Below is the text that was printed in the program for our annual Summer Meeting at Frost Valley, which took place, with more than 100 people in attendance, under a tent behind the Welcome Center (administration building). One of the people we inducted (posthumously, alas) into the FV Hall of Fame was Frank Ketcham. I hope readers of this blog will read the note about Frank carefully. He was a remarkable friend of Frost Valley and of course his family still remains connected in dozens of ways. If you want a nicer-looking version, just as it appeared in the program, click on
this link and read the
PDF.
Above at left: Mike Ketcham presented the induction with a short talk about his father. Accepting the plaque on their father's behalf are Billie Ketcham Heath and Debbie Ketcham Goodeve, two of Mike's three sisters. They all agreed a little later that the plaque should be mounted on the wall in the foyer to the Ketcham Family Chapel, and so it will be.
Frank Ketcham
When Frank Ketcham’s youngest daughter Debbie joined the
family at camp in 1953, there were at that point seven Wawayanda Ketchams. Today we posthumously induct Frank into
the Hall of Fame for his critical involvement in Wawayanda’s move to Frost
Valley in 1958, for his forging of the Westfield Y/Wawayanda connection, for
his key role as an original trustee, and for his inspiring work as a volunteer
leader of his community, but it might well be that the myriad accomplishments
and enduring legacy of many members of his family at Frost Valley are
themselves sufficient criteria for bestowing this honor.
Certainly he would have humbly believed so—he who believed
in the power of family love above everything else. All five of his own children
attended Wawayanda as campers, made the transition to Frost Valley, and grew up
to become staff leaders of Wawayanda and Hird, counselors, lifeguards and
directors—one of them later the camp’s auditor, another its Associate Executive
Director, a daughter-in-law its Director of Development. Five of his
grandchildren have been Frost Valley campers and four of them came of age here
and became staff members. Three of his great-grandchildren have now been
campers. Two of his sons met the loves of their lives at Frost Valley, and the
same happy fate befell one of his grandsons too. One of his children was
married here (at Straus), and the ashes of a beloved son and those of two beloved
granddaughters rest at Memorial Island in Reflection Pond. Frank Ketcham
donated thousands of hours to ensure the success of Wawayanda and Frost Valley,
but his greatest impact may well be the continuous, generative love his family
feels for the place to which he introduced them.
That first introduction was in 1948, when the young family
spent a week at Wawayanda Family Camp at the old Wawayanda in New Jersey. They
became regular members of the Westfield YMCA, and from the mid-1950s through
the late 1960s Frank served on the Board of Directors at Westfield, while
continuing to bring the children to Wawayanda in the summers—and, starting with
son Mike (who typically attended three two-week sessions), sent them to resident
camp as well. In 1956 and ’57 Frank became very involved with the search for a successor
location for Wawayanda, whose various recent moves in northwestern New Jersey
were caused by encroaching suburban development. Frank Ketcham and Ed Tomb were
leaders among those who planned the move, identified Frost Valley as a
destination, collaborated with Walter Margetts to secure the purchase of 2,200
acres from the Forstmann family, and then handled the tricky finances as
Wawayanda prepared for its first summer in the Catskills in 1958. Frank was on
the leadership team of the Central Atlantic Area Association of the Y, an
entity that helped form the first Wawayanda trusteeships, and Frank himself was
tapped to serve as one of the original members of the Frost Valley Board. In
1957 he became the Board’s very first treasurer. In Wawayanda’s early years at
Frost Valley, the camp’s budget was precarious, and its survival (in some
years, its bare survival) owes in part to Frank’s integrity, honesty, and
constant fiduciary attentions. Frank served as a Frost Valley trustee through
1965, just prior to the arrival of Halbe Brown and, with that, an era of
stability and then expansion. As Frank’s son Mike recalled recently, his father
“worked hard all through those tough years.” “He intuitively understood the
value of camping,” Mike adds, “and he believed very strongly in Frost Valley.”
And, crucially, he did not keep that intuitive belief to
himself. He wanted most of all to share such belief with his children—and theirs,
and then theirs. “As a father,” Mike
reflected recently, “he was devoted, very supportive, loving, always
encouraging. He was very oriented to the family, and by bringing us to
Wawayanda he provided an amazing opportunity for us to develop an awareness and
a set of values that would help us for the rest of our lives.”
During Mike’s time as Associate Executive Director, he and
Halbe Brown discussed a plan to move the administration office (now the Welcome
Center) and create a chapel out of the existing building. He consulted with his
father about an idea: to dedicate this new chapel in memory of Frank’s mother
Laura. At the time of Frank’s death in 1990 the vision of a new chapel was still
unrealized, but the range and sheer number and deep emotional attachment to
Frost Valley of the extended Ketcham family was strong, so they came together,
with many friends, and raised funds to build the stately, placid,
vaulted-ceilinged Ketcham Chapel in the quiet woods near Reflection
Pond—dedicated to the memory of Frank and to his mother.
Sixty-six years after he first brought his family to Wawayanda,
by unanimous affirmation of his successor members of the Frost Valley Board of
Trustees, we honor Frank Ketcham with induction into the Hall of Fame for his
generosity of spirit, his devotion to his own children but also to all children, his absolute integrity as
a lay leader, his talent for helping to save and then preserve a camp at its
critical moment, and his remarkable capacity for familial love.
