Tom Ashbaugh surfaces after only 40 years

My Outpost counselor in '67 was a lanky, blonde, kind guy named Tom Ashbaugh. Since helping to found the FV alumni association in the late 80s, I've made efforts to locate Tom and get back in touch. But no luck ever. I had given up when a small-world story told itself as follows: We use a company named BlackBaud for our databases and apparently the corporate folks at BlackBaud like to talk about us as one of their model customers. At such a meeting, after Frost Valley was mentioned, one of the managers got a big smile on his face, and said, "Well, I know Frost Valley. I was a camper and counselor there." Of course it was Tom Ashbaugh. I got a message from the other manager who was delighted by this and urged me to write Tom. I did and we have been exchanging elated nostalgic messages for the last 24 hours. Tom will dig up some pictures and remember a few good times, but that's for another entry. Meantime, here's what he's told me so far (I knew none of this):

I was part of the Westfield crowd. My brother Bob first attended camp in the 50's in NJ and my first year was a special "trial" for kids thinking about camp but either too young (my case) or not ready to commit to 2 or 4 weeks. We went (I think) after summer sessions were over for three or four days and I was hooked. I went the next few summers for 4 weeks, then spent a number of summers attending Camp Dudley in NY and returned to Wawayanda in 1967 as cabin counselor. Kathy Ketcham was in my class at Westfield and Mike is her older brother. I had forgotten how involved the whole family was.

I'm insane about memory, but I can recall the entire staff of Outpost '67: cabin 11--Roger Pollard; cabin 12--Tony Selese, the village chief (Ai, yi yi yi, greasy Salese [please forgive the slur against Italians in that ditty, but I didn't make it up]); cabin 13--Bill Kingston (who actually kept a machete in this cabin); cabin 14--the aforementioned sweet Tom Ashbaugh, called by Dave King "Big Daddy Warbucks Ashbaugh"; cabin 15--Chris Schmidt, camp's Rifle Range director and a fellow who truly scared me for some reason. "Bill [Kingston] was a good friend," Tom wrote me, "at Wawayanda and back in Westfield. I remember Bill and I tried to revive the camp to sing a very long and uninspired version of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. We had sung it when we were campers and when we returned as counselors, it didn't seem to be on the list of songs that were regularly sung. We bombed, our voices were certainly not pure - but we didn't care. It's not like we were going to get fired!"

Well, it's only been exactly forty years since this Westfield guy Tom--this smart easy-going adult, this easy mentor, this man whom I wanted to be--was my Wawayanda counselor. Four decades. Eight half-decades. Four times the age of today's Forest kid. Oh, Wawayanda has been in New York State for nearly 50 years and for 40 of them Tom hasn't been there. Tom, Tom, where have you been? Come back soon.