I'm not sure why Bill Abbott and I call each other "cuz." Bill, whose mind is a like a trap for such details, can tell us. I suspect it comes from Kangaroo Court. At a certain point, once Dave King retired (he was always "da Judge"--as in "Here comes da judge!") I was promoted to ye presider over the court, having been a perfectly maladroit defense attorney for some years, and whipped-cream-pie set-up man earlier. So when I was Judge Bill Abbott was at least once the Prosecuting Attorney. In the custom of that all-camp evening program, it had to become clear that the judge and prosecutor were in cahoots--that, in short, the defendent, some hapless staff member or camper, didn't have a chance of justice. Probably Bill and I made this point clear by referring to each other as cousins. "Hey there, cuz!" said the Judge to the Prosecutor. "Well, howdy cuz!" was the Prosecutor's smirking rejoinder, adding a slap on the back. When I was the VC of Thunderbird village in 1974 (the village existed for one week, ever) Bill was my camper, at 10 years old. Later he became one of my counselors and a VC. Now he's a colleague on the Trustees. Time flies...and also doesn't. For one of the periodic alumni updates, sent to our listserv in the summer of 2006, Bill wrote: I was a camper from '70 - '79 and a counselor from '80 - '84. I took many Adventure trips through FV, including the Adirondacks excursion with Sue Moriarity as our leader and the Rainer cross country trip with Mike Larison (now FV's forester!) as our leader! My brother and sister, Ken and Ann, were also campers and staff members. We found FV through the Summit YMCA. I'm now a banker working and living in Manhattan and serve on the Alumni Association as well as the Board of Trustees. Ken and Ann both live in Bozeman, MT. Ken is a subcontractor for a painting contractor there and ANN works for a child welfare agency. Ken has a little girl named Karen Leigh, eight years old, and Ann has two girls; Price now 20 and Morgan now 15!The picture at the top of this entry was taken in April of 2007. I took my Penn students camping overnight at Banks Hill (that's a long story--never mind why) and Bill happened to be in camp. So he came up
to the camp site (as did John Giannotti) and told my students a few stories. Afterward, they looked at me and said, "Who was that guy?" And by the way: how the generations and the networks converge--the young woman to the far right in the pic, wearing the green sweatshirt, is Ellie Kane, my student and advisee at Penn and also now in her second summer as FV counselor. She loves it. To the left here is a photo of Bill on the last day of the summer of '84. Click the image to see some more '84 pics. Well, Bill's seen this entry and adds the following Abbottesque narrative curlicue:
I can confirm that the origin of the use of the term Cuz indeed came out of our wonderful Kangaroo Court evening activities! As a camper, I always loved Kangaroo Court nights. The whole affair was hysterical! I'll never forget when poor Maurice Penn, my counselor in cabin 15 in old Outpost, was accused and convicted of yelling "It's great to be alive" in spontaneous outbursts! Maurice would yell this at the top of his lungs from our cabin's porch on beautiful mornings and by the end of our first session in Outpost the whole cabin would join him! And once we got the hang of it we'd do it all day long when we were having fun, which was pretty much all the time! (The cabin had some great kids in it - my brother was there as well as David Lovice and John Bear to mention just a few. It was also the summer that Rick and Mike Cobb taught me lacrosse, a sport I continued to play right on through college!).And this guy's a banker, so I think he needs to stop thinking about pies in the face and get back to work.
As a counselor, it was a career highlight (up there with reprising the Hettler Brothers' [Bill and Bobby] "Russian Midget" routine with my brother Ken!) to act as the prosecuting attorney with Hanging Judge Filgrits as the presiding Magistrate! Having done the bumbling defense attorney once or twice, it was great to be on the other end of a cream pie in the face! I remember that we'd hold off calling each other "cousin" until we'd convict a kid or counselor or two. Then we'd start calling each other "Cuz" and asking about "how your uncle's doing" and such. Once the audience understood that "these guys are related" it knew there was no hope for any "suspects" to get a fair trial! Even now, whenever I hear the term "kangaroo court", I always think of those hilarious evenings at Frost Valley!
