An Hour A Week? Podcast

Worlds merge on the race track where Scouts share skills, hopes
Back in the 1950s, the Boy Scouts had a plan: build gravity-powered model cars and launch them down a track. They called it the Pinewood Derby, and the idea was to bring boys together.

Good ideas stick around, and last week the derby reached a bunch of boys who live with what professionals describe as “profound disabilities or complex medical needs.”

Many cannot speak or walk. Yet because of their efforts and those of fellow Scouts, two dozen boys from Northeast Portland’s Providence Center for Medically Fragile Children competed in a run that ended with a special kind of grace: Two sets of boys learned a little about each other.