Contact: Kristin Roberts
TALLAHASSEE — The Boy Scouts of America is honoring longtime MagLab Director Greg Boebinger for his remarkable career and service to the community.
The National Eagle Scout Association has named Boebinger a Distinguished Eagle Scout.
The honor was presented during the Suwannee River Area Council’s Eagle Scout recognition banquet in Tallahassee on March 23. The award recognizes Eagle Scouts with 25 or more years of career experience who achieve extraordinary eminence in their profession and have a strong record of volunteering in their community. It is the association’s most prestigious award.
"It's a huge honor," Boebinger said, "I'm quite flattered by the magnitude of the award."
Longtime scout leader Mike Boebinger, Greg's younger brother, presents him with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.
Boebinger has been Director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and a professor of physics at Florida State University since 2004. Before coming to Tallahassee, he worked for more than a decade at Bell Labs and then lead the MagLab’s pulsed field research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Boebinger says skills first learned in scouting have served him throughout his distinguished career.
"It is that first leadership training that I draw on, even to this day," Boebinger said. "Things that are applicable, no matter what the setting. How to work with people, how to build teams, how to kind of grit your teeth and just work through the hard times. And I think scouts provides that experience as much as any other organization."
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio and raised in Indiana, Boebinger grew up in a scouting family. His mom started him and his three brothers in Cub Scouts and served as den mother.
"It was just kind of always in the cards that I'd be in Boy Scouts just because I had so much fun in Cub Scouts and had so much fun camping," he recalled.
Camping was the biggest draw for Boebinger.
"Because we would go camping for several weeks in the summer as a family. But Boy Scouts would then camp throughout the whole year," he said.
He remembers a couple of nights spent in cold, wet sleeping bags while camping in the rain and snow, along with three 10-day backpacking trips at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. During those trips, he also sharpened two fundamental skills that come in handy to this day.
"One is how to build a fire, because I still very much enjoy building fires in the fireplace, and the other is tying knots that are appropriate for the application," he said.
Boebinger went on to shepherd his sons through scouting, returning to the rugged Philmont Ranch for more backcountry adventures.
"I went with my two sons when I was 50, and the mountains were steeper than they were when I was 14. I went back when I was 53 with my younger son and they were steeper still," Boebinger recalled with a laugh.
Greg Boebinger with his younger son, Scott, during a 10-day backcountry hiking trip at the Philmont Scout Ranch in June 2013.
The returns to Philmont took him back to his trips there as a kid and gave him a chance to see his boys grow, just as he had grown.
"I can remember watching them over the course of the 10 days build their own leadership skills. You could see them learn. How do you build consensus? How do you make decisions?"
Boebinger's younger brother Mike, who has been a scout leader for many years, nominated Greg for the Eagle Scout award, working with the Suwannee River Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Mike traveled to Tallahassee to present the award to his brother at the recognition banquet. Fewer than two thousand of the nearly 2.7 million Eagle Scouts nationwide have received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award since it was first created in 1969.
The recognition is even more meaningful because of what scouting has meant to Boebinger.
"I got so much out of my scouting experience, particularly in terms of leadership training, I think more than any other experience my whole life," Boebinger said.
