People often ask me to trace the origins of what has become a robust tradition and core principle: everybody's a winner at Frost Valley, the quasi-non-competitive cooperative spirit of game-playing. Of course there are years when there's more competitive and hard-core winning-and-losing sports and games, but there are also years when the non-competition thing is supreme. If you listen to the audio recording I made during Olympics 2005 (an earlier entry), you'll perhaps be amazed at how readily the campers talk about how everyone's a winner at Frost Valley. Well, first of all, we took very seriously the book New Games (and another book, More New Games) which was part of a movement that became known as "the New Games movement." Yes, it was an early 1970s thing. New Games filtered into FV in 1973, three years before the book itself was published. By '76, when we got copies of it, we were already using official New Games and had made up a bunch ourselves. One from the book was called "Hunker Hawser." The photo above shows that game in action.
Ken Barton (great and hilarious Program Director in the early 70s--who came to us from Halbe and Jane Brown's beloved Camp Fitch) was a phys ed teacher and brought us "Gumbo Softball," a funny and high-spirited and somewhat less competitive version of regular softball, which can get rather grim and intense. I won't go through the rules of Gumbo Softball and how it differs from the regular game, but interested parties should feel free to ask me. Wonderful game--and it takes about half the time to play it. Once Ken gave us "Gumbo Softball" we began making up Gumbo versions of every game we could think of. By around 1977 and '78, "gumbo" was a word associated with me. Everything that was a little weird, a little funny, a little less serious--with a bit of pizzazz about it--was given the prefix "gumbo." The term became synonymous with winging it - with just doing it - with making do and having fun. Gumbo this and gumbo that. One summer I wore a t-shirt that simply had the word GUMBO printed on the front. (I gave that T-shirt away my last summer, I think to Dave Gold.)
After a while the prefix got unmoored and the word around camp for fun was just "gumbo." What will we do tonight now that it's raining and the indoor space we had reserved has been taken by another village? Answer? Gumbo!
