The Girl Scouts of San Jacinto Council will kick off the 2012 centennial year of Girl Scouts by hosting the organization’s national convention here in Houston. The big event will be held at the George R. Brown Convention Center, and an estimated 25,000 girls and adults are expected to attend.

Other celebrations throughout the 2012 centennial year will include the release of a commemorative coin, a sing-along on the Mall in Washington, D.C., a float in the Rose Parade and a nationwide Take Action project called Forever Green. 

Serving 76,000 girls with 18,000 volunteers in a 26-county area, the GSSJC is now the largest Girl Scout council in the United States. It is committed to giving every Girl Scout the chance to discover the leader she can be through a variety of activities and programs. It's no surprise that many of Houston's most successful women and many in key leadership roles were once Girl Scouts themselves. Leadership is one of the key lessons Rosi Hernandez, vice president of corporate partnerships for the Houston Astros, took away from her years as a Girl Scout growing up in Puerto Rico. According to Hernandez, learning real survival skills at camp was a great experience for a Catholic school girl who grew up in a comfortable environment.

In high school, Hernandez earned the Gold Award, Girl Scouts' highest honor, for a project she developed to promote tourism in Puerto Rico. 

“It was really something that stood out on my resume and my college application,” says Hernandez, who now holds a master's degree in public relations and marketing.

She has served on the GSSJC Board of Directors since 2005 and is committed to advancing the Gold Award Program as the equivalent of the Eagle Scout Award  so many male CEOs of U.S. companies earned in their Boy Scout days. In addition to leadership, Girl Scouting helps develop character, confidence, self-esteem, community awareness and the strength to remain “above the fray” and resistant to peer pressures, Hernandez said. Entrepreneurship is another key lesson, she adds, admitting she was “ridiculously competitive” when it came to cookie sales. 

Houston native Gloria Vittone Echeverria, now working toward her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine, also earned the Gold Award while attending Langham Creek High School.  Her project was the development of an audio cassette  library chronicling the interesting life stories of people in her community.  

Girl Scouts — especially the Gold Award projects — gives girls the confidence to tackle a large project, break it into manageable steps, and see it through to the end, she said. Today, she continues to give back to scouting through a committee called Science, Technology, Engineering and Mechanics which is composed of professionals who develop programs for girls, such as You Be the Scientist. There, girls get to snap on rubber gloves and work with lab equipment and mentors who show them how to test and evaluate a scientific hypothesis. More importantly, they learn science is fun and accessible, Echeverria said. 

“It’s nice for the girls to have a young adult role model to look up to — not an old man with a beard and a scary lab coat,” Echeverria continued. 

Another active STEM volunteer is Vicki Freeman, Ph.D., chair and teaching professor in Clinical Laboratory Sciences at The University of Texas Medical Branch. She was a Girl Scout throughout her formative years, but also a campus Girl Scout when she went to college. Later on she became a troop mother/helper when her oldest daughter joined the Brownies. The family even participated in Girl Guides in the UK when her husband was assigned to a British Air Force Base. It was when she came to Texas that Freeman read about the correlation between girls’ math and science scores and their self-esteem in middle school.

“It’s not cool to like science and math at that age, so girls back away from it,” she said. “STEM helps encourage them to believe they can do math and science and shows them that there are careers that use those skills.” 

Today, both of Freeman’s daughters, Wendy and Dawn, are grown, having both attained Gold Awards as Girl Scouts and now employed in fields requiring a strong math and science acumen.

Marguerite Woung-Chapman, El Paso Corporation's vice president, secretary, and chief governance officer at El Paso Corporation, has served on the board of GSSJC since 2008. Although she was not a Girl Scout as a child, she became a volunteer in her daughter’s troop, and later became an adult member herself. Girl Scouts helped create a bridge between her daughter and herself and opened up a meaningful dialogue between them, she said. 

“There is a misperception that scouting is all about camping and crafts, but it’s more than that," she said. “Girl Scouting creates an environment that enables girls to become leaders. They gain a real awareness of their community and then, as young adults, they are motivated to go out and serve their community’s needs.” 

Woung-Chapman says Houston is the perfect place to begin the Girl Scouts’ 100th anniversary festivities. 

“It’s a great honor for the San Jacinto Council to be selected as the host, but I think it also says a lot about Houston. Our population really represents the face of America’s future. Houston is the perfect microcosm of what the next 100 years of Girl Scouts is going to look like,” she said.

Houstonians will be saddling up February 23 and riding on over to the Hilton Americas Hotel for an evening featuring a live interview with legendary actor Robert Duvall, celebrating the Texas epic mini-series Lonesome Dove and benefiting Texas Children’s Cancer Center. Festivities begin at 6:15 p.m. and continue on until 9:30 p.m.

The Academy Award, Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner will take the stage to share memories of his role as character Augustus “Gus” McCrae, in a live interview conducted by Bob Schieffer, moderator of Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer and former anchor of the CBS Evening News. 

Houston philanthropists Lester and Sue Smith will chair the seventh annual Evening with a Legend dinner, presented by Wells Fargo.

The Lester and Sue Smith Foundation will generously match every dollar raised at the event, which benefits pediatric genomic cancer research conducted at Texas Children’s Cancer Center, the Number 1 pediatric cancer center in Texas as ranked by U.S. News & World Report.Guests will hear personal stories from Duvall and relive the epic story of two former Texas rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. Duvall has stated in several forums, including on CBS Sunday Morning, that his role as Augustus “Gus” McCrae was his personal favorite.

All proceeds from An Evening with a Legend benefit research at Texas Children’s Cancer Center. Children come to the cancer center from across the nation and around the world for state-of-the art treatments, many of which are unavailable elsewhere.

To learn more about Texas Children’s Cancer Center, visit www.txccc.org.For more information about An Evening with a Legend, visit www.texaschildrens.org/legend. To reserve a table, please call Jayne Dumolt at 832-824-6818. Tables start at $3000; individual tickets are $300 each.

People often ask: Where do you get ideas for your columns? Well, this one came to me during the cool down after my step class. In between calling out commands to stretch our calf muscles, our young instructor, Sabra, lamented that she’s starting to forget things. 

“I’m now dependent on sticky notes to keep my life in order,” she groaned as we relaxed the biceps in our upper arms.

She feared her gray matter was having too many gray moments.  

Nervous laughter swept through the class of 20, all over the age of 30-something. In between exhales, I smiled and gave her a knowing nod. I’ve survived for years thanks to sticky notes, to-do lists and e-mail reminders. My motto: The shortest pencil is better than the longest memory. 

I’ve made peace with having to write everything down. In fact, I had to write down the idea for this column as soon as I got home from class, or I would have forgotten it. Many in my circle of girlfriends share this malady. We’ve discovered as life gets busier, it’s harder and harder to remember simple things. We rack our brains to recall the name of an actor we saw in a movie last night. Wonder if we left the milk on the counter. We forget where we put car keys, cell phones and, sometimes for a moment or two, even our kids. 

I used to fret about losing my memory, but I don’t any more. With age-earned wisdom, I liken sporadic forgetfulness to a baseball catcher’s overload. With a job, a husband, kids, dogs and a book club, there are simply too many balls to snatch. The less urgent stuff – buying stamps, taking out the trash or fertilizing the roses — occasionally drops out of my mitt. That’s not a sign dementia is my next stop on the train ride of life. 

There’s no shame in relying on a system — even if it’s made up of colorful scraps of paper — to help you remember to turn off the flatiron or pick up poster board at the drug store. There are lots of mornings I jot down a to-do list before I’ve gotten out of bed. I stash a pad and pencil in my nightstand drawer for that reason. Random notes to remind me to: e-mail Cathy about a book I just finished, figure out what movie theaters are near Houston before I buy a gift card for my nephew or pull the pot roast out of the freezer so we can eat before eight tonight.

So, what if I can’t remember the name of Dan Brown’s newest book (The Lost Symbol) or the collective term for a group of turtles (a dole). I’ve already apologized to my teammates for our third place finish in last month’s trivia challenge. I should have remembered the book title. I don’t think I ever knew the turtle term, though.

For decades my head’s CPU has been bombarded with information. My computer-like brain is always on the job, processing data gathered from my thousands of days on this earth. When I was 12, it was so much easier. I barely had a decade of life under my belt. Twelve years of fact and fiction to keep straight. Maybe three contemporary U.S. Presidents and four Beatles to remember. There was lots of room in my head to memorize state capitals, multiplication tables and words for a spelling test. Homework was my brainteaser.

If there was something important I needed to do, my Mom reminded me. Back then I had maybe 50 people in my life, including schoolmates, aunts, uncles and TV characters. Nowadays, more folks than that follow me on Twitter. 

As the years pile up, so does the minutia. Names, places, computer programs, all vying for a spot in the mind’s filing cabinet. It’s an ongoing battle to determine what’s worth remembering, what can be retrieved by a Google search and what to delete from your cerebral hard drive. No one keeps track of everything. And why would we want to when there are notepads, calendars and other memory-saving shortcuts at our beck-and-call? 

More power to those of us who’ve joyfully embraced our yellow and pink sticky notes as a white flag of surrender. We fight back by keeping our minds sharp and our pencils sharper. There was one more thing I was going to add, but I forgot what it was. Guess I should have written it down.

A federal judge issued an injunction November 26 to keep Houston’s 70 red light cameras from coming down — three weeks after voters elected to turn them off. 

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes’ injunction will ensure the city continues to ticket and collect fines from red light runners caught on camera through November 15 –– the date Mayor Annise Parker announced the lights were turned off, following the defeat of a referendum to continue their use. The injunction is in response to a contract dispute filed by the city against American Traffic Solutions, the company that installed and maintained the cameras, and a countersuit by ATS against the city.

Houston has had red light cameras in place at several major intersections since the fall of 2006. Since then, they have resulted in ticketing of 800,000 drivers for a total of $44 million in fines, of which ATS was entitled to a commission of $1.75 per ticket. In September 2010 alone, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company earned $31,000 from more than 17,000 tickets issued here in Houston citywide. 

The battle against the devices began last summer with the formation of Citizens Against Red Light Cameras, a political action committee headed by criminal attorney Randall Kubosh, his mother, Francis, and his two brothers. Paul Kubosh, an attorney who specializes in traffic court cases, and Michael Kubosh, a former minister and currently owner of a bail bonding company, are the others involved. 

The family-run PAC fought to have a charter amendment banning the cameras placed on the November ballot. The wording on the ballot read, “Shall the City continue to use red light cameras to enforce state and local laws relating to traffic safety?” 

A Special Purpose Committee Campaign Finance Report shows more than $210,000 donated to Keep Houston Safe, which supported a campaign for the continued use of cameras. Of that, ATS contributed $150,000. 

A poll conducted by Rice University’s Bob Stein prior to the election showed 55 percent of voters were in favor of keeping the red light cameras in place. On November 2, the amendment to maintain the cameras failed by a 53.2 percent margin, but the contract dispute underway in federal court has put the voters’ mandate in limbo. 

By Judge Hughes’ order, cameras will remain in place until the litigation is finalized. 

The city’s contract with ATS stipulates that the company is paid $2,395 per month for each of the 70 cameras at 50 major intersections –– more than $167,000 total –– and that a four-month notice must be given to cancel the contract, which was scheduled to run until 2014. The extra expense to honor the contract could cost the city $668,000 at a time when it is already facing a budget shortfall of $70 million. 

At about the same time as the ruling regarding the contract dispute with Houston, ATS also celebrated a unanimous ruling by the California Supreme Court upholding a lower court’s ruling on the legality of the payment structure in contracts between municipalities and private contractors to provide equipment and support services for automated traffic enforcement systems. 

Houston is the bellwether battle as the state legislature is also taking a look at the legality of red-light camera use, says Michael Kubosh. That’s why ATS is fighting so hard to keep the Houston cameras in place, he added. 

The City of Houston really doesn’t want them removed because of the revenue stream they provide, despite the voters’ mandate, Kubosh said, and whatever the outcome in federal court, an appeal from either side is likely. 

“The citizens of Houston should be very concerned that the city attorney is providing a weak defense for the voters,” says Kubosh. “I see trickery. [The City] and the red light camera company want the same thing. They want the cameras back up and making money.”  

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, red light running is the leading cause of urban automobile crashes. In 2004, more than 900 people were killed in the U.S. and an estimated 168,000 were injured in crashes involving red light running. Statistics from the Houston-Galveston Area Council show that red light accidents in the Houston area account for approximately $225 million per year in total comprehensive cost.

Deborah Quinn Hensel is the news editor of Houston Woman Magazine. To contact her, send email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .