Everett Lake

This is Everett Lake, the legendary long-time Food Service Director ("Cook," we mostly called the position) of the 1970s. The photo was taken by Carolyn Shelburne at the December 1973 celebration of Paula Brown (Halbe's sister) and Tom Holland, at the Castle. (I believe this was the party after their wedding ceremony. I'm not certain of that.)

1973 behind the old dining hall

 

From left: Al Filreis, Peggy Hope, Marie Hess and Doug Tompkins. That summer I was the "third cook" in the Boys' Dining Hall (working for Food Service Director Everett Lake). Peggy was "second cook" and "dessert chef." Doug was the LIT Director (LITs worked in the kitchen for two weeks and spent two weeks living in cabins). Marie Hess worked all summer with Everett in the Boys' Dining Hall (that summer Marie Kremer was head cook in the Girls' Dining Hall) and then in the evenings cooked in and ran the Staff Lounge in Pigeon Lodge. This photos was taken behind the old Boys' Dining Hall in the mid-afternoon - after all the lunch mess was cleared and in the brief lull before it was time to get back to work for dinner. That's Marie's ubiquitous Jeep Wagon. Doug was the original photobomber - never took a serious photo in his life, for sure.

the bug

My (infamous) red Volkswagen, parked by the Castle in the late spring of 1973. The other vehicle was the ubiquitous Volkwagen microbus driven everywhere by the late Leon Van Heusen.

the Beirut connection

Looking over the camper list just prior to their arrival yesterday, I noticed two with the last name of "Hibri." This put me in mind of Bassem El-Hibri, whom I knew as a young man from Beirut, Lebanon. Bassem attended a Y camp in the mountains of Lebanon and somehow through that experience met Paul Brown, Halbe Brown's brother. Paul was doing an international Y stint in the middle east. (I think David Allen met Paul, and perhaps Paul and Bassem, over there too. David was in Egypt, I think.) Anyway, Bassem found out about Frost Valley from Paul and arrived in 1973 (in the midst of war and civil war back home). He was here in '73, '74, and '75, possibly '76 too. One summer he was the Totem village chief. Another summer he climbed all 46 high peaks of the Adirondacks with Bud Cox and a group of boys on an Adventure trip. He and I became pretty close friends and spent some wonderful days off together in '75.

I lost touch with Bassem a few years later. Last I heard, he had moved to the U.S. and was running an import/export business in South Carolina.

"Hibri" on the camper list. Okay. Then I promptly forgot about all this and went on with my check-in afternoon. Coming back from taking a family up the hill to a cabin, I ran into staffer Jessica Dymond who said that someone named Hibri was looking for me. His first name was Nadi. He was in fact Bassem's brother!

Nadi and his family live in Texas, where he is an MD (radiologist). "My brother has told me for many years that Frost Valley changed his life - that I must bring my own children here." So from Texas they came - with son Omar and daughter Nadia. As they drove a car along the New York highways, Bassem called his brother from Lebanon and asked where he was. "We are driving to Frost Valley!" "Oh! When you get there, look for Al." So they did.

Yes, Bassem is back in Beirut (running a business). So now I'm aiming to get back in touch with him. Meantime, Omar, as you see above, tried his hand at limbo in the Challenge contest this morning. He was eliminated fairly early (big guy) but seemed to have fun.

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David Allen notes: "I met Paul Brown in Beirut but Rich Hanna new him there better. Rich came to Frost Valley first, and called me about an opening. Definitely a Beirut connection though. Part of my childhood was in Egypt, some teen years in Lebanon."

four musketeers on check-out day

From left to right, standing: Sven Grotrian, Doug Tompkins, Pat Ricciardi; below, Al Filreis. This is almost certainly 1973. I'm going to guess that Sven was LIT Director, Doug was CIT Director and Pat was VC of Sequoia, but that's an off-handed guess. Doug is wearing that summer's popular shirt: a three-quarters sleeved baseball jersey with the "73" on it.

dear friends for life

Liz White Russell and Leslie Black. Dear, dear friends since 1973. They met, needless to say, at Frost Valley.

1973

Page one of the 1973 staff list.

August '73 CITs

I seem to be on an early 70s roll, so let me keep going for a bit. Below is a part of a photo reproduced in the 1973 camp yearbook of the August girls CITs. Top from left to right: the late Melanie Mackin, Lisa Ernst, Carole Wolff, and Linda Caplan. In the middle kneeling below: Melanie Brown (Halbe's niece). Lisa is now our Director of Development.

makin' $325 for the summer

Ah, the old contract. We awaited these, typed by Jane Brown and "signed" by an inked stamp carved with Halbe Brown's signature. Here's Stu Sherman's contract to be a counselor in the summer of '73. If he came on June 18 and left on September 1 (including Family Camp week at the end) he'd earn $350! Click on the image below and you should get a large-enough version of it to read the whole contract. (I've blocked out Stu's SSN.)

We didn't get paid for staff training week (now the staff does indeed get paid for that week, which is of course hard work).

I think I must have spent $50 easily on my days' off each session. That didn't leave much. Sometimes it felt like serfdom, sometimes it felt like a labor of true love, sometimes it felt like a hamster cage, sometimes it felt like volunteerism, but we got these things, never questioned them, signed them and sent them back. (Later - once - I negotiated a slightly better weekly pay, but it felt odd and untoward.)

Tom Two Arrows

Here's a photo of Tom Two Arrows dancing in the dining hall in the early '60s. Tom used to come up to Frost Valley to teach and perform for father-son "Indian Guide" groups who were spending fall and spring weekends at camp. I remember Tom still doing this in the early 1970s - I'm guessing he was still at it in '73, possibly '74. This photo is courtesy of Jim Wilkes who had been searching for it for a long while.

Bill Starmer remembers: "Tom made a leather case for my 12-gauge shotgun, complete with bead work. To this day, the case hangs in the liviing room of my house in Las Vegas. It has actually been displayed in every house I have owned since '69 To heavy for the gun to live in it, so it is now home to a bow made by another Indian friend who lived in Michigan."

Dot Van Zandt

I'm very, very sorry to report that Dorothy Van Zandt passed away on December 13, four days ago. Everyone knew her as "Dot."

For many years - into the mid-1970s - Dot worked in the Ad Office, in later years alongside Jane Brown and Marie Kremer. Dot's husband was Bill Van Zandt, a crusty yet totally lovable man who worked as a prison guard for 9 months of the year and at Frost Valley, as a maintenance guy, for 3. Dot and Bill lived parts of the year in Florida. They became very close friends of Carl and Marie Hess. Bill died many years ago, though (as did Carl), and Dot remarried. She attended a recent reunion and had a wonderful time then with all her old FV friends.

Marie Hess and Dot remained close friends.

We hope all of Dot's Frost Valley friends will send condolences to the family, perhaps expressing a bit how much Dot meant to us. Please send notes to Dot and Bil's son, Bill VanZandt Jr. at: 114 Kensington Circle, Belvidere, NJ 07823.

The photo appeared in the 1974 Frost Valley yearbook (yes, we had yearbooks in those days) and shows Dot in the Ad Office, working with Joanne Walker. The photo was taken during the summer of '73.

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.

Fir Mountain in January

It's the first of September and I'm thinking of Frost Valley in winter--perhaps this morning trying to avoid all those autumnal death thoughts I mentioned the other day. I'm glum at summer's end (for many reasons, not all having to do with FV), so my mind likes to leap forward fast. I went hunting among my carousels of 35 mm slides for a scene of snow.

After a day-long hike up and back down Fir Mountain in January 1973, Bud Cox pretends to be so tired as to fall asleep leaning against a tree. Fat chance that Bud was tired--then or ever--on a hike. Among those he dragooned into this adventure were David and Becky White, two of Chuck and Joy White's children.

It was really cold that day--15 degrees or so--but we were all young and had just hiked at almost a running pace, so the coats had come off long before this point.

If anyone ever asked Bud how far it was before we reach our hike's destination, he would immediately and in a flat-toned just slightly ironic voice, "Oh, two point three six miles." You would believe this until, maybe a half hour later, you asked again, and then came this answer: "Oh, two point three six miles." Sometimes he would add as a coda: "Give or take a few miles."

Lenape 1971

Another year I've neglected: 1971. Here's the Lenape village photo for one of the sessions that summer.

Among the campers shown here is Ira Sasowsky, who was later a staff member.

Wearing number 16 is village chief, Jim Beckner. Jim was from Virginia (Radford, I believe) and was then studying English literature; eventually he became an English professor. Although when Jim and I got to know each other (in '73) and we talked a lot about novels and poetry I didn't have a clue that I'd also end up an English professor, there was nonetheless a strong connection between us.

Just in front of Jim is camper Lee Fleischer (FV 1969-1980) who also later became a staff member and whose son attended camp this past summer.

Ira Sasowsky is now a professor at Ohio State, and Lee Fleischer is a medical doctor in the Philly area. Probably the rest of the people in this pic have terminal degrees too. Maybe there was something in the Lenape drinking water that summer....

hunker hawser and "gumbo"

People often ask me to trace the origins of what has become a robust tradition and core principle: everybody's a winner at Frost Valley, the quasi-non-competitive cooperative spirit of game-playing. Of course there are years when there's more competitive and hard-core winning-and-losing sports and games, but there are also years when the non-competition thing is supreme. If you listen to the audio recording I made during Olympics 2005 (an earlier entry), you'll perhaps be amazed at how readily the campers talk about how everyone's a winner at Frost Valley.

Well, first of all, we took very seriously the book New Games (and another book, More New Games) which was part of a movement that became known as "the New Games movement." Yes, it was an early 1970s thing. New Games filtered into FV in 1973, three years before the book itself was published. By '76, when we got copies of it, we were already using official New Games and had made up a bunch ourselves. One from the book was called "Hunker Hawser." The photo above shows that game in action.

Ken Barton (great and hilarious Program Director in the early 70s--who came to us from Halbe and Jane Brown's beloved Camp Fitch) was a phys ed teacher and brought us "Gumbo Softball," a funny and high-spirited and somewhat less competitive version of regular softball, which can get rather grim and intense. I won't go through the rules of Gumbo Softball and how it differs from the regular game, but interested parties should feel free to ask me. Wonderful game--and it takes about half the time to play it. Once Ken gave us "Gumbo Softball" we began making up Gumbo versions of every game we could think of. By around 1977 and '78, "gumbo" was a word associated with me. Everything that was a little weird, a little funny, a little less serious--with a bit of pizzazz about it--was given the prefix "gumbo." The term became synonymous with winging it - with just doing it - with making do and having fun. Gumbo this and gumbo that. One summer I wore a t-shirt that simply had the word GUMBO printed on the front. (I gave that T-shirt away my last summer, I think to Dave Gold.)

After a while the prefix got unmoored and the word around camp for fun was just "gumbo." What will we do tonight now that it's raining and the indoor space we had reserved has been taken by another village? Answer? Gumbo!

Melanie Mackin, 1958-2005

The other day I was thinking about Melanie Mackin, who was a CIT in '73, an LIT in '74 and a terrific JC in '75. Melanie from Short Hills, NJ - an energetic joyful young person I recall from those summers. I looked in our listserv and realized that we'd lost touch with her. Then I googled her and found, sadly, that she passed away in 2005. In 2002 she and two other partners had founded a law firm in Ohio that concentrated on workers' compensation and labor relations. Here is an obituary:

Melanie Mackin Stump, age 47, of Oakwood, Ohio, formerly of Montclair and Short Hills NJ, passed away Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005 at the Hospice Care Center, Dayton, Ohio. Melanie was born on April 25, 1958 in Newark, New Jersey. She was preceded in death by her mother Alma (Partyka) Mackin. She is survived by her husband of 18 years, Randall; her son Ronald Patrick Stump; her father Thomas Mackin of Bedminster NJ; her sister, Tara Hiby and her husband Eric of Houston TX; her niece Allison Hiby; her father-in-law and mother-in-law Maury and Patricia Himmelberg of Kettering OH; two sister-in-laws Leigh Ann Turner of Bellbrook OH and Susan Holt and her husband Tim and their children Justin & Kristin of Tampa FL. , She was a 1980 graduate of Smith College in Northampton MA, and a 1984 graduate of the University of Dayton School of Law and was admitted to the Ohio Bar in the fall of 1984. She started her career as a law clerk for Judge James A. Brogan, then worked at Smith and Schnacke for several years, later with Chernesky, Heyman & Kress, and then with Thompson Hine. In 2002 she was a founding partner in the firm of Scheuer, Mackin & Breslin, with offices in Dayton, Cincinnati & Cleveland. She was board certified in the specialty area of Workers Compensation Law. Memorial contributions may be made to Hospice of Dayton, 324 Wilmington Ave., Dayton OH 45420.

If Melanie's FV friends want to set up a campership in Melanie's memory (financial aid grant for a camper to attend for 2 weeks whose family cannot otherwise afford it), contact me and I can help set it up.

Boyd family redux

Elizabeth Boyd is a very, very talented counselor in Pokey this summer. She is the daughter of Peter Boyd, a former camper, CIT, LIT in 1972, and JC in '73, who has long since settled in Texas with his family. I had lunch with Elizabeth's cabin the other day and it was moving to see how attached to her the kids are. Peter's brothers David and Tim were also campers and staff members in the 70s. Peter and his family have traveled from Texas to Frost Valley many times in the past few summers - most recently between sessions 1 and 2 when he helped, along with other staff alumni, with check-in, greeting parents, escorting new campers up the hill to the villages, etc.

Bud's thirsty boots

Of course it was Henry A. ("Bud") Cox who first created Frost Valley's Adventure Program. The photo here was taken in August of 1973, about an hour after Bud returned from a summer of Adirondack backpacking. In 2007 Bud still works at Frost Valley, leading hikes, helping Brian Sense with details of the current FV Adventures program, and, once in a while, leading "Goin' on a Lion Hunt" in the dining hall. We have two videos of these "Lion Hunt" revivals and I hope to post at least one of them before too long to this blog.