before Hayden Lodge

Anyone who came after 1970 will be disoriented by this photo, which was taken in 1965 or '66. You are looking at (on the left) what is now Hayden Lodge--what was then "the Crafts Shop," or "Forstmann's garage." Even as the home for Arts & Crafts, it looked and felt absolutely like a garage. Two large garage doors and two bays inside. I have a vague recollection that for at least one summer in the mid-60s, it was actually used as part of check-in. I believe the nurses (wearing whites - and caps!) were stationed in their to give us a check-in-day check-up--among the big bins of loose tiles and wooden parts for birdhouses and spools of colorful lanyard.

Off to the right you see one small building and part of another. The little one is the Flyfishing Shack - in Forstmann's time, the paymaster's hut. And then the back edge of Smith Lodge, the "Infirmary," later "the Heath Center." Recent FV'ers will even have a little visual trouble with this, because since 1975 the dialysis center has been a wing of Smith Lodge coming well off the back. Today this view of the little shack would be obscured by that back wing of Smith.

Between the Crafts Shop and Infirmary (look behind the white car) you can barely see the deer fence that fenced off the apple orchard that in those days served as our Archery Range. It is now still an orchard but is also the location of our greenhouse and gardens.

The vantage-point of the photographer (me) is the front of the Rec Hall (now Margetts Lodge).

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."