Well this didn't really hit me until this morning, when departing staff also received their patches. And I myself was given one. It's only been about 33 years since I got my last one. That's a lot of time passing between the same simple but powerful symbolic gesture. As I got mine I was standing next to Lee Griffin, a counselor (and son of a friend). This was Lee's 9th year so he got his H-9. Separated (in FV years) by a mere 36 years, we chatted and realized we felt the same way about all this.
Ellen Rutan and Jim Ewen visited on Wednesday (8/20/08) and what a gorgeous day it was. Without really thinking about it, I found myself scheduled to give not one, not two, but three Castle tours. Fortunately Jim and Ellen love camp, fit in instantly, and are incredibly knowledgable about the Castle for our Forstmann history. So we did these three together. I'll admit that we got a little goofy by the very end of these sessions and we began telling some ridiculous and apparently believable semi-spooky stories about the Castle. (I generally do not tell such and am always a little sorry when I do. But we had fun and the kids absolutely loved it all.) At the bottom of this entry, you'll see a video clip of Jim telling one such tale.
They stayed overnight at the Roxbury Inn in Roxbury, which is a few miles beyond Margaretville off Route 28. The manager at the Roxbury is our beloved Leslie Black. I drove over there yesterday morning (snapping the pics of early-turning leaves on trees in the previous entry on the steep hill after Slide Mountain) and met Jim, Ellen, and Leslie for breakfast at a cute little cafe on Roxbury's main street. Jim was first here at Frost Valley in 1959; I and Ellen in the early 60s and Leslie in the mid-60s...so we have had many years together, a huge cast of camp characters to talk about, and enough affection for each other to exceed the size of the cute little Catskills town where we spent our sunny morning.
Since Hirdstock Field is hardly ever used for anything else but this annual late-August all-camp program, it's ...well ...called "Hirdstock Field". And there we gathered for the 2008 verison of this all-afternoon/all-evening event. It was a good one. Gorgeous weather (ample sunshine, oool temps, a breeze) and great in-camp talent as well as, in the evening, a local band. Here we are near the start of the proceedings. 
Several of the male staff shaved and trimmed beards into Fu Manchus, Giles the program director borrowed a pair of women's bellbottoms and wore a hilarious colorful paisley matching top and hat. (If you click on the first image above and look at the guy standing of the stage, you'll get a sense of Giles' get up.) Flowered skirts flowed, and political slogans were scrawled on t-shirts. But most of all (and remember it's the end of a long summer for the staff and some of the campers) the mellow spirit abounds. The kids get it and everyone is relaxed. You might say, at peace.
There were 15 staff per- formances (I myself sang an old camp song), and a series of campers performed in the air-guitar contest - which, for the uninitiated, is like a lip synch contest only instead of singing it's all about movement.
Just to make sure this was a serious bein' outdoors experience, we barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers. We formed a circle of 6 or 8 grills and did the sweaty hot business of producing such grilled meat for 700. We did it, primarily because of the organizational skills and outdoor chefery of Kam Kobeissi and Eric Blum. Kam and Eric are shown here amid the smokiness that we all endured for several hours.
A few days ago Kim O'Connell and a friend climbed up part of Slide Mountain, and this experience put Kim in mind of her days at Frost Valley, from 1970 through 1974. She was known then as Kim Aronowitz. (The image is reproduced from a photograph in the 1972 yearbook of Kim and the other CITs that summer. Kim is at the back right, behind Starr Hedrick who was the CIT Director.) After coming down from Slide, Kim went home and starting looking for traces of Frost Valley on the web...and found this blog. Kim now tells a moving story about reuniting with her counselors through the last weeks and days of their father. Here is that story:
Tamara Stephenson (now Tamara Crocker) directed our dialysis unit for a number of years from the mid-80s through the early 90s. She worked closely with Chuck White in those years and - we are recently back in touch with her - she took a moment to remember him. If you haven't already read others' remembrances of Chuck, written after his passing this spring, I hope you'll look at those in addition to this from Tamara:
Allye and Jesse Glicker had visitors yesterday and took part of the morning off to spend time with Aunt Dawn and Uncle Russ. Yes, these are the Helfands, who, with sister Robin (the Glickers' mom), were mainstays here in the 70s and early 80s. From left to right: Jim Huebner (Dawn's husband); Russ Helfand; Jesse Glicker, Susky counselor; Heidi Benoit, Russ' wife; Dawn Helfand Huebner; Allye Glicker, VC of Lakota.
Behind this barn you can see a bit of Wildcat Mountain and the western edge of the old calf barn, later our Administration Office. Yes, you are looking from the vantage of Smith Lodge across the Olympic Circle but there's a big barn there! Right you are: until it was destroyed by a fire our "Olympic Circle" was the footprint of a barn.
A few more words about Ted. Theodore J. Forstmann (born 1940) is one of the founding partners of Forstmann Little & Company, a private equity firm. He is unmarried and has no children. Forstmann is a graduate of Greenwich Country Day School, Phillips Academy, Yale University and Columbia Law School. At Yale he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He is usually known as "Ted" (occasionally "Teddy" to friends and family). Ted Forstmann, an attorney, founded Forstmann Little in 1978 with his brother Nicholas C. Forstmann, who later died of lung cancer, and William Brian Little. Ted Forstmann's second brother, J. Anthony Forstmann, founded ForstmannLeff. He was featured prominently in the book Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, as he and his company attempted to acquire RJR Nabisco. In the subsequent film adaptation, he was portrayed by actor David Rasche. The book portrayed Forstmann as a critic of KKR's Henry Kravis and his investment methods. Forstmann's criticism of Kravis (and much of the rest of the financial industry during the 1980s) centered around the use of junk bond (high-yield) investments to raise large amounts of capital. When the junk bond market later fell into disfavor as a result of scandal, Forstmann's criticism was seen as prescient, as his more conventional investment strategy had been able to maintain nearly the same level of profitability as companies such as KKR and Revlon that built their strategy around high-yield debt.
One of the counselors in Windsong - Anna Armstrong, who herself has been here for years beginning as a young camper - organized a double-period session with me yesterday here in the Historical Room of the Ad Office. We gathered her and I described what was in the Frost Valley/Wawayanda archive, a deep closet now very very well organized with file drawers, archive boxes, deeds and meeting minutes and annual reports, photos, old issues of The Wawayanda Whirlwind and the Wawayanda Wasp and Frost Valley Life, staff lists and even camper lists for early years.
During our session our CEO Jerry Huncosky stopped in to talk with the girls. One of the girls was reading through a long-range planning document that called for the replacement of all cabins with lodges, one super-lodge for each existing village of five cabins. She asked Jerry his view of the cabins vs. the lodges. Before he describe his preference (strongly for the cabins) the girls discussed it with them. All but one preferred the cabins. Later Georgia Gleason wrote about this: "Campers at Frost Valley who have lived in lodges and cabins usually have an opinion about which they prefer.... It's cool in the cabins to look at all the names and dates carved in the walls. Thinking about all the different girls and boys who slept in the bunks long ago is interesting to dream about. Cabins provide 8 individuals the same age an opportunity to bond and grow very close to each other. Lodges on the other hand hold more people and allow everyone to be part of a bigger family. Lodges such as Kresge [where Windsong lives] are really great because they have a main room in the center where the girls meet to hang out and say goodnight. Wherever you stay at Frost Valley there will be fun things to do, great times to experience, and the most fun, cool and exciting people on earth."
Sherley Wetherheld was another who read the Wellness Lifestyles manual and it got her to thinking about her own time here. "As a Windsong camper (the equivalent of Cherokee Village, for those of you who remember playing 45s of the Beatles and the Doors), my last days as a camper loom darkly and inevitable. I have done quite a big of thinking lately. What will I say at Vespers? How have I made my mark on Frost Valley? Will I make CIT? How will my life be changed? I can try to answer one question: What is the allure and magic of Frost Valley? It's the feel-goodness that surrounds us every time we set foot on Frost Valley property. While flipping through "Building Wellness Lifestyles" I realized that all of the ideals Frost Valley stood for in the 70s still hold true in the 21st century. Here's the conclusion of the old booklet: We hope all of us will agree that after spending the summer together that wellness was never intended to be boring coursework, putting people down, getting everyone to behave the same way, a program for super-jocks, or a drag. It is intended to be health enhancing, enlivening, inspiring, and to make us feel good inside. Which is exactly what Frost Valley does for me. It makes me feel good. The way we all share our secrets and keep them too, the way we become a family, but closer, and know that we will always be friends, and in our hearts, we'll always be campers, and know where to find some of that Frost Valley magic."
I had a centennial year staff T-shirt to give away to one of the Windsong kids at the end of the program but they were all so into this exploration into their camp's history it didn't seem appropriate to single out one kid, but everyone instantly agreed that Anna Armstrong, the counselor who came up with this idea, should have it. She was delighted and wore it the rest of the day. It turns out that today, the next day, she was leaving camp for the summer (needing to go back to college a bit early). So this was a fine farewell gathering, some reflection, some connecting to the larger community here, and a new shirt to prove it. The girls applauded her when she showed them her new FV possession.
Above is the program for the dedication of the newly built main dining hall in the year 1960. (It was unnamed at the time; only later was it given the name Thomas Hall after Emerson Thomas.)
We woke to a stunningly good morning. Not a cloud. Deep blue August mountain morning sky. Dew glistening off the beech trees. Great visibility: you can make out individual trees on top of Banks Hill by standing on the west side of the dining hall (it's a view of Banks I'd never stopped to look at before - and I caught it with my camera).
While I was standing there outside the dining hall (while Camp Hird was eating breakfast and while Wawayanda was back in the villages cleaning cabins) I looked over at the Carl Hess Pavilion, which we've used for our outdoor barbecues until the construction of the new Wellness Center began. For the second time in its career, Carl's pavilion was used as a warm supply hut/break-station for construction crews...first in the 1983-85 period during the building of the new dining hall and now again in 2007-08 for the Guenther Family Wellness Center. Soon we'll either start cooking in Carl's pavilion again or we'll move it down the hill and put on the chicken and burgers there. It's possible we'll be moving laundry out of the main part of camp (it's still in the old Forstmann-era bullpen) and put the Hess structure in its place, so that it'll be near the Halbe & Jane Brown pavilion, which is an excellent large covered space for rainy days. The two would work well together, just as Halbe and Jane and Carl and Marie always did.
Now I pivoted northward and looked at the scene before me and asked myself, What am I seeing here that I've always seen? Certainly not the dining hall parking lot. the very road we use to drive up to the dining hall was not there until '86. Prior to that one used a rocky trail to walk up from the Big Tree Field to the dining hall area or to cabins 21-25 (Hemlock village in those days). But there it was: the old Rifle Range Road, making its way steeply up the hill from the dining hall to what was then the furthest distance up the hill (really a foothill of Doubletop) on which the villages are laid out. Up past old Lenape on the west side of Hemlock Brook/Trickle Brook (cabins 16-20 and now 13-17 were built on the east side of that sometimes flowing creek). Kresge Lodge is now almost exactly where the Rifle Range used to be. But the Rifle Range Trail (now without a name) is still there, the first part of it more or less exactly as it ever was. Quite a beautiful walk through the woods there. It beckons.
Finally I turned due west and walked about 100 feet in the direction of cabins 21-25, old Hemlock, now the village where Pocohontas and Totem are combined into one youngest group. These cabins have been replaced by nice new cabins (laid out in the same way as the old ones but much sturdier) put in exactly the same spots as the old ones. In this picture you see only cabin 24, but imagine to the left of the shot cabin 25 sitting near the brook across from the dining hall. To my extreme right stands 21, and just off to the right and beyond are 22 and - in its corner against what used to be the Deus property - the nestled cabin 23. Arguably 23 is in the nicest spot for a cabin in camp. I'd also vote for cabin 40 (what used to be 10) and also cabin 17 (what used to be 20). Fans of the cabins will approve, I think, of what's been done to restore this semi-circular village arrangement. This is now where Wawayanda holds its morning flag raisings - making it super convenient for the youngest kids to roll out of bed and hear the morning announcements, praise the core value of the day, hear pearls of wisdom and sing a silly song to start the day.
Bud Cox has been (as I kid him) AWOL a lot this summer. Not really AWOL...just (predictably) out of camp. He's driven trips to the Adirondacks several times. During session 3 he was up there pretty much the whole time, supplying two trips, moving by van back and forth between them. He's picked up trips coming back from New Orleans twice. He's done luggage runs to airports and bus-stops. He's led hikes for adult groups at Straus. He's kept the brochures stocked and neatly stacked in various racks ("literature" is Bud's word, pronounced "LIT-ti-chure" with a little Bob Dylan snarl) and once in a while he and I have sat in the Ad Office watching the Mets game on my computer. But until this week Bud has not offered programs to the villages. Today he's spending the whole day at the Sap House (9/10ths of a mile east of the main entrance to camp) showing campers and counselors how we gather sap and distill it into maple syrup. 
Toward the end of the morning the Mac Boys (teenaged boys with various chronic disabilities - quite an amazing and fun-loving group but often a bit unruly or digressive) made the trip to the Sap House in a couple of buses. When I arrived Bud was describing the sap in the trees in late winter and the Mac Boys were totally attentive. It was a great scene. I caught it in a few pictures and also recorded a portion of it. Have a listen here.
After hearing the recording of the conversation Dave King and I had on Olympic Day last month, Rick Cobb sent us his thoughts:
Margaret Kremer McLaughlin's daughter Emily has been a Tacoma counselor here all summer, and this vicarious re-emergence into Frost Valley has set Margaret to fond remembering. Here is what she recently wrote to me:
Jamie Duff is now a camper in Outpost, and Ceri Duff is a Susky girl. They've been family campers (the final week of the summer) with dad and mom but this is their first time in resident camp. Dad is here too, for two weeks. As dad put it at the VC meeting the other night: "I'm surely up there in the Frost Valley record books: twenty years between the now and the last time I was on the staff."
Frank DeGraw grew up in Grahams- ville, or nearby. He went to high school with the White kids and the Brown kids and fell in with the "Brown boys" and eventually, when he came just of age, worked here at FV weekends through the fall, winter and spring. Soon he joined the summer camp staff and was a counselor in Totem and, I believe later, was a VC (just after my time in the late 80s). He moved to Japan many years ago, met and married his wife there, and has two daugters.
Benjamin Wechter is in Forest village this session. Ben is the son of Eric Wechter, our old friend from the 80s, and so naturally we got a chance to see Eric this past weekend. Milton Pittman also came to volunteer and so here's a reliable 80s trio: Eric (left), Milton (middle) and Bill Abbott (right), wearing three shades of volunteer/staff shirts.
Blast from the past this afternoon. Bill Clarke (at left in the photo) showed up here. Bill Clarke! Bill's first summer was as a Lenape camper in cabin 18 - Bud Cox's cabin. (Bill remembers Bud as a fanatic about winning the camp-wide cabin clean-up competition. The winners, some readers of this blog may recall, won a watermelon.) That must have been '65 or '66, when Bud was Lenape VC. Later Bill moved up the counseling ranks and eventually was our "Nature" director. Although born and raised in Manhattan Bill was one of our real outdoorsy guys. He was here through the early to mid 70s and then moved on. He now works in Albany for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (the DEC). He was here today to bring his nephew to camp for the fourth session.
Each of these kids is doing what they're doing for the very first time.
The Pac magic is back. Still in Hird Lodge. There since '85. Quinnipiac, more properly, but the 4-syllable sound of that name hasn't been heard in a long while. Just Pac. Somewhat separate (too cool for school) yet totally part of the scene. This morning (last full day of session) a late sleep, no flag raising, then brunch cooked in Geyer Hall. Then they don new Pac t-shirts and gather on the Hird Lodge porch. I happen by, take this good shot of them--the crew, what a crew--and chatted with them a bit. Listen to the recording of our talk. Pac chatter, vintage. The "Harry" referred to is their beloved village chief, Harry McCormack.
