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Years later bump. I also remember they had a paper drive and one of the fathers involved mentions a big bundle of magazines they have, which is even better than newspapers - he says - because they weigh more page-for-page than newspapers. But when I was in scouting and we had a paper drive the people we were sending out paper to would refuse magazines because the treatment the paper got to make it slick made it unable to be recycled. And of course all this (the book and my experience) were long before people in general did curbside recycling.

True-to-life book for boys written in maybe the 1950s or 1960s; my parents bought used for me in the 1970s. I don't know that it was published by/on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America but it could have been.
It is about a boy whose family moves into a new town and he wants to join the Cub Scouts - the real Cub Scouts, not a Scout-Out situation - but he isn't allowed to because all the dens are full. If he can find enough boys to start a new den they could all join together. He does, and they do. His mother becomes their den mother (not den leader, as it was called by the time I was in Cub Scouts).
At the pack meeting where they join, held in the school gym, there's a tug-of-war activity after the meeting. Our heros win, even though they were all new and/or younger than the rest of the pack, because the rest were all wearing the full Cub Scout uniform including hard-soled shoes whereas the new kids were all wearing sneakers (except one boy whose mother always makes him dress up, and he is wearing shoes with crepe soles so they're practically as good as sneakers) so they have better traction on the gym floor.
At a later point in the book the boys in the new den (which is well established by now, but it's still their first year I think) happen upon a small house fire. and all the boys know what to do: run to the fire alarm call box and get the fire department. (Remember, this was in the 1950s before everyone had a cell phone.) We follow our protagonist as he does this. But it turns out that all the other boys did it too, and since they don't all live in the same neighborhood note they all ran to their own neighborhoods' fire alarm call boxes - because that's where they knew where one was - so this relatively small house fire is suddenly a six-alarmer.
Edited by randomsurfer