WHIZ KID: Andy Custer Makes Eagle Scout

The rank of Eagle Scout is only awarded to 4 percent of all boy scouts. 

Beverly Custer of Lutherville raised a few of them. 

Andy Custer, 18, is the second of her sons to make Eagle Scout, with one more younger son also working his way up the ranks. It’s the rare boy that sticks with scouting for so long that he earns the elite title of Eagle. 

Beverly is almost three for three, and if that’s not something to be a proud mom about, she doesn’t know what is.

Andy likes the idea of being part of an Eagle Scout tradition within his family. “I think it would be pretty cool to say all three Custer boys are Eagle Scouts,” he said.

Beverly agrees. “There’s a few families that can say that, but not a whole lot,” she said.

Becoming an Eagle Scout requires earning 21 merit badges (some of which can take six months to complete) and sweating through 150 hours of a community service project.

As for Andy, who’s been a scout with Timonium’s Troop 832 since kindergarten, he never considered any of that to be a hardship. In fact, he was happy to put his hours in, renovating the gymnasium at one of his favorite places, the Towson Presbyterian Church.

Why did Andy choose the church’s gym as his improvement project? “'Cuz it was a mess!” Andy exclaimed. “It’s the room that I go in a lot, and it was just hard to breathe in there because it was so dusty, and you can’t play basketball. When you’re dribbling these basketballs, the dust just clouds up. It’s not fun.”

Andy, and a group of helpers, started by cleaning out the gym’s supply closet and throwing away the junk. They swept the whole gym over and over, and then mopped it several times and waxed it. “And this is while we were painting the walls, too,” added Andy. “Some people were painting the walls, other people were mopping. We had a pretty good system going.”

Andy added a painted mural to the walls, using a sketch that a friend in his youth group had drawn. Andy is modest about it. “It’s nothing too fancy,” he said. “It’s just a big picture of a cross. I guess it’s about six feet high. It’s just a red and blue cross with a ribbon going around it.”

The entire project took about six weeks.

Nick Dordai, Andy’s scout master, never doubted that Andy would see his project through and achieve his new rank of Eagle. “Andy is a really great kid,” he said. “He’s the strong silent type. He really enjoyed scouting, he was really great working with the younger boys. The younger boys really respected Andy and looked up to him. In turn, he really had a lot of patience with them and enjoyed teaching them the skills that he had learned. He’s just a good kid to have around. He was always there when there was something fun to do, and when there was work to do, he was always there to help. We’re really happy that he made Eagle.”

Andy attended Towson High School, but decided to get his GED last June instead of pursuing a diploma. “He aced the GED,” said Beverly. “He was in the 99th percentile.” Beverly hopes that next, Andy will look into joining the Maryland Army National Guard. Andy’s not opposed to that idea, but his heart is pointing him in a different direction.

“I just want to do some kind of volunteer organization that helps people,” said Andy. He’s interested in outreach programs like AmeriCorps that provide community services.

Andy’s official Eagle ceremony will be this Saturday, March 26, at the Towson Presbyterian Church. Maybe afterward, he’ll invite all the guests upstairs to the church’s gym to shoot some hoops.  If there’s one thing Andy can vouch for, it’s that the gym is clean.