Tom Slade with the Flying Corps by Percy and similar items

Tom Slade with the Flying Corps: A Campfire Tale. This book is by Percy Keese Fitzhugh c. 1919 by Grosset Dunlap, New York. "Let your boy grow up with Tom Slade," is a suggestion which thousands of parents have followed during the past, with the result that the TOM SLADE BOOKS are the most popular boys' books published today. They take Tom Slade through a series of typical boy adventures through his tenderfoot days as a scout, through his gallant days as an American doughboy in France, back to his old patrol and the old camp ground at Black lake, and so on."---Grosset Dunlap advertisement The Tom Slade series, written a few decades later, takes the opposite view: dishonesty, violence, and other moral failings are not inborn flaws, but are product of a bad environment -- remove the boy from the bad environment, and you can change his character. When we meet Tom, he is a hoodlum. Uneducated, half-starved, abused by his father, Tom roams the streets committing acts of robbery, vandalism, and intimidation. Thrown out on the streets after his father and he are evicted, Tom is taken under the wing of Roy Blakeley and Scout leader Mr. Ellsworth, and swiftly develops into a sturdy, ambitious, and honorable boy. Similar reformations happen with several other of Tom's slum friends, as well as to the spoiled young Connie, victim of an overprotective mother. As the series progresses, Tom grows up, participates in various capacities in the World War, and returns to Temple Camp to resume his connection with Scouting and with the camps as a young adult. In a typical plot, Tom Slade performs some self-sacrificing action which is misunderstood by those around him. He stolidly weathers universal disapproval until the true facts are somehow discovered by accident and his noble motivations become known