Ask kids what they like about the Ed Laird Scout Camp at the Irvine Ranch Outdoor Education Center and they will talk about the high-ropes course, the zip lines, the archery, the mining camp or event the enveloping hills that make them feel far from urban sprawl.
“It’s a hidden little oasis,” said Regina Engle, director of camping for the program in Orange. “Parents like the camp because it’s close. Kids feel like they’re far away in nature.”
Niles Nam, 12, experienced the camp for his second year. “I like being outdoors and experiencing Mother Nature.” He likes the “rare” opportunity, he said, to shoot a BB gun and take part in archery.
Campers range from age 6 to 17 and aren’t required to be Scouts.
On a recent sweltering morning, counselor Sebastian Elizarraras, 20, led a group of 163 campers in the “Llama Song.” Happy llama, sad llama, totally rad llama…
Elizarraras, a student at Loyola University Chicago, joined Cub Scouts when he was in kindergarten. “I had many leaders who shaped the way I live my life,” he said. “I want to have that influence too,” he said of his summer job.
The camp is named for Ed Laird, who many local Scouts recognize as one of those inspirational leaders – in the Scouting world, and, perhaps surprisingly, in the Barbie world.
Laird, an 83-year-old retired chemist living in Huntington Beach, is well-known in business as a plastics pioneer. He solved a crucial fashion problem for Mattel’s Barbie: How to make her lip color stick to her face. Not an easy thing back in the late 1960s.
Decades before that, when he was 7, Laird joined Cub Scouts and eventually worked his way up to Life Scout.
“I discovered girls and gasoline, the two perfumes of a 17-year-old male,” Laird said, explaining why he never quite made it to the highest rank of Eagle Scout.
But he stayed involved with the Scouts through the decades, serving as a scoutmaster, a finance director and even as chair of the Orange County Council Boy Scout of America. He’s been a member of the board for 55 years.
Laird has been “constantly involved in Scouting and has never backed off,” OC Scout President Russell Etzenhouser said.
Laird was actively involved when the Irvine Company donated the 208-acre parcel that includes the camp to the Orange County Council in 2005 and played a leading role in the property’s development, Etzenhouser said.
The Ed Laird Scout Camp opened in 2009 and serves 20,000 kids a year through school programs and the summer camp.
“It’s a great location for kids to be exposed to the outdoors and hopefully they’ll join Scouts,” Laird said. “That’s my main goal.”
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