the OA now aims to look towards its elected youth leaders for innovation. Too many adults in Scouting tend to be illogically fixed in their own way of doing things. Promising to “observe and preserve” traditions does not mean change and innovation is to be absolutely rejected.
I’ll leave it to others to comment directly on Pop’s logic and patch ordering methods.
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