In the late 90s I got to know Steve Purkis, now a teacher and masterful soccer coach, as a talented VC (Lenape, I believe) and then Camp Director. I saw Steve in action a good deal and came to admire him, but here I want to say something that might seem miscellaneous, off the point. On his day off, Steve almost invariably went to play golf, no so much because his game was good but because his FV buddies loved such outings. I'm sure there were FV staffers over the years--in my time, almost certainly--who played golf, but I didn't notice it. In the 1960s, of course, Grossinger's in Liberty was thriving and had a pretty good 18 holes. But did Wawayanda people actually go there? Maybe because of my image of Grossinger's - the not-Frost Valley, the people there seemingly doing the opposite of what we did - I could never imagining reconciling golf and camp. This is naive and probably also a bias on my part, and maybe it's just symbolic and visceral: after all, I associate camp with a rocky field (rocks so plentiful you could never remove them), a hillside of ferns you'd never mow down, streams you wouldn't divert, and grass, such as it was, that was brown by the middle of July. Even the making of a football field behind the Ad Office in the early 70s seemed incongruous to me. A little after I noticed Steve's forays off camp to the links, I realized there was a 90s gang - Bill Baker prominently among them - that loved to do this. Even during one of our reunions, off they went, and it's a way for them of doing again what they did together summers--a tradition, a real custom they loved. Thus at first disconcerted by all this, now I am instructed: we each have our images of what camp in the summer should be, and we can't impose them. If Steve's excellence was aided by 18 holes, and modest watering at the 19th, I'm all for it. Culture is capacious, or ought to be. And open minds make culture.The photo was taken in the Day Room of the dining hall during a Session 2 lunch, July 1999.
