It’s no surprise that Frank Tsuru, president and chief executive of M3 Midstream LLC, includes the Boy Scouts of America among numerous pro bono causes he supports. Tsuru was once a Boy Scout himself—an Eagle Scout to be exact.

Sure, thousands of boys become Scouts until other interests—cars, girls or sports—come along in their teen years and entice many to drift away from a troop. As successful adults, many may occasionally donate time or money to support one of the best-known youth programs around.

But Tsuru’s involvement spans more than 40 years and efforts at every level of the organization. He started as an 8- year-old Cub Scout when he and his family lived in Chicago, recruited by his cubmaster dad to join their church pack.

From that humble beginning, his Scouting career has included chairmanship of metropolitan Houston’s Sam Houston Area Council—one of the largest regional organizations in the U.S. Scout organization—and service on the board of the National Eagle Scout Association among several leadership positions.

His consistent involvement has earned him a Silver Beaver, one of the highest honors that Scouting presents to its most dedicated volunteers, as well as the National Outstanding Eagle Scout Award.

Tsuru tells Midstream Business he continues to have “a passion and involvement with Scouting” after all these years. He takes the Scout motto of “Do a good turn daily” to heart as much now as he did as a boy.

Following Cub Scouts, he went through the Scout organization’s traditional crossover ceremony and joined a Boy Scout troop. Then he worked his way through each of the increasingly difficult ranks—Scout, Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and Eagle.

Attaining Eagle Scout is no small achievement. Fewer than 5% of those who enter Scouting earn the rarified rank before they reach the maximum age of 18. The rank requires completion of a rigorous set of requirements, the most difficult of which stipulates a boy must plan and supervise a significant beneficial project on his own—a challenge many adults would have trouble fulfilling.

Tsuru admits his Eagle Scout project “was kind of over the top. It was a complete renovation, a redo, of the basement of our church to make it usable. It was just kind of a storage area that was used for Scouting and all that; all the kids’ and children’s ministries.”

He coordinated volunteers and contractors and budgeted donations of materials and cash to convert the mostly unused church basement into fully usable space.

“The troop was quite a strong unit, and we had a lot of people who were interested in working on this. But there weren’t a lot of Eagle Scouts, so this was a novel thing” at the time, he says.

Following high school and Scouts, he attended the University of Kansas as a petroleum engineering major, the one brief break in his Scouting career. But graduation and his first job served to remind him of what he had accomplished as a Scout, something he admits “I didn’t realize” at first.

“There was a company that came in, a very well known exploration and production company,” Tsuru recalls, that seemed to offer the dream job he and his fellow petroleum engineering students wanted.

“Several of us just thought, ‘Wow, that’s crème de la crème. I really want that job.’ So a lot of my friends I knew were really wanting it. I put my name in and, long story short, I got the job.”

Why him?

“Probably three or four weeks after I got the job, I went and talked to the guy who interviewed me,” he says. “I asked him how come I got the job vs. the other guys—because I knew they were very good. They were good students, they had all the same classes I had and about the same grade-point average. We were all kind of clones.

“He told me, ‘That’s right, everybody was about the same,’” Tsuru recalls, but the new boss explained, “‘I went one step further and looked and I saw you had Eagle Scout—and none of the others did.’”

It was one of many payoffs he’s experienced from his time with Boy Scouts. “For that reason, there I was,” he says.

Tsuru keeps a reminder of his younger days as a Scout with him even now. “Every office, every place that I have worked, I have this shadow box that my mom made me with all my Scout badges. I keep that,” he said. “I keep that to remind me that nothing that I’ve done was because of my smarts or surely not my good looks,” he adds, tongue in cheek. “You did it because, among other things, you were an Eagle Scout. I truly believe that God gave me my talents, and He gets the glory.”

As an adult, he returned to Scouting as cubmaster of a pack that included his son, Seth, while his family lived in Durango, Colorado. Scouting allowed father and son to build a bond through service projects, campouts, hikes and other activities that they could not have developed otherwise.

Tsuru still spends considerable time in the field with today’s Boy Scouts. He’s a top-rank Vigil member of the Scouts’ Order of the Arrow honor society, which includes participation in Eagle Scout courts of honor when boys receive their rank, as well as Order of the Arrow campouts.

“My 53-year-old body doesn’t like that cold, hard ground but you need to do that,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m very involved. It’s important to be there as well as all the other philanthropic organizations in which my wife, Stephanie, and I are involved with. We definitely are on the ground, boots on the ground, getting our hands dirty.”

Tsuru serves in a number of other volunteer roles. He is chairman of the board of Yellowstone Academy, a faithbased school located in an economically challenged Houston neighborhood. He also serves as vice president and a trustee of Houston’s Star of Hope Mission, a faith-based ministry to the homeless, and various other church and volunteer roles. Tsuru is also a member of the Midstream Business editorial advisory board.

He emphasizes that, whatever the organization, it’s important to give back to the community.

“We need people writing checks. It’s important, but we also really need people there on the ground,” he adds. “It is critical to be there.”

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