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© 2005-2008 Sam Maslow. All rights reserved. This site is not affiliated with the U.S. National Park Service.
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Sam Maslow's
National Parks
Junior Ranger Site
Junior Ranger Site
| About Sam Maslow Hi, I'm Sam Maslow. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and am a freshman in high school. My favorite subject is history. I twice won first prize in my elementary school's annual Social Studies fairs. My first prize project in 2007 was on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was a member of the school band, playing the saxophone. I have an older sister, Rachel, and a younger brother, Bernard. My mom and dad have taken us to over 200 National Park Service sites. We've been to 49 states (all except Hawaii) and eight Canadian provinces and the Yukon Territory. We've been quite fortunate to have visited all these places. The United States is the greatest country in the world and there is so much to see in it in terms of nature and history. My favorite history site of the National Park Service is Sagamore Hill National Historic Site on Long Island, New York. That is where President Theodore Roosevelt lived. I have been there several times. My second-most favorite history site is Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota. I went down to the underground bunker where Air Force officers remained ready to defend our country during the Cold War at a nuclear launch control facility. My favorite nature/scenic site is Grand Canyon National Park. To see this deep canyon with mesas and buttes poking upwards was spectacular. My second-most favorite nature/scenic site was Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona. There I saw thousands of saguaro cactuses, many with arms pointing outwards. What an amazing thing to see! Among some of the more interesting places (which are not National Park Service sites) which I've visited are Dealey Plaza (where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated) and the nearby Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas; Dr. Samuel Mudd's home in Maryland (where Dr. Mudd treated John Wilkes Booth's leg); and Plimoth Plantation (a living history attraction where the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts). I always like visiting Washington, D.C. Several years ago I was at the National Archives and it was exciting to see the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. While there, I also researched my great-grandfather Isidore Finkelstein, who served from 1909-1910 on the U.S. Revenue-Cutter Service. He wrote in a diary that while on the ship he saw President Theodore Roosevelt and I examined the ship's logbooks, reading about a naval parade organized to greet the former president when he returned from Africa, and about my great-grandfather. I met Fran Mainella, the previous Director of the National Park Service, twice, to discuss the Junior Ranger program with her. The first time was on Feb. 27, 2006, when I attended the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., as the 389th site of the National Park Service. The second time was on Apr. 28, 2006, at an event at Edison National Historic Site in New Jersey. It was in 2004 that I collected my first Junior Ranger badge. A park ranger at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, asked me if I wanted to do the Junior Ranger program. She explained that it involved completing a booklet based on the displays there. At the end I would be given a badge. So I completed the booklet and received the badge. They had a patch there too. On that same summer trip, I asked at every National Park Service site we visited, completed the booklet, and received a badge or patch. In early 2005, I asked many western parks if they would send me their Junior Ranger booklets in the mail so I could complete them and receive the badge or patch. Most sites accommodated me; a few said you could only do their Junior Ranger program at the site. My collection of Junior ranger badges and patches took off. Later that year and in 2007, I visited some of the parks which let me do Junior Ranger by mail. As of April 2009, I had about 315 badges, patches, and pins. Although I've been to about 200 park sites, others I received through the mail and some sites awarded more than one badge or patch. About 240 National Park Service sites and affiliates are represented in my collection (some badges or patches cover more than one site). As I've explained elsewhere on this Web site, you can never obtain a badge or patch from each National Park Service site, as some sites will never be issuing them. For the foreseeable future I'll keep on going with the collection. I continued completing the booklets on trips, mostly in the summer, in the years afterwards. In 2007, I earned some badges on my family's trip to Alaska. We drove all the way from New York and back. By car we reached as far north as Coldfoot and Wiseman, in Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. The trip took two months and was the most exciting one we ever took. I hope that our national park sites will be around for future generations of Americans. Also it is important for Americans to be made aware of the need to maintain and preserve them. I support the Junior Ranger program because it's a fun way for youngsters to enjoy the parks and learn a few facts in addition. That's why I wrote a letter to the editor of National Geographic about the Junior Ranger program. It was published in the February 2007 issue. Also in 2007, the National Park Service asked me to write an article for their Junior Ranger Gazette. This newspaper is distributed every spring and summer at the national park sites and is designed to inform children and their parents about the Junior Ranger program. In late August 2007, an article about me appeared in Science Studies Weekly Challenger, a student newspaper for fifth graders. A similar article appeared in Arizona Studies Weekly. Ms. Debbie Coyle's fifth grade class at Liberty Magnet School, in Sebastian, Florida, read the article in the Science Studies newspaper and asked me to come down to speak to them. My father drove me down in January 2008, and I spoke not only to their class but also to the other three fifth grade classes at the school. I created a special Junior Ranger program booklet for them to complete in advance. In class, I reviewed the booklet with them and awarded them all Junior Ranger badges. I also distributed to the students a folder comprised of several park site Junior Ranger booklets and brochures and other information about the National Park Service. In the 2008-09 school year, I continued lecturing to classes in New Lebanon, Ohio, and in New York City, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. If you press the "Lectures" button on the navigation bar at the left near the top, you can link to a page which contains photos of my talks to the students and a musical slide show also. I've enjoyed collecting the National Park Service's Junior Ranger badges and especially the patches. They make a nice display. But in building up the collection I've gotten to know interesting things. I've also been lucky to meet some really nice park rangers who do a fabulous job in preserving our national park sites and enhancing my visits to them. I'm in high school now but I hope to continue to add to my collection. I'd also like to see the park sites develop a program specifically geared to older children like me. Besides trying to obtain Junior Ranger badges and patches at park sites, I also collect the cancellation stamps which are available under the Passport to Your National Parks program. At each park site there is at least one cancellation stamp available; many sites have different stamps at different locations within the site. In the last few years, I have managed to obtain over 100 stamps per year. Please see my Passport Cancellations page. |
