The only camps I went to were religious ones that went for 5 days (4 1/2 really) so they were over before you knew it. The main goal was to find a girlfriend.
I always wondered what it was like for you all who went for a month or the whole summer? I’d imagine being with some of the same kids for a month every year meant some very close friendships.
From “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”.
“And the counselors, want no sissies,
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.”
It’s funny you say this, as a deeply weird kid, my mother was sending me audio tapes for my Walkman of Allan Sherman’s songs during that summer.
And my degree, if you can’t tell by username, is in Irish Literature.
A woman told me her daughter worked at a camp up in Minnesota where their were some “odd” rules. One is to not ask the kids about their home life or even their last names (the kids mostly went by nicknames).
What it was was a camp for kids from wealthy families or families of celebrities and they didnt want the exposure.
I went to day camps when I was a young kid and sleep away camp when I got bit older and was in Girl Scouts. I don’t remember anything too particularly traumatic except the underlying feeling of not wanting to be there after about a week. I’m a person who really really treasures, nay, needs a certain amount of solitude and obviously that isn’t happening when you’re surround by five hundred other girls. I’m also a very picky eater so I spent weeks on end pretty much hungry all the time (dispelling the myth that "if you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything. Nope.) One summer was horse camp, which got me over my desire to own one (a horse, not a camp). It also cured me of my fear of yellow jackets; they were all around us and I don’t recall one girl getting stung ever. Mosquitoes were another story, however. I remember my parents coming to pick me up and I looked like a, well, someone who was covered with swollen, red bites. One of my favorites things were the sing a longs. Holy cow, I can still remember some of the songs
"Azalea trails, deep in the mountainside . . . "
I grew up in suburban Connecticut, and sleep-away summer camp seemed pointless, since everyone had a big backyard (so you could camp out there if you wanted) and there were woods nearby that you could explore. They did run a day camp through the school system and my parents made us go to that, mostly to keep us busy as they both worked. Not much fun to be forced to play softball outside on a really hot, humid summer day. (Especially not when that grade school was air conditioned.)
Meanwhile, I remember that the New York Times would run articles about what to pack for your kid’s sleep-away summer camp and where to buy it from. I just found one article, from 1977, suggesting that it might cost $500-800 to equip the kid for camp (let alone the fees for the camp, plus travel to it). $800 then is like $3,000 today, so it sounded to me like summer camp was for rich city kids.
I went to church camp for one week when I was 12. Presbyterians don’t really lay any heavy religious stuff on you so it was pretty good. We lived in a cabin with a flush toilet. The next year I went to Boy Scout camp where we lived in two man tents and had latrines. Biggest mistake of Boy Scout camp? Not using insect repellent because “hey, I didn’t need it last year”. Came home with a lot of mosquito bites. Lesson learned for next year. Most of boy scout scout camp was good except the one day cooks were off and they sent us meat and vegetables to cook for ourselves. The horror! The horror!
Summer camp is one of my fondest childhood memories. I really enjoyed my times there. I went to a camp in the mountains of Pennsylvania for nine years, usually for six weeks or so. The camp was not religious but almost all the kids there seemed to be Jews from the mid-Atlantic states.
I did mile swims, theater stuff, wood shop, managed the radio station (a shack with a (probably illegal) 50-watt AM transmitter from the bronze age), got my lifeguard certification, learned to play poker, kayaked down a river for a week, built model rockets, learned first-aid skills, competed in the yearly color war events, built fires, learned to play D&D, made pottery, played on the soccer team (badly), learned to ride a unicycle, got into mischief, and met my first ever girlfriend.
I would have loved it too. I think I considered summer camp as one of those things that only existed in books. You know, like boarding school.
Now I read that part of the reason for summer camp back in the day was just to get the kids out of places like New York City in the summers because 1. it was so blasted hot and 2. to keep them from trouble and 3. hopefully to instill some values.
The history channel had a show on that where the kids would all board trains and buses at Union station and that most camps kept a kind of residential native american for some sort of mascot.
What is that camps name? Is it still there?
Sadly most camps are gone because they tended to sit on prime real estate.
I loved it. Much like Dewey Finn, I wasn’t sure why I needed to leave the woods of southern Connecticut for the woods of western Massachusetts, but I had a good time when I was there. I did a 4 week session every summer for about 5 years.
I did one week of Boy Scout camp, but wasn’t crazy about it. Shitting in an outhouse and sleeping in leaky Army surplus tents wasn’t my idea of a great time.
The New York Times still promotes and sponsors the “Fresh Air Fund” which arranges a summer away from the city for low-income kids. Some go to sleep-away camps and some stay with host families in the suburbs. (Personally, I wouldn’t mind a swap, so I could spend a summer in the city. The suburbs always seemed deadly dull to me.)
I was a counselor at a Scout Camp in the middle of Nebraska. We got tornadoes.
More than once.
I went to a sleep away camp for a week every summer, from ages 8-12. Strangely enough, while my family was catholic and almost never attended church, the camp was hard core evangelical. Lots of praying, singing Jesus songs at the campfire ("we’re from spring hill! And we know god’s will!), and testifying about accepting Jesus into your heart. (Luckily my heart was more resilient)
It was pretty cool in many ways. Had cool themed areas in camp, like tepees or rail cabooses to stay in. Got to try for the first time stuff like shooting .22’s, riding horses, canoeing, etc.
When old enough, you could do cool outpost camps, where you went on trips. One trip I paddled a 30ft voyageur canoe around islands in Lake Michigan.
A source of humor for my family was the fact I’d get into a fistfight with someone every year. My tolerance for assholes was pretty low, so I’d just have it out. One year, a kid kept picking at me while I was trying to sleep, and I finally got up and starting kicking the shit out of them while they were encumbered in their sleeping bag. They ended up getting a big lecture from the counselor about their behavior and Jesus, and they must have spent the next hour crying about not wanting to go to hell.
The camp must have a winning formula of outdoors and religion as they’ve only gotten bigger over the years.
Summer camp is vacation for the parents.
This is the first summer that both my kids will be at camp. I have no idea what my wife and I will do for 4 weeks :D:D:D
I worked at a YMCA camp for a summer. We had a kid who was seriously homesick, and constantly tried to use the phone to get his folks to come pick him up. When that didn’t work, he would show up at the nurse’s hut with various and sundry medical complaints he hoped would get him sent home. One time, he said he had a toothache, so the nurse said, “Let’s see if we can cure that with a filter over your mouth to catch the germs that cause the pain.” He came out of the nurse’s hut with a Kotex maxi pad taped over his mouth. He wore it most of the day, though later on it had slipped down under his chin like a necklace.
I went to day camp for several years. Though I loved the camp itself, what I remember most is the songs we sang on the bus.
It’s called Island Lake. (It’s on a lake with an island in it. Pennsylvanians are very creative.) Still there.