Branscome Companies

To be an Eagle Scout, you need to camp out at least 20 nights, be able to teach First Aid and know how to rescue drowning swimmers. And, if you're Johnny Mac Yates, get rid of the tadpoles at the Lucille Brown Middle School track.

Eagle Scouts need to complete a community-service project.

Johnny Mac's was to renovate the track at the South Richmond school.

It involved 140 tons of rock dust, as well as blisters for himself and a dozen volunteers from his troop and RT-D FIRST school as they raked weeds and stones off the rundown track.

It meant tracking down city engineering officials for advice, as well as finding construction companies and material suppliers willing to lend a hand.

And it meant a level of poise and self-discipline that people often forget 13-year-old boys are capable of -- even if they are the troop bugler, used to needing to play reveille a couple of times to wake up 16-year-old fellow Scouts of Troop 436 at St. Bridget Catholic Church.

Yesterday morning, for instance, Johnny Mac paced the 275-yard length of the track with Victor Jennings, a superintendent from the road-construction firm Branscome Companies, to talk about how best to grade the oval.

The two paused for a bit at one end not far from where the puddle-with-tadpoles forms, and after a brief consultation decided the slope of the adjacent hill meant it would be best to grade the track so its inner edge was lower than the outer one.

A 2-inch slant across the 15-foot-wide track should do the trick as far as drainage goes, Jennings and Johnny Mac agreed.

"We're glad to do this," Jennings said. "We're glad to give something back to the community."

Branscome donated the daylong efforts of an expert heavy-equipment operator -- a man Jennings said can tell pretty much by eye whether he's within a quarter-inch of a specified grade -- as well as the use of a grader and a roller.

Vulcan Materials Co. donated 140 tons of material -- 14 truckloads -- to surface the track, and market manager Jay Gammon didn't bat an eyelid when a nervous Johnny Mac asked what he'd think if the project might would require that much rock, instead of the 40 tons he'd first suggested.

The smaller amount was meant just to fill the holes, but as Johnny Mac got deeper into the project, the coaches and engineers he talked to all said an overall resurfacing would be a better long-term solution. In addition to Vulcan and Branscome, Lowe's, Home Depot and Hercules Fence donated material as well.

"I just felt it was something that needed to be done," Johnny Mac said. "I didn't know I could do it to this degree, but Mr. Gammon and [Branscome construction division manager Steve] Mr. Wright really helped."

DAVID RESS
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER