Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs speech strikes a chord with National Jamboree audience

The Boy Scouts of America got it right. Saturday night's National Jamboree Closing Arena Show was nothing short of spectacular. The BSA was counting on featured speaker Mike Rowe, Executive Producer and star of Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs", to be a crowd favorite. Perhaps what they weren't counting on, is that his appearance at the Jamboree is now being touted as the 'favorite event of the whole 10-day Jamboree', by many who were there.

His message, "A Scout is clean, but not afraid to get dirty", struck a chord with the nearly 75,000 in attendance as well as with the national television and online audience who tuned in.

Mike Rowe, Eagle Scout, and self proclaimed "ambassador of dirt", rode into the arena in the bucket of a Caterpillar front loader, sporting blue jeans, work boots, Dirt Shirt and a baseball cap. And this is what makes Mike Rowe different; immediately after taking the microphone he called the Caterpillar operator by his first name and thanked him for a safe trip to the stage, as though he'd known him for years. After pausing just long enough to take a picture of the entire audience, Mike publicly thanked the men and women who clean the latrines at the Jamboree. Who does that! The ambassador of dirt, does.

Besides wanting to "Say happy birthday to us" ('us' refers to 45,000 fellow Scouts in the audience), Mike Rowe had a message. "I'm here in defense of dirt," he said. He rallied the audience and reached an agreement with them. "Let's agree, a Scout is clean... but not afraid to get dirty." And in a way only Mike Rowe can, he offered up a novel idea- create a Dirty Jobs merit badge. The crowd went wild.

Mike recalled his first days of Scouting, as a shy, stuttering, uncoordinated 11-year-old boy.  He described his first troop meeting as, "difficult" and "uncomfortable".

After getting knocked to the ground during a Scout game called 'swing the thing', he remembered, "I had been in the Boy Scouts just two minutes and I was bleeding already." Rowe mused, "It's a game invented by an idiot."

Mike said he wasn't exactly sure why, at first, but he kept going to meetings. He earned awards, joined Order of the Arrow, made friends, and ultimately earned his Eagle Scout.

As he told the story to the packed arena, Mike effortlessly rattled-off the first and last names of his fellow Scouts, the Senior Patrol Leader and Scoutmaster, as though he was introducing his own family. This is a man who clearly loves Scouting.

Fast forward 25 years: the Executive Producer and Eagle Scout brought the message to a close at the end of his 20 minutes on stage at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia.

He admitted that he's often asked, "What did Scouting mean to you?" He summarized, "Everything I needed to know [about hard work and getting dirty], I learned in that first Troop meeting." 

He concluded, "Scouting forces you to confront your discomfort... it trains you to like it." He challenged the boys to "figure out how to like the hard things; the things that nobody else likes or wants to do."

Since Rowe's appearance at the Jamboree, internet chat rooms, online communities and blogs across America are suggesting that Mike Rowe become the national spokesperson for the BSA.

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