1980, the view from Pigeon Lodge

Jurgen ("Bobo") Bobrowski spent a few weeks being the village chief of a special village that resided in Pigeon Lodge. He took this photo from the second-floor west-facing room in the back of the building. He's obviously looking out across Biscuit Creek to the main part of camp. Notice the newly paved parking area in front of Smith Lodge. It was set up for street hockey, which ran pretty much all day every day. It was 1980 and Margetts Lodge was just a few years old at that point. Notice that you can't see a single car parked anywhere!

when Margetts Lodge was new

This photo was taken in the spring of 1976 or possibly the early fall of 1975. Margetts Lodge was new and hadn't been named yet (we called it the "New Conference Center" and used "NCC" on schedules). The Volkswagen bus is that of Leon Van Heusen.

dusk in Filreis Field

Dusk, last night, 8:30 PM. I walked alone across the field on my way to catch the second half of "Wawa's Got Talent" in the main room of Margetts Lodge. It had rained hard much of the day and then cleared and the sky was gorgeous, the whole feel of the place was damp and now cooler than in days. So here you see Hayden Lodge (at left) and Smith Lodge (at right); in between then the greenhouse and garden (where the Archery range used to be many years ago) and Banks Hill visible behind that.

Mr. Carey's old rec hall

There it is. Forstmann's cow barn, which we first used as our dining hall (1958, '59) and then as our beloved "rec hall" for many years. The "rec hall" was essentially our only indoor space other than the dining halls. Somehow--unbelievably--we held all-camp evening programs in there. On a rainy night, once in a while, we'd crowd in there to watch a reel-to-reel 16 mm movie. Calamity Jane (a western already old then) was one I remember. We held Kangaroo Court in there too. I got at least one pie in the face in there, as a "defendent" in the K Court, Judge King presiding. During sunny days it was quiet in the rec hall, but when it rained we all flowed in. During some summers there was a little library of old adventure novels (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island). For a few years there was a random never-in-tune upright piano.

I came of age as an extrovert in that building.

One torrentially rainy afternoon in '66 - I was a camper in Forest - we found ourselves sopping wet, standing around in the rec hall. Maybe a hundred kids and counselors, waiting out the rain. But it just wasn't going to stop. It was maybe 3 PM and surely we'd be stuck in there until 5. What to do? One of my counselors, the legendary J. C. Pony, sat down at the piano and began to play loud, melodramatic, lugubrious mystery-movie music. Instinctively, I grabbed a book from the shelf. It was Stevenson's Kidnapped. I began to read its overheated boys' adventure prose in a loud radio-drama voice. Between J.C. and me we were creating a story time. People started to listen. Then they went quiet. Then they sat down and gathered around us. And as more people came in from the rain, they were shushed and sat down too. I don't know how long we did this, but we dramatized Kidnapped for some time. And we hadn't planned to do it, we hadn't even cued each other - it just happened. I felt the feeling of having flair for the first time in my life. I was gumbo. I could invent something to do on an otherwise dreary day.

By the early 70s the rec hall was really falling apart. We had Arts & Crafts in there. In the winter, it was the x-country ski shop. Then in '75 "Chuck White came with the world's largest shovel" (as the song goes) and "knocked it all down for the progress of camp." And Margetts Lodge was built. See the photo below.

Mr. Carey, by the way, was Dick Carey, Wawayanda's executive director when we moved from NJ to Frost Valley. So I sometimes refer to the rec hall as "Mr. Carey's Old Rec Hall."

(Jim Wilkes, on seeing the above about Dick, reminds me that Ray Grant was the Executive Director in those days. "Carey [was] the Camp Director my first summer," Jim writes, "along with Marion Schreck, and Al Parsons who met my bus in Woodstock.")

In the photo at the top of this entry: it's holdover weekend (visiting day) and the boy in the bottom right is me. The kid from Forest.

Margetts Lodge (aka "NCC") opens

At the very end of the summer of 1976, the renovation of the old "Boys' Rec Hall" - the old Forstmann-era cow barn that had served Wawayanda as its first dining hall at Frost Valley, and later out-trip, Arts & Crafts, and the ski shop - was finally complete. It was Chuck White's first major renovation as Director of Development. The renovation used the stone foundation of the old barn, but everything else was new: a large activity room in the back, two large offices on either side in the front and a smaller one in the middle, and 8 rooms upstairs of the sort (motel-like) that we'd never seen at camp to that point. Dissenters and grumps called it "the Halbe Hilton" and we mocked the idea that anyone would sleep at camp in an actual bed other than a cot or bunk or one of those droopy 70-year-old frame beds in the Castle.

I was the Program Director in August '76 and remember my conversation with Halbe and Chuck about the extent to which we could use the new building. It was session 4 and we were certainly hungry for an alternative indoor space for rainy days. They resisted but finally relented: yes, summer camp could use the new building. It was not yet named "Margetts Lodge" (after Walter Margetts, a long-time Wawayanda friend and the Forstmanns' attorney). Halbe referred to it as "the conference center," which seemed not just ambiguous to me but definitely something summer camp should stay away from. But in we went. On Period 4 schedules and handouts I have from that summer, I see it referred to as "NCC" (e.g. "Forest will meet in the right-side room of the NCC"), "New Conference Center."

Oh, and yes, that summer everyone who entered the building had to take their shoes off--a little bit of brand-new-building decorousness that was gone within two weeks of the start of the next summer.

Yeah, we grumpily protested the renovation of the old barn but soon appreciated having the extra indoor space.

Can't tell for sure but I think the yellow-hatted guy on the right is Norm Gurfinkel and on the left is Doug Kerr. Just guesses.