nobody messes with Ta-(uh)-coma

In today's mail arrived** not just the full staff list for summer 1995, but also (a rarer document in every year) the list of the village staffs. (As many or most reading this blog know, our staff lists gave names, addresses, and generally described positions. But village and other assignments were printed separately and were never part of the official record.)

Here's the Tacoma staff that summer:

Katie Kelly (VC)
Jessie Bleichman C
Georgia Chown C
Jill Clark C
Meghan Conley C
Kristen LiVolsi C
Victoria Secora C
Care Coffina (Associate Counselor or "AC"--see below)
Diane Sacker AC
Marta Esquilin AC
Deb Shoenemann AC
Elly Weisenberg AC

Katie Kelly's involvement has been deep and a few years ago she was our full-time Alumni Coordinator. Diane Sacker stayed around quite a while after her AC summer in Tacoma, and has been very active on the alumni committee. Deb Schoeneman is someone I've known since she was a little kid, as she's the daughter of Morris and Sandy; Morris was for many years one of the pediatric nephrologists who spent at least two weeks at camp. Morris and Sandy became avid FV'ers, as did their daugthers, and good friends of the Whites. "Georgia was from England," D'Arcy Oaks says, "funny crazy Brit."

"Cara Coffina was awesome," remembers Karin Turer, "--I think she and Katie Kelley shared a birthday. But Cara's was 7/7/77, which made everyone envious. I'm sure she had a great party this year!"

"Jill was serious, dedicated," D'Arcy Oaks continues, "and probably the most devoted to wellness out of TacoLen (and Katie and I called the 2 villages that summer). Meghan was a counselor's counselor, who used her intellect at camp to persuade young women to do things they didn't want to (like get in the water). Vicky was one of my roommates in college, she also traveled to West Africa with me in the summer of '93."

As for Kristen LiVolsi: if she or someone who knows her well reads this, please let me know if she is related to wild red-headed Scott Livolsi who was a mainstay camper and staffer in the 80s.

Oldtimers eyeballing this village staff will count up the C's and gawk and the gaudiness: six counselors in one village, plus the VC. They lived in cabins 41-45, on "the hill": thus, That means 7 counseling-level staff for 5 cabins. Not to mention the JCs (called ACs in that era). Wow. I say: wow. Earlier, there was a VC and four counselors. Plus 2 JCs. The VC had a JC, as did one other counselor. The other three counselors managed their cabins without assistance. I'm not saying such understaffing was good; but it surely made for a different dynamic (and greater rates of burnout by the end of the summer).

Several of you have asked about the distinction between "AC" and "JC"--a point of which I'm only vaguely aware (since it was only a mid-90s phenomenon), but here's Karin Turer: "AC is not just a different name for JC - it was a legal difference: Associate (not Assistant) Counselors are over 18; JCs were 17. That is what we were told in 1993 (again, I am super-sensitive to this because the change ate up a lot of my cohort!) when FV decided to have more 18+ staff. Maybe it changed later on (and looking at this list, I had Diane in Taco 44 in 1993, so it's hard to believe she'd have been 18 already by 1995!) but as far as the kids my age were told, the AC was simply a way to have a bridge between JCs and Cs." I'm a little sad to think that an administrative decision (a reasonable one, in my view--to be sure) could be thought of, even at this distance, as having eaten up a cohort (FV generation).

Katie Kelly adds this: As far as the entry about Tacoma in 1995 - that definitely gave me a laugh. Georgia Chown is in fact from Australia; she's not "a crazy brit" as D'Arcy seems to remember her. Then there is the whole JC vs. AC thing. I think that the AC designation was brought about for a couple of reasons. One being a legal issue as was mentioned - if the staff member wasn't 18 yet but they had been a JC, then they were an AC. Cara Coffina fell into this category as she had a summer birhday. Her birthday is in fact a day after mine, but I became staff prior to this being an issue at the time. I don't remember though if one was about to be "promoted" to a full counselor if they had the birthday over the summer and turned 18 at which point they were now technically able to care for kids without "adult" supervision.

Diane Sacker adds: In the summer of '95 I was 16 (I have an October birthday) and I'm pretty sure I was Meghan Conley's JC and for some reason they gave us cabin 45 (the oldest cabin).

** from D'Arcy Oaks