Snapshot: Rob Lion takes scouting to the limit and beyond

By TOM GIBBONEY

Rob Lion is the kind of kid you don't worry about. He knows his way around Menlo-Atherton High School, where he has a well-deserved reputation as a techie who knows computers and is always ready to explain the finer points of physics or math to anyone who might be stuck. As a senior, he is disappointed that he didn't get into MIT, but he is fine with his fallback -- Caltech in Pasadena, one of the best engineering schools in the country, MIT notwithstanding.

But while Rob seems to be totally immersed in his senior year, playing in the jazz band, helping build sets for the school theater, working on the robot project, the Sand Hill Challenge cars, plus working part-time at Sun Microsystems, he is also proud of a long career in Scouting, where he recently attained the exalted rank of Eagle Scout.

Although hardly a vanishing breed, Eagle Scouts don't pop up every day, even in the Silicon Valley, where there seems to be more of everything that's good, even if you have to work 20 hours a day to get it. With Rob, it was a traditional path.

"I started as a Cub Scout in second grade at Las Lomitas School," he says. He moved up to Boy Scouts in fifth grade with Troop 222 at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, and has stayed with it ever since.

"At first, I liked to go on trips, camping out. Recently, as I became more experienced, I have a good time teaching young scouts. I also found it to be good leadership experience."

With 34 merit badges and many community service experiences under his belt, Rob was ready for his Eagle project, designed to be the crescendo of the scouting experience.

"It has to be 75 hours, but the key to it is leadership," Rob says. "You are not supposed to do it by yourself."

For Rob, the challenge was to draw up and implement plans to replace the roofs on two large water tanks that irrigate the fields at Hidden Villa Farm, in Los Altos.

"The tanks were 11 feet in diameter and they are located on a hillside, about one third of a mile from the nearest road," Rob says. Moving the material to the site was a challenge in itself, but one that was answered by Rob and his fellow scouts from Troop 222.

"We carried everything by hand and worked two weekends last October," he says. Each Saturday and Sunday Rob and five scouts, plus two or three adults, worked on the project and got the job done.

"In the end, I figured we had put in 180 man hours. I wasn't really stressing out about it. But it was definitely one of the largest community service projects I've done," he says, adding that there were no sleepless nights but a lot of double check phone calls to make sure his helpers were on their way.

Besides learning to lead a major project, Rob has a more down to earth satisfaction from his years in scouting: "One thing I definitely appreciate learning are the useful skills, like tying knots, first aid or just attaching things to the top of your car."

Rob's current project at M-A is working on the school's entry in the Bot Ball contest at NASA Ames on May 1. Teams from many area schools build robots from Lego kits, which are designed to pick up black and white Ping Pong balls in a competition.

Rob is also trying to recruit underclassmen to the competition, "so we'll have a team next year."

As for scouting, Rob knows it won't be part of his life at Caltech, "but wherever I end up, I'll try and become involved in local scouting." Knowing Rob, that's a promise you can count on.