reunion hoopla

FV people never outgrow the best antics: hoopla.

2 former staff visit

Anna Armstrong and Rebecca Reilly visit for the day, happy to be back. Anna is seriously considering attending the Labor Day reunion, having not until realized that the reunion will include many recently former staff--people she'll know. Then when I told her we would have an inter-decade Challenge Night, she said, "Wow! I'm getting chills just thinking about it."

final '09 hoopla

hoopla

It seems counterintuitive to present "hoopla" (after-lunch cheers, shouts, chants) in photographs. I took some video and might get that up later but meantime I really think these images give you the (ahem.....) accurate picture of the scene. This was the final lunch of session 1, last Thursday. The loudest, or at least happiest and most spirited, hoopla I've heard in some years. I especially enjoyed how the villages supported each other--cheering each other's cheers, and building one on the next. And I loved the way the directors, instead of standing around waiting for it all to end so that announcements could be made and the next activity period gotten to, danced to the beat of the organized chaos.

hoopla 1978

The scene is the Boys' Dining Hall, August 25, 1978. The last full day of camp for that summer, lunchtime. Time for what later become known as "hoopla." I think in '78 we still called this rollicking session "cheers." But it entailed cheering and loud singing (and sometimes a skit). Jean-Louis Lalanne had been an ICCP (international) counselor in the summer of '76, and missed all this. He asked me if I could make a recording of hoopla and I did. I recently rediscovered this old cassette and I'm glad it hasn't deteriorated too much. The recording is fifteen minutes long. At first you hear the villages cheering - Totem, Forest, Outpost, Lenape and Hemlock. Sequoia was with us usually in that dining hall, but they were out that day. And Cherokee, a village older than Tacoma (they lived in Biscuit and Pigeon Lodges and ate in the Boys' Dining Hall), wasn't happening in session 4 that summer (they'd been there 1, 2 and 3). Among the cheers you hear are two versions of "The Gridiron" (Lenape's: "The Gridiron's cold, you can't beat Lenape 'cause we're too old") and a classic Lenape "triple locomotive" left over from the Bud Cox Lenape days ("L L L - E E E - N N N - A A A - P P P P P P P - E E E... LenapeLenapeLenape"). And a Forest cheer that had been introduced and perfected by J.C. Pony in the mid-60s: "Has Forest got the spirit?" "Yeah, man!" Then "Announcements" and then two songs: Father Abraham and Green Grass.

Here's that recording - an mp3 audio file you can download.

radio Dave

David Scherer ("Radio Dave") is up to something on YouTube - something about some sort of somewhat unkosher project he undertook in Forest one summer - but I can't quite say what it is. Anyway, here is is, Dave's video, on YouTube: link.

the Wawayanda spirit, it never does die

Max Geiser in the dining hall with his MAC kids, last day of session 1, summer 2007.

hoopla redux

One way of thinking of the 90s is as the Hoopla Era. At the 2001 reunion some of the 90s' staff had been gone just a few years, while others of course were returning after nearly a decade. (The recent FV decades are especially long in this sense.)

Hoopla is a kind of program unto itself. (This past summer I overheard one camper say to another as they walked into lunch: "Oh, today's the last day of hoopla of the session. I hope it's really good.")

Hoopla is gumbo updated.

Hoopla is a cross between cheerleading, slam dancing, doing the dozens, and a seance.

Hoopla is shouting Olympics-style, only every damned-fool day.

What earlier generations called "cheers" - which is to say the post-lunch village chants and cheer-songs and shouts - more recently is called "hoopla." Actually the word was first used to describe all the post-lunch craziness in the mid-80s. In those days it was a synonym for everything--announcements, songs led from the front of the room, skits (usually one skit per day), spontaneous singing, as well as the cheers (only the latter being the villages taking turns to be loudly proud).

And the village-to-village challenges, one-ups-man-ship of the cheers chanted in turn...all that dates back to the mid-60s. When Hemlock chanted

Chip chop!
chip chop!
chip chop!
Forest falls again!

it was a big blow to Forest's collective ego. The next day, Hemlock got up and Outpost joined them. Uh, felt Forest. Worse. The next day they did it again but this time, immediately after the cheer was done, Forest rose and shouted "On you!" The next day Totem added a rejoinder after "On you!" and so on, until the Chip Chop cheer took about 20 minutes to get through all the sequences of rejoinders.

I'm not sure how seriously anyone should be taking any of this, but it surely is the second or third thing people remember from their summer days in the valley.

At the 2001 reunion there was a bit of culture shock for the older folks, as after one lunch the 90s' guys took over, gathering together in the middle of the dining hall tables, and did one cheer after another, many of them combined village cheers (e.g. "The Hill" for both villages in cabins 41-50 or "Silence," which began--I think--as a Hemlock-Sacky cheer). It was impressive. At the 2006 reunion I made a video of this same group--now a bit greyer and some with their own children in tow--did a wonderful reprise of "Silence." I'll try to find that video and put it up and link to this blog. Meantime, here's a photo from the '01 reunion.

"I was reading your blog," writes Ashley O'Hara (1988-1998), "the Silence cheer was a Sacky-Hemlock cheer. I was a camper the year it was introduced. Jeff Daly, Malik Jenkins, Tameka Brown...were all counselors that year. They made it up during staff training and we had our first campfire and they taught it to us. I will never forget that day when we first did the cheer during Hoopla. We did really silence everyone. It was an amazing thing to be part of during that summer. Great FV memories. Don't remember the year to be exact... I'm 27 now. Love reading all about FV."

videos: Pokey-Totem cheer & Susky too

Seen and heard your Pokey-Totem cheer for the day? No? Well your day's not complete without it, so click on this link and see a video of what will for many be a familiar cheer--recorded during the current (4th) session at camp. The cheer is called "Bang Bang Choo Choo Train."

Now let's leave the dining hall and watch Susky in the Big Tree Field perform their favorite cheer: here's your link.

origins of "Silence" & "Ultimate Sicko Ball"

D'Arcy John Oaks (kneeling with backpack in photo), a Frost Valley lifer and one of the staff stars of the 1990s, paid an eventful four-hour visit to the valley in early July, during the current summer's session 1. An old buddy of Jeff Daly and Bob Eddings, who together now run summer camp, D'Arcy was hooked up with Hemlock & Sacky '07 and introduced to them as one of the creators of their favorite combined cheer, now called "Silence." Here is D'Arcy's description of his visit, starting with his guest appearance at "Silence":

The kids from Hemlock and Sacky asked me to do the "Silence" cheer (which we used to call "Knights and Maidens") with them. That was pretty awesome. Back in like '91 there was a massive "cheer war" in the Hird, especially between Lenape and Hemlock. "Knights and Maidens" was written to combine the shouting strength of Sacky and Hemlock (80 kids) to over-power Lenape (40 kids). Jeff helped write that cheer with me and a bunch of Hemlock/Sacky counselors (Ellie Gordon, Malik Jenkins, Cybil Ryan, Ed Zimmerman, Sam McTieran, and others) right before Session 1 started in that summer (either '91 or '92). I was proud to see that the Hird kids still play "Ultimate Sicko Ball," which is this crazy 4-team capture the flag game they play on Big Tree Field. In something like 1990 or 1991 Josh Tucker, John Turer, and I decided the Hird needed a game that every Hird camper could play at the same time, thus the beginning of "Ultimate Sicko Ball." It involves four teams, a lot of balls that are the flags, tagging, jails, no-mans-land, hoola-hoops, throwing, kicking, catching. Its really great. [Editor's note: here's a photo taken of the four teams all set up in the Big Tree Field just prior to one such USB game.] I can't believe they still play that game. I was wearing my classic early '70's FV half-sleeve jersey and, like you've been writing in your blog, old FV shirts are noticed and desired by both staff and campers. Jeff introduced me to the Hird campers over the PA right before hoopla and all the kids cheered my return to FV...I felt like a rock-star.

And then, still D'Arcy talking about his visit, there's this, almost inevitable strong feelings of gratitude:

Of course right before Jeff and I said good bye we had that teary-eyed conversation of how important Frost Valley was to our becoming the fine adults that we are now (ha!)... that FV helped us develop courage to challenge ourselves, champion the underdog, take responsibility for ourselves and others, be proactive, have the courage to hold an individual opinion different from others, be able to take charge and lead a group of people, resolve conflicts, be thankful for the little things, act local and think global...many of our personal characteristics which we are most proud can be traced to some extent to being young people at Frost Valley. We acknowledged to each other that we owed Frost Valley, big time.

Now here's D'Arcy John Oaks' FV profile:

1990 - Hemlock JC
1991 - Hemlock counselor
1992 - Hemlock counselor
1993 - PAC counselor
1995 - Lenape VC
1996 - Hemlock VC
1997 - CIT Coordinator
1998 - Recovery Camp/Discovery Camp Director

The photo above was taken in 1995 and shows director Peter Swain and Lenape VC D'Arcy Oaks explaining some camp rule or another to a Lenape camper.

an Outpost cheer

If you click here you will see a video recording of a cheer chanted by Outpost village just a few days ago. Note that Outpost's sister village (Lakota - between Susky and Sacky in age) cheers along with Outpost during "hoopla" after lunch. The brother and sister villages typically memorize each other's cheers; indeed, often when a village begins one of its cheers, the entire dining hall shouts in comradeship. It's quite something to behold.