Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

You may remember that, a while back, I compiled a list of, and a link to, the Time Machine series of "Donald Keith," which featured a Boy Scout patrol in possession of an abandoned time machine. The stories appeared in Boys' Life between 1959 and 1989, and were fixed-up into a couple of books.

The intrepid planettom has picked up the bibliographic ball, and run much further down the field than I did. Behold: Synopses of all the Time Machine stories, with links to their texts. (He warns that they are full of spoilers.)

Former readers of the flagship magazine of the Boy Scouts of America may also be interested in planettom's list of episodes of the science fiction comic strip Space Conquerors! (The exclamation point is part of the title.) Intrepid astronauts inhabited the comics pages of Boys' Life between 1952 and 1972.

My hat's off to planettom! (The exclamation point is part of the sentence.)

Long ago, Boys' Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, ran the Time Machine series.

In these stories, a Boy Scout patrol finds an abandoned Time Machine in the wilderness; the Smart Kid figures out the controls and they roar off to adventure, acquiring new patrol members from ancient Sparta and from 4000 A.D. along the way.

They were published, starting in 1959, under the byline "Donald Keith," a pseudonym for the father-and-son team of Donald Monroe and Keith Monroe. Eventually Keith Monroe published some of the stories under his own name.

I greatly enjoyed these when I was a Scout. I now recall that I read some even before that. My dad was a Scout leader and I remember reading a Time Machine story, maybe the origin story, in one of his issues of Boys' Life before we moved out of The Little Red House, so it must have been 1962 or earlier.

The Time Machine itself-- a luxurious saucer-shaped model-- was quite powerful, if not quite user-friendly. You could set the controls for any point in space and time, it was built to survive even in outer space, and it featured a time-viewer so you could study history or the future.

Boy, I wanted one of these so badly I could taste it.

(Using the time-viewer could be dangerous, though. On some occasions Brains Baynes would be watching some horrible scene from history, then somebody would trip and fall on the gearshift knob and the Polaris Patrol would find themselves in the middle of trouble...)

In the past, I have tried to track down some of the Time Machine stories I haven't read. I've pursued this quest for a long time.

Recently Google has been bringing more magazines down from the attic. In the past week, they have been adding freshly scanned issues of Boys' Life almost daily. One benefit is that we can all enjoy some of the Time Machine stories.

Here are the Time Machine stories I know of. (Tip o' the hat to Jerry Boyajian, who helped me get this list started years ago.)

Month	Year	Title	Author	Comment
DEC	1959	The Day We Explored the Future	DK
FEB	1960	The Time Machine Flies Backwards	DK
JUN	1960	How We Got the Mind-Reading Pills	DK
JUL	1960	Our Time Machine at the Jamboree	DK
OCT	1961	Marco Polo and Our Time Machine	DK
FEB	1962	The Time Machine Slips a Cog	DK
DEC	1962	Mutiny in the Time Machine	DK	Dec 1962 to Mar 1963 (4-part serial)
JUN	1964	The Time Machine Cracks a Safe	DK
OCT	1964	Time Machine to the Rescue	DK
FEB	1965	The Time Machine Gets Stuck	DK	Feb 1965 to Apr 1965 (3-part serial)
APR	1967	The Time Machine Hunts a Treasure	DK	Apr 1967 to Jun 1967 (3-part serial)
DEC	1968	The Dog from the Time Machine	DK
SEP	1970	The Time Machine and the Generation Gap	DK
AUG	1971	The King and the Time Machine	DK
FEB	1973	The Time Machine Cleans Up	DK
AUG	1973	The Time Machine Twins the Jamboree	KM
DEC	1973	Santa Claus and the Time Machine	DK
NOV	1974	The Time Machine Fights Earthquakes	KM
APR	1975	The Time Machine Saves a Patriot	KM
JUL	1976	The Time Machine Kidnaps a Parade	KM
SEP	1988	Target Timbuktu	KM
FEB	1989	Why We Kidnapped Our Scoutmaster	KM
SEP	1989	Pirates Took Our Time Machine	KM

Some of the stories were combined into two fix-up books, Mutiny in the Time Machine (1963) and Time Machine to the Rescue (1967).

Using another pen name, Rice E. Cochran, Keith Monroe also published Be Prepared, a comic memoir about his experiences as a Scout leader, in 1952. It was the basis for a 1953 movie, Mister Scoutmaster.

(Part 2 of this series is Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer." Part 3 is Robert A. Heinlein's Scouts into Space. Part 4 is Dale Colombo's Starship MAGELLAN, more stories for which Keith Monroe was a co-author.)