28 Years Later, A Tennessee Eagle Scout Gets His Badge

HENDERSONVILLE, TN — Earning the Eagle Scout award means being an Eagle Scout forever, even if it takes forever to actually receive the badge, as a former Hendersonville Boy Scout learned this weekend.

In 1989, Carl McCoy, then a Hendersonville High School student, earned Scouting's top honor from Troop 406. But, as he told NewsChannel 5, there was a change in the troop's leadership around the same time and he never received his Court of Honor, the formal presentation of the award that is one of Scouting's most revered ceremonies.

McCoy finished high school, went to college, served in the military — as he told the station "Life happens" — and never got that ceremony. Fast-forward to the spring of 2017 when Dana Denton was cleaning out the troop's office and stumbled across McCoy's paperwork, noticing that a Court of Honor had never been held.

She took to Facebook, she told WTVF, to see if anyone knew McCoy, by now a sergeant with the Sumner County Sheriff's Department and a former Student Resource Officer at his alma mater. Denton is Facebook friends with HHS' band director, Jeff Phillips, who, of course, knew McCoy.

Denton got in touch with McCoy and Sunday he finally got that Court of Honor.

"It's not often that you get an Eagle Scout that comes before you guys that has gray showing in their hair, and somebody that's lead the life of an Eagle," McCoy said during the ceremony. "The recognition I think after working so hard for so many years for something and then not having that moment, your moment in the spotlight. Better late than never they say."

Photo by J.R. Lind, Patch staff