organizational structure and trustee committees, 1959

Click on the image for a larger view.

when Lake Cole was brand new

The article here was published in a local New Jersey newspaper in 1959--probably the Westfield paper. It marks the completion of the construction of what we now call "Lake Cole" at Frost Valley. The article refers to it as "Wawayanda Lake." The camp had moved from New Jersey to Frost Valley the summer before. During that first summer, campers swam in a rectangular muddy pond built by Forstmann in the field across from the Castle, and also in Biscuit Creek Falls, Devil's Hole, and various swimming spots. At the time of this article - presumably late spring - what was a marshy field was bulldozed and fed by an inlet diverted from the Neversink River (near where the boathouse is now) and by a creek (which still has no name) coming across the Deus property across the bottom of what is now the hill leading up to cabins 31-35. Three Westfield boys posted for the newspaper's cameraman - allegedly the first people ever to go boating in our lake. Two of them became Frost Valley legends - Jim Ewen and John Ketcham.




Dave King remembers as follows: "As I remember it, the 'pool' across from the Castle was dug prior to opening Wawayanda in 1958. Thus, the VERY MUDDY pool. The pool was made in order to say that we had a "water program". Hal Russmeyer did as much as he could with it. The Board attempted to build a lake during 1959, but the builder was not able to stop the water from flowing out. The builder went bankrupt, and Harry Cole, the property manager, repaired the earthen dam and controlled the exit flow so that the lake levels could be stabilized. Thus, the lake was named for him. Also, 1959 was an arid summer. Biscuit Creek was about 2 feet wide and 4 inches deep. Somewhere, I have a picture of me standing on both sides of the lake (actually, it was more like a drainage ditch)."

Thanks to Ellen Rutan, who found the old article among the files of Liz Ewen, Jim's mom.

Bill Hawkins, 1959

Bill Hawkins was a counselor at Frost Valley in 1959, just one summer. But he's a Y lifer and later did 30-plus years after his Wawayanda summer. I've been in touch with him for years, but recently we had this exchange:

Al: Have you made plans to come to the big Frost Valley reunion over Labor Day?

Bill: No, unfortunately. Give my best wishes to anyone who attends from the summer of 1959!

Al: By the way, Dave & Shirley King will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in July.

Bill: We celebrated our 50th last December 26th ... being married kept me from returning to FV in 1960 - so went to YMCA Camp Bernie with Merrill Oleson.

Al: Wawayanda didn't permit married couples on the staff in that era?

Bill: Yes, they did permit it .. but had limited accommodations for married staff ... all the available positions were filled by others ... I didn't have any seniority！

Al: What was the position you would have been going for in '60?

Bill: In 1959 I was the cabin counselor in #25 ... since I got married the following December I really never thought about a position except I was interested in the trip program for older boys ... I went to Camp Bernie as the Program Director ... it was, of course, a much smaller camp ... but I needed a job for a pregnant wife as well ... so she became the secretary for the director of Camp Bernie ... we returned to Bernie in '61 at the end of the summer I joined the Ridewood Y staff and the rest is history ... 34 years as a Y Professional before my retirement in 1995.

Al: I find this all so interesting. Do you remember what the accommodations for you would have been at Frost Valley if you and your wife had worked there? Castle? Pigeon Lodge? So you went from cabin counselor at Wawayanda in '59 to Program Director at Bernie in '60!

Bill: I have no idea about accommodations as the possibility didn't exist. My early YMCA "career" was from cabin counselor at YMCA Camp Abe Lincoln (Davenport, Iowa) in 1958, to cabin counselor at YMCA Camp Wawayanda in 1959, to program director at YMCA Camp Bernie in 1960 and 1961 ... then into a full-time Y job ... I returned to Camp Bernie in 1965 to become the first resident director ... left in 1969 to join the staff of the Westfield YMCA ... where I led the purchase of property and the development of the YMCA Four Seasons Outdoor Center in Hunterdon County ... but it was later sold by the YMCA and it became the Hunterdon Learning Center.

one of the very first nurses; the first nurse for Hird

Sad news from Dave & Shirley King tells us of the passing of our beloved nurse from 1959 through the 1960s, Jerry Lester. Here is what they write:

Geraldine B. Lester, camp nurse for Camps Wawayanda and Floyd, died today at 3am in Little Rock Arkansas.

Gerry came to Camp Wawayanda at Frost Valley in 1959. She,along with her husband Don and sons Kevin,Danny,and Tommy, lived and worked in the small building next to the fly fishing shack which we labeled the "Dispensary". Don, an exexcutive with the Brown&Williamson Tobacco Company, worked in New York City during the week, and came to camp on Friday night for the weekend.Gerry and her family were part of the development of Frost Valley for the entire decade of the 1960's.

The job of camp nurse during that time period was crucial. Our nearest medical Doctor was Dr. Tompkins whose office was in Liberty, 26 miles away.Dr. Tompkins would visit camp twice weekly. Liberty-Loomis Hospital was located near Ellenville even farther away. In every sense of the term ,Gerry was a"nurse practitioner" who had to make tough/sometimes critical decisions on a daily basis.

Gerry was also the first camp nurse for Camp Hird which added to the load that she carried so very well.It is probably hard for present era staff members to conceptualize the camp evnvironment without a complete medical staff and facilities.This concept just illustrates how good and competent and effective Gerry was.

Beside the medical competency, Jerry and Don were "Camp People". Al calls us "Lifers". Don, on weekends, would load and unload baggage, drive the camp truck"the green rat" for all kinds of necessities, or the camp station wagon for town runs. He was also always available to talk to counselors or to tell stories, and he attended camp activities with his sons.

Shirley and I became very close friends with Gerry and Don, and we and our families had Thanksgiving Dinner together for 17 years. We gathered in New Brunswick,NJ, Baltimore,MD, and in Louisville,KY. We also travelled to Harpers Ferry VA, Annapolis MD,and Bound Brook, NJ where Don umpired a Little League World Series tournament game. Our kids did grow up together as a family, and, in those days,there were very few "camp families". The Camp Directors, the maintenance Director, the Program Director, and the cooks might have a family with them. There were few women in camp then and they did create lifelong bonds.

After Frost Valley, Gerry worked with geriatrics in a nursing home environment. She and Don visited Europe and stayed for seven years, before fully retiring in Little Rock Arkansas.

It is very poignant for Shirl and Me to lose her during Thanksgiving Week. In our estimation, she belongs in the Frost Valley Hall of fame!

old Olympics

Wawayanda Olympics 1959, photos by Mike DeVita. Notice the flags set up around the Olympic Circle. For many years--at least through '68--these would be set up for Olympics and also for every check-in day. Note, too, how rocky the soil is in '58. It took a while to clear some of the rocks and grow some grass on some of the fields and along the paths.

dining hall

The dining hall, a photo taken by Mike DeVita, not longer after its construction was completed (I'm guessing it's late spring/early summer 1959). The shot is taken from the east of the building. Mike was standing at the top of the wide path that came up from the lower flat - the path that now runs behind Margetts Lodge.

July 4, 1959

This is a photo I've admired for years. One of the great shots of the early era. It's 1959, July 4. To kick off the celebration, three staff re-enacted the spirit of '76: Mike DeVita, Dave King, Tom Squires. They led everyone from flag raising to the dining hall. (To orient you: that's the old Forstmann garage, then the Arts & Crafts shop, now the bottom floor of Hayden Lodge, off to the right. So the three are actually going, for the moment, in the wrong direction; they must have looped around.)

"Roman Celebration Day"

1959. It's an all-camp program, one of those thematic gigs: "Roman Celebration Days." Ralph Holt leads Ceaesar (Mike DeVita) to the dining hall during the Roman Celebration Days. Camp secretary Marian is at his side (one of the few women in camp). The campers from Mike's cabin in Forest Village hold the cape as his attendants. And below is another shot of DeVita and his attendants, looking fairly dramatic and authentic.

friends for life

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.

We had some time to see the 2008 campers and staff do their amazingly loud and together thing in the dining hall after lunch, took a tour of the Wellness Center and saw the dialysis unit in action, and walked through Lakeview Lodge (J. and E. were amazed by this gorgeous building).

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.

Jim Ewen & Ellen Rutan (audio)

Photo taken last night here in Philadelphia: Ellen, my kids, and Jim.

Jim Ewen and Ellen Rutan stopped by yesterday to pay an annual pre-Thanksgiving visit. I feel so currently connected to them - or, rather, that I've been consistently connected to them over the years - that I was startled to remember that they stopped working at Frost Valley in around 1973! Jim's time at camp ran from 1959 through '73, and Ellen was there from around '63 to '73. Jim was part of the Westfield, NJ, gang that clustered around the great public high school there, the various sports teams, and the Westfield Y. Jim's dad, Ed, ran that Y, and established a close relationship to Wawayanda. In fact Ed was a member of Frost Valley's "camp committee" or "Wawayanda Committee" and was a member of the hiring committee, led by Woody English, that chose Halbe Brown to be the new associate executive director in 1966.

Jim and Ellen are among those couples that met at Frost Valley. It's a nice story, and in the conversation we had last night, which I recorded, they tell it. The met at camp, fell in love, and 30 years later are together and still very very fondly remember anc cherish their FV experience.

Some of the folks mentioned in this convo: Peggy Rub, John Ketcham, Bev Gross, Dave King, Peggy Hope....

So here is the link to the audio recording of these two wonderful people remembering their FV time. Below are two photos taken of Jim during the 2001 reunion. Jim led the chapel service that Sunday morning in the old Wawayanda Chapel.


Above: Jim and Lisa Ernst.

first time up Doubletop (video)

Hike up Doubletop: late June 2006, with Bud Cox, myself, and Bill Abbott. I have some great pictures of this trip, but I'll add them later. We left camp at 8 am on this particular Saturday in the drizzling rain, and maybe it was 60 degrees, but no warmer. And we decided to climb up a little-used way - up High Falls Brook, which of course comes down the mountain far far above where most folks see the brook (at High Falls itself). Following the brook to its source (which is really a bunch of swampy streams) we walked through mud and brambles, and it was still raining.

So there were nicer days of hiking, but this was fun. When we got to the two tops of Doubletop, the rain and fog lifted and so we were able to see down to camp (you can see the Ad Office from up there!). But...but...now we were hit by swarms of black flies.

Oh, and as a bonus, here's a video of Bud being Bud - hilarious - as we rested during the final ascent (very steep) up the High Falls Brook-side (or western) ridge.

Send me your first-time-up-Doubletop stories.

The first (in several respects, as you'll see) is Bill Sonsin, who goes way back, wrote me about recent posts to this blog: "The 'first time up Doubletop' and 'Hemlock cabin 24' together brought back memories. I was in Hemlock #24 in the summer of 1959. Art Fritz was the counselor. I think we were the absolute first group [from the camp] to climb Doubletop, ever." Fritz was from Westfield and a student at Syracuse University (class of 1962). Other campers besides Bill from cabin 24 that summer were Ron Lochly, Ed Kieling, Chipper Hoeck, Robert Floyd, Joe Allen, and Dave Edsall.

Here are two more Doubletop firsts.

building Lake Cole

Lake Cole is a man-made lake, as almost everyone knows or recalls. Wawayanda's first summer at Frost Valley--1958--was a lakeless summer. Harry Cole led the team that created our current stream-fed 23-acre lake between the summers of '58 and '59. This photo was taken in '59 or '60. The dock and swimming area you're seeing here is situated on the eastern edge of the lake, near the boathouse--not along the northern edge which is where the swimming area is today. (In this picture the boathouse would be off to the left at about 10 o'clock.) In the background you can see the grassless, treeless rim of the newly dug area. Later pine trees were planted all along the southern edge of the lake between the high rim holding the water in and the road. These trees are now tall and full. The blonde counselor on the diving board here is one of a number of staff who came from Towson State College--brought to Wawayanda, I believe, by Digger Shortt and/or other Baltimore-area folks. I can remember, as a camper, that my camp director (Dave King) and program director (Dick "Yo-Yo" Sommers) were both Baltimoreans. It's even the case that at dinner Baltimore Orioles scores were announced (they were of course a great team in the mid-60s*). Even later, in the early 70s, prominent staff members like Barry Dunkin came out of Towson State. By now the Towson connection has long faded, but my memories of the odd-seeming Marylandcentricity of Wawayanda in those days hasn't. (Someday, in another entry, I'll say something about another eccentric geographic pipeline: the Mississippi connection.)

* I suppose there would have been protests about this had the Yankees or Mets been any good then. The Yanks had just gone bad, starting in'65, and the Mets of course were perennial 10th-place finishers in the National League. My dad, Sam, mailed me short short notes when I was at camp--always enclosed with a Newark Evening News clipping about the Mets game the previous day and the National League standings. I'm not sure why I enjoyed this. My team typically lost 90 to 100 games and typically sent no one to the all-star game. But I can remember as one of the great pleasures of being at camp, this: rest hour, a cool breeze blowing through my own little crank-up window in my cabin, my green navy wool blanket (always tucked neatly into my bunk), resting my head on my pillow and gleaming white pillow case (I changed the case at least 3 times during each 2-week session), and the day's mail just brought in by my junior counselor, and I always started with the letter and news of the Mets from my dad. His letters read like this:

Dear Al, nothing much going on here. I don't see any of the neighborhood kids. You are lucky to be at camp. It's hot here. Must be cool there at night. The Mets lost again. What else is new? Ron Hunt was hit by a pitch twice. Love, dad.

campy boys camp circa 1960

Here is a photo of Jim Wilkes of Mississippi (at left) and Ralph Holt (at right, of Newark NJ) gussied up in drag for some camp program or other in 1960 (or 1959). I just love that camp car! It's good to know that a white southerner and black northerner in that era could meet at Wawayanda and find at least gender-bending in common! By the time I came to Wawayanda as a very young camper a few years later, Ralph was quite a bit stouter (taking a larger dress size, I imagine) and was by then the director of Arts & Crafts, which we called "the Crafts shop." Crafts was then located in the old garage that was renovated in 1970 and since then has been called Hayden Lodge. Hayden was the first major renovation of one of the old Forstmann buildings, the first of many in the Halbe Brown era (1966-2001). In 1963 and 1964 Jim Wilkes held two positions at camp: Trail Blazer Director and "Associate Executive Secretary" and his address on the staff list is given as 45 Bleecker Street, Newark, NJ - which was where the Wawayanda/Frost Valley Association year-round office was located. The Trail Blazer program was a combination of the following: a step beyond Hemlock, the oldest regular in-camp boys village; a pre-CIT program; what we later called "Sequoia," adventure village; and what we later called "Catskill Explorers" and "Adventure Camp" (adventure trips). The Trail Blazer staff included a "director" (not "village chief") and counselors and junior counselors. For instance, in 1964 Paul Augustine of Westfield NJ was a Trail Blazer JC, and so was Geoff Steck, while the same year Bill Starmer was a TB counselor. I believe that the Trail Blazers were headquartered in the area just to the east of the main cabin areas, what we later called Sequoia. The original Sequoia barn (a wooden structure with bathrooms that was built up on stilts to keep it above a swampy area near where Biscuit & Pigeon converged) was, when I first came to camp, called "the Trail Blazers' barn."

1959

The grainy blow-up of a photo here shows Dave King as the Lenape VC among the 1959 Wawayanda staff. Here is a link to a web page which presents the whole photo, which Dave & Shirley King lent me to scan. At one point Dave had identified everyone in the photo, but I don't seem to have that list at the moment. I'll find it and add the names. 1959 was of course the second summer Wawayanda was at Frost Valley. There were five villages, from youngest to oldest in order: Totem (cabins 1-5), Forest (cabins 6-10), Outpost (11-15), Lenape (16-20), and Hemlock (21-25). Girls camp would be built a few years later.