10 Fun Things You Might Not Know About Juliette…
Girl Scouts across the country celebrate October 31 each year as Founder’s Day. The date was chosen to celebrate our Founder, Juliette Gordon Low, because it’s the anniversary of her birthday. There are tons of ways to celebrate! To challenge your JGL knowledge, here are 10 Fun Facts about the ultimate G.I.R.L. that you might not yet know!
- She was born on October 31, 1860 in Savannah, Georgia.
- Her childhood nickname was Daisy which serves as inspiration for the first two years of Girl Scout membership (K-1 grades).
- That nickname also led to a biography written about JGL by Fern G. Brown called Daisy and the Girl Scouts.
- Though she never considered herself a skillful sewer, while home from boarding school one year, this Go-Getter named herself an instructor of sewing and started a club called “Helpful Hands” in which JGL and her friends would sew and donate clothes to children in need.
- In lieu of using ribbons and flowers to decorate a hat like the other girls, she was an Innovator and used her creativity to decorate with carrots and parsley instead!
- She was nearly deaf – not that she’d let it stop her from being the life of the party!
- She got an earache in one ear and insisted her doctor treat it with the up-and-coming treatment of silver nitrate, which the doctor did not want to do but with JGL’s persistence (and her Risk-Taker tendencies), he could not turn her away. This ultimately left her partially deaf in one ear!
- The second eardrum was damaged by a piece of rice that got stuck in her ear during the rice shower after her wedding! This small piece of rice damaged her eardrum so terribly that it left her completely deaf in the second ear.
- Skills she excelled at included tennis, swimming, horseback riding, and hunting.
- In May of 1911, JGL met General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, author, and Founder of Boy Scouts. Three months later she got involved by inviting every girl in Glen Lyon, Scotland (where she lived at the time) to her home for the first ever Girl Guide meeting. Seven girls attended, one of which walked over seven miles to get there.
- In 1912, JGL aimed to bring Girl Guides to America and on on March 12, 1912, 18 girls were inducted from Savannah, GA as the first Girl Guides of America.
- After traveling back to Europe to seek counsel from the British Girl Guides on how to grow membership, she arrived back to America in 1913 with the plan to change the name to Girl Scouts after finding out that the Savannah girls did so themselves because it “reminded them of America’s pioneer history.” Soon after, this Leader designed and patented the trefoil badge becoming the official insignia of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.