Baddest Troop Alive

In 1969 seventeen boys from Willowbrook, between Watts and Compton, marched down Orange Street in Redlands in uniforms that didn't fit. Halfway along, without a word to their scoutmaster, they started to chant: Eleven thirty-five, baddest troop alive. They had been practicing on their own.

Their scoutmaster was Steve Hauser, a 21-year-old UCLA student from Redlands, who had started Troop 1135 the year before, three years after the Watts riots. For nearly ten years he took them to the redwoods, to Mexico in a VW bus, and to Yosemite, while he finished college and law school and went to work as a public defender. Decades later he went back and found sixty-three of the men, and they speak for themselves throughout.

“I have taken a stand on my beliefs against the Vietnam War, passed the California State Bar exam, defended murderers in court, and run for public office,” he writes. “But leading ‘the baddest troop alive’ was the hardest thing I have ever done.”