Keith in his personal engraving shop.

I taught high school graphic arts in Los Angeles Unified School for 40 years. I started in 1969 and I got a New Hermes engraver for use in my classroom in 1972. Still have it and still use it. I have been involved in Boy Scouts and also the LDS Church. I have been doing various types of engraving for name tags signs, etc. I also do silk screened t-shirts for everything from our Primary kids to troops, and local schools as a service.

I don’t charge for doing them, or just the cost of the ink. For engraving I don’t charge. I have made plaques for Eagle Scouts, with their badges, etc., and plaques outside sponsors offices listing their Eagle Scouts. I usually do a couple of thousand shirts a year for schools and groups and several hundred badges. I am an Eagle Scout, received the Silver Beaver Award (Scouting highest award for volunteers) and been called as a Bishop twice. I retired in 2008 and moved to Arizona with my wife. Still doing the same kind of volunteering. I am currently printing shirts for one of the local elementary schools Talent show. We will do 200 shirts, two sides, two colors each side, and I charge them 50¢ a shirt. I help them do the designs in a vector formate, make the screens, do the printing. They provide the shirts or I get them.

The High Adventure badges I just ordered from you folks is typical to what I do. I have done at 2,500 of those. We have been using them since 1981. I know the number because I am the only one doing them, and we have ordered 2,500 of them. We were getting them from Hew Hermes, but they are no longer making blanks. As new members join the High Adventure team we give them the tag. Our Team is associated with the Los Angeles Area Council – BSA. We supply name badges to several other Councils in Southern Cal, Nevada and Arizona.

The High Adventure Team trains Scout leaders to take their kids on backpacking and challenging activities like snowshoeing, rock climbing, caving, canoeing, back country first aid and rescue, desert travel, glacier climbing and that kind of thing. We conducted several seminars and weekend overnight training session each year. I also am the Reservation Director for Los Angeles Councils camp at Lake Arrowhead above Los Angeles. We run several thousand scouts and leaders through in week long camps. Camp runs from mid-June through late August with about 100 staff.