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Girl Scout Cookies: Long Islanders look back on 100+ years of sales

Three generations of Long Island Girl Scouts: Kerri Stallone, 56, left, Faith Stallone, 17, and Jean Wilson, 86, in Levittown. Credit: Morgan Campbell

When Roz Brenowitz, now 77, sold Girl Scout Cookies in her Valley Stream neighborhood as a third grader in the late 1950s, there was one door she was afraid to knock on.

"I remember the principal of my elementary school lived around the corner. I remember being very nervous to go ring his doorbell," she says.

Three Girl Scouts, Margaret Rudolph, Doris Koch and Lenore Skeoch,...

Three Girl Scouts, Margaret Rudolph, Doris Koch and Lenore Skeoch, brave the snow in search of customers to sell their cookies to circa 1941. Credit: Newsday

These days, Girl Scouts are more likely to be approaching their school principal with a QR code on their cellphones, asking for a purchase that would be made digitally than to be heading door to door. 

Girl Scouts have been selling homemade cookies as far back as 1917, with the first cookies baked by Scouts themselves, according to the Girl Scouts of the USA website. During the 1920s, "these cookies were packaged in wax paper bags, sealed with a sticker, and sold door to door for 25 to 35 cents per dozen," the website explains. In the 1930s, cookies began to be commercially prepared for the Scouts.

By 1951, there were three cookie varieties — Sandwich, Shortbread and Chocolate Mints (now called Thin Mints). Today, choices include such flavors as the peanut-butter-patty Tagalongs, Lemon-Ups, Girl Scout S’mores, which is set to be retired at the end of this cookie season, and Thin Mints, which is still the most popular cookie variety.

Girl Scouts S'mores cookies are set to be retired after this...

Girl Scouts S'mores cookies are set to be retired after this season. Credit: Los Angeles Times via Getty Images/Mariah Tauger

Door-to-door sales have largely been dwarfed by booths outside grocery stores where troop members peddle boxes and online marketing where girls create their own Facebook pages to sell to relatives and friends across the country. Girls now earn Cookie Business badges, Financial Literacy badges, Cookie Entrepreneur Family pins and Entrepreneur badges, according to the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Girl Scout Cookies: From 25 cents to $7

Cookie season kicked off nationwide on Jan. 7 and lasts through March or April, with exact end dates varying by location. Former Long Island Girl Scouts marvel at the cookie evolution since they were the ones in uniform.

Betsy Toban, Troop 16, sells plenty of Girl Scout cookies...

Betsy Toban, Troop 16, sells plenty of Girl Scout cookies during a drive in an undated photo. Right, Audrey Russell, of Troop 16, makes a Girl Scout cookie sale in Floral Park circa 1941.  Credit: Newsday

"It was a whole different world back then. It was like ‘The Wonder Years,’ " says Penny Montell Jordan, who sold cookies door to door in the late 1960s in Bayville, referring to the television series featuring a suburban middle-class family during that decade.

When Jordan first started selling, a box was 25 cents and it was easy to calculate in your head how much to charge for multiple boxes, she says. Then it went up to 35 cents and became harder to figure out, she jokes. A box of cookies today costs $7.

Selling the old-fashioned way continued into the 1980s, says Patricia Maguire, 53, of Long Beach. "There was no internet," she says. The orders took a while to come in. "You would order when it first started," she says of cookie season. "A month later is when you would actually get the cookies. It wasn’t big numbers, I probably sold like 100 boxes."

Credit: Getty Images

By contrast, Maguire’s daughter, Cathy, "doesn’t sell less than 700," Maguire says. "She gets a lot more exposure." Under the current cookie selling program, the girls learn about how to handle credit cards, how to make an online pitch, and how to build a customer base they can go back to year after year, Maguire says. They also earn credits for each box sold that they use to buy Girl Scout merchandise or use toward paying for Girl Scout summer camp, Maguire says. The Cookie Program as a whole is a fundraiser that earns money for local troop activities.

Hawking in the 1940s

Jean Wilson, 86, of Levittown, sold cookies even earlier than Brenowitz, Wilson or Maguire — she hawked them in the mid-1940s, when she was growing up as Jean Abernethy in Brooklyn. "I lived across the street from apartments. I went immediately over there with the sheets," she says.

Jean Wilson, now 86, of Levittown, sold Girl Scout cookies...

Jean Wilson, now 86, of Levittown, sold Girl Scout cookies in the 1940s. Credit: Jean Wilson; Morgan Campbell

Girls sold cookies from a master folding cookie order form with photographs of the cookies that they filled in in pen or pencil. Wilson says her parents would also take the order form to work to ask colleagues if they wanted cookies, and Wilson sold them to people in her church.

Credit: Getty Images

Wilson says she was never a popular kid, but when the troop announced how many boxes each Scout had sold, and they called her name and number ordered — probably she had sold about 50 boxes, she says — she felt seen. "Oh, wow, somebody knows that I exist," she says she thought then.

In those days, the girls not only sold the cookies, they delivered the boxes personally to each purchaser after the orders arrived to their troop. "I can remember with my brother’s wagon, delivering and walking with a wagon full of cookies. It was just fun, wearing your Girl Scout hat. It was something you were really proud of." Today, boxes can be shipped directly to purchasers’ homes.

Three generations of cookie sales

Kerri Stallone, 56, of Wantagh, sold Girl Scout cookies in...

Kerri Stallone, 56, of Wantagh, sold Girl Scout cookies in 1976, when she was 7 years old, following in the footsteps of her mother, Jean Wilson. Credit: Kerri Stallone; Morgan Campbell

Wilson went on to have three daughters and become their troop leaders; one of her daughters, Kerri Stallone, 56, of Wantagh, sold cookies from 1975 to 1981. "I would go through that card on a daily basis counting and recounting the boxes I had sold," she says of the order form. "It was in my backpack and carried in my arms like gold no matter where I went during cookie season. We would always put on our sash or vest and knock on doors."

Today, Stallone’s daughter, Faith, 17, is the third generation of the family to sell boxes.

"It’s funny to compare my experience to my daughter’s experience," Stallone says. "Where I would go door to door, she instead carries around her phone with a QR code that she flashes everywhere she goes to gets sales ... they download the Digital Cookie app to their phone and log in with their account."

While times have changed, the goal of the program is the same, the former and current Scouts say.

Girl Scout Faith Stallone, 17, whose mother, Kerri Stallone, and...

Girl Scout Faith Stallone, 17, whose mother, Kerri Stallone, and grandmother Jean Wilson were also Scouts, in Levittown. Credit: Morgan Campbell

"Selling cookies has taught me awareness of money," Faith says. "It’s taught me out to speak out and talk to people without getting anxious. It’s taught me to make eye contact, smile at the person, and have a lilt to your voice to be more engaging."

Faith’s goal is to sell 500 boxes to customers this cookie season, and to achieve donations of an additional 100 boxes for Operation Cookie, which allows people who don’t want to be tempted by having the sweets in their homes to purchase a box for U.S. troops instead.

To find cookies, visit the Cookie Finder at girlscoutcookies.org and enter your ZIP code.

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