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Mark Wendle has always credited his time in the Boy Scouts and his troop leader, Jack Ross, for helping him through difficult times.

A retired teacher with a doctorate in biology, one might not suspect that Wendle, now 81, struggled as a student throughout high school and college. Scouts, Wendle said, along with Ross’s guidance, helped him develop a sense of dedication and confidence that helped him throughout his life.

That was a story Wendle wanted to share, he said, in honor of Ross.

Wendle’s journey in the Scouts first began at the age of 8, in the basement of Farmin school on Second Avenue in Sandpoint.

Over the years he would work his way through the Cub Scouts ranks to reach Webelos, before joining the Boy Scouts as a Tenderfoot.

Wendle recalled an early memory of his Boy Scout days — a camping trip to Cusick, Washington.

Wendle and the other young campers had stayed up all night in their excitement, causing a disgruntled Ross to threaten to cut the trip short.

“We didn't know that was going to be so offensive for Jack, who had to take time off from his family to come and babysit,” Wendle said.

Ross didn’t cancel the trip, though. Instead, he told Wendle something that would remain a recurring theme throughout his life.

“Jack told me that you can climb any mountain if you take one step at a time,” Wendle said.

That motto was simple, yet it would be essential in the years to come. Throughout Wendle’s time in the Boy Scouts, he struggled in school, he said. He constantly passed classes with “D” grades thanks in part to arts and crafts assignments.

No matter how hard he worked, Wendle said, he could never seem to get his grades up. At one point he found a book that had numerous pictures and used it for three different book reports.

His name appeared more than once on the “Tuesday morning Honor Roll” — an ironically named list of students who had failed two or more subjects in a week, called out over the PA system.

“[Eventually], I imagine, somebody stepped in and said that you can't do that,” he said. “There were a number of high school students who were failing. And so I guess they thought this would help us out.”

Despite those challenges, Wendle continued through the Boy Scouts. He and his scouting friends, Wayne Evenson and Dean Ostheller, decided they wanted to try for the highest award in Explorer Scouting, the Silver Award.

Wendle, an ever tenacious young scout, figured he already had skills he could apply and get the award within a week or two. But to help him, Ross said Wendle would have to complete every skill anew from that point forward. The entire process took Wendle a year and a half.

“I'm thankful for Jack for doing that,” he said. “I didn't give him credit.”

It was close to this time that tragedy struck in Wendle’s life, he said. At 14 years old, his mother, a nurse at Bonner General, died by suicide — something he witnessed, having picked open the bathroom lock to find her partway through the process.

Wendle called his father, a doctor, who was at work. His Dad would later tell him he had done everything right. Even so, his mother died.

“Every day of my life, I think about that,” he said. “I've actually reached a point where I would not trade for my brothers or my dad or granddad to be in my shoes.”

Following his mother’s death, Wendle said his father, Neil, did everything he could to support him and his siblings.

“He was loving parents. He tried to be a Mom and a Dad. And it was a struggle,” Wendle said.

Even so, in the time after his mother’s death, Ross became a kind of second parental figure to Wendle.

“That's why it was also so special to him to have a loving Scout leader who could take him under his wing,” said Wendle’s wife, Betty. “Because he really needed something at that time.”

Wendle continued through Boy Scouts and made it to the University of Idaho. There, a counselor told him graduating would be impossible.

“He told me I failed my complete entrance exam and ‘that I would never receive my diploma from the U of I or anywhere else,'” Wendle wrote in a letter. “‘I was wasting my Dad’s money, my time and the school’s time being there. I should leave school and seek a job in a fire lookout.’ To this day I do not know what he thought I would do in the fall, spring and summer months. I thanked him and four and a half years later, I graduated with a bachelor’s in agriculture.”

After graduating, Wendle moved on to earn his teaching certificate and married Betty.

He taught sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade science classes, for eight years before becoming a high school science teacher at Newport High School in Washington.

Being someone who struggled as a student helped him be a better teacher, he said.

“I taught junior high, high school and college, and [Betty and I] feel that a teacher should be one who struggled, and not a straight-A student,” he said. “My honey, I think, got all Cs in high school. And she made an awesome teacher.”

During his time teaching high school, Wendle went on trips with his students to study orcas and created a program in his advanced biology class where students learned to assist in cat spay operations.

“We had doctors come in, as well as nurses and anesthesiologists. And they would come in and talk to us. And we did 200 cats that were brought in by the owner,” he said.

Years later while lying in bed waiting for surgery at the hospital, Wendle was approached by a young man.

“[He] came up to the foot of the bed, and said, ‘Are you Mark Wendle?’ And I said yes,” Wendle said. “He said, ‘Oh, I was in your school, I was in your class. And I was an anesthesiologist for the cats. I went home and told my mom, that's what I want to do.’ And today he is an anesthesiologist.”

During his time teaching at Newport High School, Wendle began taking summer school for a master’s degree at the University of Wyoming — taking things one step at a time.

At the U of W, Wendle took a graduate entrance exam. The tests took a full day, and Wendle failed them horribly, he said. Yet he persisted, and four summers later, he graduated with a master’s in biology.

After that, Wendle attended the University of Northern Colorado. A professor asked him to take a GRE, which Wendle had to explain he had already taken.

“I pleaded for him to please consider my grades of the last 100 hours,” Wendle wrote in his letter. “He thought about it for a short while and then told me what to do: Put my GRE test results in an envelope and slide it under his door. That was the very last time I heard from my professor about my horrible GRE test results.”

A little less than four years later, Wendle graduated with a doctorate of biology.

Despite his many challenges, Betty said, Wendle never stopped working toward his goals.

“That made him strive, I think, for whatever he wanted in life, and he succeeded,” she said. “He attributes a lot of that, again, to the Boy Scouts.”

None of those accomplishments, Wendle said, would have been possible without Ross’s support and guidance. Ross has since passed, but his lessons had a lifelong impact on Wendle.

“To my very beloved Boy Scout Explorer Scout Leader, Jack, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for all your efforts and patience with us, Sir,” he wrote. “Without your idea of ‘climbing any mountain, if I took it one step at a time,’ I never would have made it all happen.”