the state of being VC

"It's just a camp." Well, yes. But for those who for one reason or another found themselves the leader-supervisor of a dozen or so young people and head coordinator and inspirer of between 40 and 45 children...it was generally a life-changing and frequently a life-making experience. I can't tell you how many people, years after being VC, have told me it was that experience--that flat-out demand, that achievement of balance, that hands-on administration, that combination of nuanced skills--that made them the great [fill in blank: teacher, businessperson, medical doctor, community organizer, parent, innovator...] that they are today.

On the final day of camp this summer, I joined the end of a session in which a VC (Chrissy) was evaluating a counselor (Laurie) and asked Chrissy about the role of the VC, how it felt. We also, as you'll hear, talked about what it's like to come home, to leave the valley, after such an intense experience. Here are several minutes of that recording.

During the summer of 1999, the VCs designed a Tshirt for themselves. Jody Ketcham was there taking photos for the book she and I did together, Finding the Way Back, and caught this shot of a VC wearing one of these. The shirt reads:

Village Chief \vil aj cheef\ n: An overworked, underpaid, camp official expected to be everything to everyone, including, but not limited to, Counselor, Mediator, Motivator, Programmer, Administrator, Police Officer, Caretaker, and Supervisor, all while maintaining good working relationships with parents, campers, counselors and support staff, and without whom any summer camp would struggle to function adequately.

To the above came this response a little later:

"It finally sunk in during my weekly trip to your blog why I love it so much....it completely eliminates the boundaries of time. One story about modern-day camp...now my son's Frost Valley...and the next entry I'm back in the late 70's...oh, to be 20 again! And through the blog with personal stories and pictures...it doesn't seem long ago or far away any more. And even more importantly, it reminds me of how much it still is alive in me, so big a part of me. This was especially true in the audio and story of the VC's. It's no coincidence that I took to the role of Chief Medical Resident fairly easily ... at Presbyterian Hospital 1988-89. Basically the same skill set as being a Frost Valley VC...scheduling the Residents, including on call (much less fun than CQ), mediating the conflicts between staff, setting up the educational experiences for the staff all the while trying to provide the best care possible of those entrusted to us. Or maybe it was just the water in Lenape in '71 as your other piece suggested."--Lee Fleischer

golf at camp?

In the late 90s I got to know Steve Purkis, now a teacher and masterful soccer coach, as a talented VC (Lenape, I believe) and then Camp Director. I saw Steve in action a good deal and came to admire him, but here I want to say something that might seem miscellaneous, off the point. On his day off, Steve almost invariably went to play golf, no so much because his game was good but because his FV buddies loved such outings. I'm sure there were FV staffers over the years--in my time, almost certainly--who played golf, but I didn't notice it. In the 1960s, of course, Grossinger's in Liberty was thriving and had a pretty good 18 holes. But did Wawayanda people actually go there? Maybe because of my image of Grossinger's - the not-Frost Valley, the people there seemingly doing the opposite of what we did - I could never imagining reconciling golf and camp. This is naive and probably also a bias on my part, and maybe it's just symbolic and visceral: after all, I associate camp with a rocky field (rocks so plentiful you could never remove them), a hillside of ferns you'd never mow down, streams you wouldn't divert, and grass, such as it was, that was brown by the middle of July. Even the making of a football field behind the Ad Office in the early 70s seemed incongruous to me. A little after I noticed Steve's forays off camp to the links, I realized there was a 90s gang - Bill Baker prominently among them - that loved to do this. Even during one of our reunions, off they went, and it's a way for them of doing again what they did together summers--a tradition, a real custom they loved. Thus at first disconcerted by all this, now I am instructed: we each have our images of what camp in the summer should be, and we can't impose them. If Steve's excellence was aided by 18 holes, and modest watering at the 19th, I'm all for it. Culture is capacious, or ought to be. And open minds make culture.

The photo was taken in the Day Room of the dining hall during a Session 2 lunch, July 1999.