Back during the Paleolithic Era, when I was a teenager, I was in Boy Scouts with my best friend Dave. We had a very active troop, and went camping as often as we could. We won the Best Troop in The Valley District award 3 years running. 

Dave’s dad, Ralph, worked at the Cincinnati Post and Times Star, the evening paper in Cincinnati. We actually had 2 papers a day back then, the morning Cincinnati Enquirer, and the evening Post and Times Star. Ralph worked in the department where he took away the empty cardboard tubes when they ran out of paper, and used a forklift to bring the new gigantic rolls of newsprint to reload the presses. The cardboard tubes had 2 wooden plugs, one in each end, and when he was taking the old cardboard tubes out to dispose of them, he would extract the wooden plugs, and toss them in a large box, to save for us Boy Scouts. The plugs, made from nice dry pine, had a rough hole in the middle, and we could light the rough part with a match, and used them as fire starters. They worked great. Every campout we would bring along a large box of the plugs, and use them.

Being boys, we dubbed them “buttholes’. It was common to hear someone shout, “Hey! Toss me a couple buttholes so I can get this fire started!” 

One time Ralph came along on a campout and heard us calling out for a couple buttholes, and he took the troop aside that evening, and gave us a talk about how unseemly it was to call them buttholes. That is not very polite, he said, and instead, you boys should call them “buntholes”, to avoid offending anybody. Privately, we scouts found that hilarious, but while Ralph was there, we called them buntholes.

The boxes holding the buttholes were large, and after we used up a goodly portion of them, we would crush the box top down, and it made a great seat to sit on, and was the favored throne to sit on at night around the campfire. If you got there first, you could cop the butthole box, and not have to sit on the ground or a stump, neither of which was as comfortable as the box of buttholes. 

That went on for 3 or 4 years, until I discovered girls, and quit Boy Scouts. I was reminded of this story today when I went with a friend to a store that made bundt cakes.