Homer McLemore remembers the early 60s

Homer McLemore remembers:

In the summer of 1961, my family members took me by automobile from northeast Miss. to Tuscaloosa, Ala., for an overnight train ride to NYC followed by a bus ride, via the Big Apple on Highway 17, to Liberty. In those days, Liberty was the abuzz with tourist and summer Catskill visitors. Arriving Saturday night about 10:00 p.m., Ralph Holt and Bill Starmer met me at bus station. Although I did not know the two, I felt as if we had been friends for life. We made the rounds of local clubs, hotels, and sidewalk café tables where we met with other counselors on that mid-summer week-end break.

The following morning, I was greeted at breakfast by Richard “Digger” Short, Mike Devita, Dave and Shirley King, Jerry Lester, and a number of others. It was a great summer with Mike Devita as Lenape Village Chief. I returned for two more summers as Archery Director and Family Camp Staff.

In the Spring 1964, I decided that summer employment within the area of my college studies was more responsible than returning as a camp counselor. The decision was difficult because of the memories of Wawayanda friends and things like the cool Neversink waters, the surrounding terrain, and hikes to the top of Slide Mountain. Other memories include flaming sneaker toes as I sat by a camp fire with cold wet feet and playing broom polo using the stable horses - seems we broke a number of broom handles. Other polo players included Bruce Whyte.

In those days, campers and counselors did not routinely cross the bridge on the road leading to the Castle. Staying at the Castle for a night was a special event. In 1962, Castle guests were served three meals including a semi-formal dinner serve by the staff who were more formally attired in their black dresses with white aprons and caps. In August 1972, my wife and I spent a honeymoon night at the Castle. What a ten year letdown! Alas, only one piece of fine china remaining in the cupboards. In the summer of 1995-ish, we ventured to Liberty on Highway 17. At one highway exit, a small bear greet us by sitting unnerved as we slowed for pictures. The town, Grossingers, the Concord, and many other summer resorts were sad reminders of the past. But (old English for something like: Behold the Undeniable Truth), the warm memories of Frost Valley have not faded in the past 48 years.

More on Homer here.

another Westfield guy

Walking towards us, looking down, is Scott Sanborn of Westfield, NJ. It's Family Camp (late August), 1961 - at the waterfront (obviously). My own sense (just a few years later as a young camper) was of a Westfield corps: the Ketchams, the Barnetts, Scott Sanborn, the Ewens, Jody Davies, later Cindy Titsworth, Peggy Hope, later Martin Kunert (now a film-maker)...the whole gang. Wawayanda was for a time Westfield-dominated, Mississippi State-dominated, Baltimore-dominated and later eastern Ohio-dominated, Woodmere-dominated, and Stevens Point, Wisc.-dominated. (The Westfield-Frost Valley pipeline has slowed somewhat, but there are still Westfielders around, e.g. Annie Gallgian.)

When Halbe Brown and Jane and their kids arrived in '66, they looked for a home to live in from September through May (they didn't live the full year at camp then) and of course they chose to live in....Westfield. Bill MacLeod, a Program Director for several summers in the early 70s, maybe late 60s, was recruited from the ranks of Westfield.... And on it goes.

My hometown of Springfield NJ produced a few notables but we never strung it together the way Westfield did. Mike Marder, Al Inselberg ("Weasel"!), my sister Liane, the Fridkis brothers, Stu Sherman, Cindy Drucker (now Keppler), the two Krop girls, there must have been a few others. And of course Bud Cox, a Westfield guy, taught math for a few years at the middle school in Springfield. He was totally a Westfieldite, but we in Springfield claimed him. I owe Larry Fridkis of Springfield a shout-out: it was Larry who persuaded me to come my first summer and we were in Totem cabin 2 together. Counselor: Tom Fewel...from Mississippi, of course.

Rudy, come & gone

Before computers, the making of the cabin lists before each new two-week session was a major project - complex and almost always done late at night when directors should have been out and around checking on things, dealing with last-minute problems, getting some sleep before the big exchange day/holdover weekend.

I can still remember all the all-nighters I pulled doing this. Usually the memory is about the friends who helped me. Read off the names, check the birthdays, make sure campers who requested each other are together, check to be sure we haven't created a cabin full of lifers next to one full of rookies....and what are the possible bad combos of camper-counselor personalities?

Here you see a photo taken of two staff people assembling the cabin lists (either them or the bus lists - the latter just as crucial for different reasons but less complex an activity) in 1962. The two are Bill Starmer and Rudy Gilbert.

Can you tell where they are working? It's inside the Lake House. This is the small house across the camp road from the boathouse and across the county road from where the old horsebarn used to be. Later Everett Lake lived there, and still later Leslie Black and Doug Kerr.

Rudy Gilbert was a counselor. He went on one of the Canadian trips with Jim Wilkes. Rudy was a student of civil engineering from New Orleans, attending Mississippi State College (which was at the time a feeder school to Wawayanda). This was Rudy's one summer at Frost Valley.

Shortly after that summer (1962) Rudy was murdered on the streets of New Orleans. Lots and lots of fine young people have passed through FV in the summers before and since, and probably few of us remember Rudy Gilbert there that one summer. So why not use this 21st-century-fangled mode (this blog) as a means by which to honor such a person, and (because we still do the same things Rudy did then) to remember him even we don't ourselves remember him?

Bill Starmer, upon seeing this picture after all these years, writes: "You have no idea how often I think about Rudy. We became really close in just a short time. Wonderful future ahead of him. So sad his life had to end so suddenly. One of the few people from those days that still floats through my memory."

So here's to Rudy! And here's to such friendships! Cherish them while you have 'em.

more Trailblazers

Pictured are from left to right: Fletcher Cockran, Wayne from Green Village, Paul Augustine, Bill Starmer, Geoff Steck, and Ken Hamlin. The photos was taken on one of the Trailblazers trips in the summer of 1961.

Jim Wilkes has made available this photograph and four more from these amazing early 1960s Trailblazers trips. You can see all five - plus captions - here.

Ken Hamlin hasn't been mentioned in this blog at all, I don't think. He stayed on for many years, into the early 1970s I think. He was quite a character. Somewhere along the line he got the nickname "Hambone." He was known for wild escapades and terrific practical jokes. At least one summer he lived in the Ad Office, and there were some rumors of fun times had there.

In recent years Hambone was or perhaps still is in the green grocer business in the New York area. For a while in the mid-1990s he was involved enough with the alumni association to be an active volunteer. I remember that for a while he drove fresh vegetables and such in his truck up to the camp to donate it or sell it at very low prices.

Anyway, many thanks to Jim Wilkes for unearthing these classy pictures and scanning them for us.

One of the first "jobs" Jim was given when he arrived at camp was to take care of a fawn that had apparently been abandoned by its parents. The photo below of Jim and the fawn appeared in the Newark Star Ledger.


Jim Wilkes on Hambone: "The first time I drove to Summit to pick up Ken, I saw Ken flying (airborne) out the front door of his house, never touching the steps with his Dad in hot persuit. He was a tough kid on all the trips to Canada and the name "Hambone" was well earned. Ken and I worked together for many years. He built a house next to Camp Speers where he lives today ..... when he is not in Florida."

More on Hambone...

our epic goes back to Homer

Homer McLemore worked at Wawayanda from 1961 through 1963 and has visited only twice since that time. But he's been following this blog and it has conjured up clear memories. "Wawayanda with its staff and several of its campers are experiences that I cannot seem to forget - they are with me always with great fondness. I know that the camp physical facilities and programs have significantly changed; however, it is 'yesterday' that I remember."

He remembers a boy from Canada who was probably under minimum camp age. He was with Homer in Totem. Maybe he was permitted to be at camp at too young an age because his father was our contact in the Canadian wilderness (for our canoe trips there). One chilly rainy night at the top of Slide Mountain, this little boy managed to get a fire started when no one else, including Homer, could seem to do it.

He remembers an 11-year-old boy perhaps named Furman - from Alabama. He remembers him because he knew or learned that due to segretation no camp in the South would offer this boy the camp experience he got at Wawayanda.

He remembers the 1962 campers of cabin 11 who won a talent contest by performing a skit based on the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

the old Boys Dining Hall

To the left here, the old "Boys Dining Hall" (properly Thomas Dining Hall or Thomas Lodge, named for Emerson Thomas or "Em") as it stood in 1961. Mike DeVita, who with his brother (and I believe sister too) was there in the early years of Wawayanda at Frost Valley, sent me this snapshot and three others. You can see these here. The dining hall, especially from this angle (coming up the hill from what the old Rec Hall, now Margetts Lodge), doesn't look like much, but everyone who ate and sang and cheered there recalls its elegance and capaciousness. Its acoustics were somehow 5 times better than those of the current dining hall, which is fabulous in almost every other way. There was a silver-colored metal fireplace hood suspended from the ceiling in the very center of the main dining room; below it a round stone fireplace. Rows of five tables for each village were spread out across two wings, one east-facing and the other north-facing. Especially at night--for instance, on story night or during a rainy-night closing campfire--the place had a look and feel of a modernist cathedral. This building burned to the ground on the last night of 1982. Photos of the fire and its story....for another post, another time. Meantime, there's this true tale: Mike Marder, when he learned that the real name of the building was "Thomas Dining Hall," asked: "What's the matter? Didn't Mr. Boys make a big enough donation?"