1992

Here, at right, is the first page of the 1992 summer staff list. Click on the image for a larger view. How many names do you recognize?

'88 Wawayanda staff

Above: the 1988 Wawayanda staff village assignment list. Notice that Pokey/Totem was combined that summer. Later the two were separated again and in recent years re-combined. Note also that Sacky and Hemlock were part of Wawayanda (now part of Hird). Also Outpost was a girls village that year!

a glance at 1970

Here is page one of the 1970 Frost Valley summer staff list. Note that it's titled "Camp Wawayanda Staff" even though by that time we were referring to "Girls Camp" as "Camp Hird" or "Camp Henry Hird for Girls." Some habits died slowly. When people asked me around my hometown what I was doing for the summer, and I said, "I'm going to camp," and they asked where, I'd say "Wawayanda." Just that. They knew. If I'd said "Frost Valley," they wouldn't know.

Peter and Nancy Barnett were Westfield mainstays. Nancy must have been a very young staff member in '70. I believe it was only in '71 that she was a CIT. Jeff Bohn, an LIT here (that was the summer after CIT), eventually was a counselor in Totem: I remember him as slight-shouldered, thin, very long hair combed in a middle part, soft-spoken, mild-mannered, and peaceful (in a counter-cultural sort of way). Susan and Meg Ambry were the daughters of Ed Ambry, who later became very involved in the development of our Environmental Education program and served as a member of our Board. The Ambry sisters and Ed have been discussed in this blog, earlier.

1997

Dan Goldman (middle) and Rick Mckay (at right) and Chris Giampapa (left) at the 2001 centennial reunion.

Here's a selection from the 1997 staff list:

Catherine Baker - VC, Sacky
Amy Barkley - barn staff
Matt Buczek - counselor
Brian Butler - counselor
Sarah Chapman - JC
Heather Constant - babysitter
Jeff Daly - counselor
Rich Eddings - Pac counselor
Carly Einstein - JC
Catharine Giegengack - counselor
Dan Goldman - counselor
Heather Graf - CIT Coordinator
Dave Haight - Wawayanda Director
Nicholas Ippolito - horsebarn instructor
Khalid Jenkins - counselor
Katie Kelly - Assistant Director
Steve Ketcham - counselor
Mike Lee - assistant program director
Rick McKay - counselor
Todd Miller - "unit leader of Sequoia"
Nicole Parisi-Smith - counselor
Carol Paterson - waterfront director
Carrie Petrick - AC
Moira Poe - AC
Steve Purkis - Hird Director
Shawn Schaefer - counselor
Beth Schwartzapfel - AC
Maria Shapiro - VC Iscusfa
Vyaacheslav Tokar - counselor (from Ukraine)
Tara Wigand - VC Windsong

Is it possible that Carrie Petrick is related to Bill Petrick who had been a VC back in the early 80s?

Mike Lee stayed on at the valley for years - working all four seasons for some time before moving on.

Am I right that Carol Paterson later became a director - perhaps Program Director?

Moira ("Mo") Poe, of Brooklyn (once and now again), rose to Assistant Camp Director in '05. In '06 she was supposed to take a summer "off" (doing some research projects at camp) but then got pulled back into the fray and spent the second half of that busy summer again as a director, plugging holes, using her vast talents.

Nicholas must be the older brother of Zach, who came of age later - doing a summer in '06 as CIT Coordinator. Zach engineered his Olympic staff dream team (for China, I believe) and then promptly lost his voice within 10 minutes of the start of the program. (Here's an exhausted CIT Coordinator Zach along with Chris Cariello.)

I had met Beth Schwartzapfel maybe 5 years earlier when she was a camper. I could see immediately how bright she was (and also how committed she was to FV). I believe she came up to me and said, "I hear that you can teach me some of the old songs." And so we sang and talked for a while. Later she earned a degree in writing and spent several years as a journalist (and perhaps a journalist-activist). Beth and I are of entirely different real-world and FV generations, but I have a feeling that if we'd worked together, she in my era or I in hers, we would have seen eye to eye and been very close.

need your staff lists

We have copies of summer staff lists for most of the years from 1958 through the 90s. Below is a list of the years for which we do not have staff lists. Readers of this blog are urged to look through their attics and old camp files for staff lists from these years. If you find any, please photocopy them (or scan them) and send them to me. Email me at afilreis [at] writing.upenn.edu and I'll give you my mailing address.

1959
1960

1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994

1997

1999
2000
2001
2002

2004
2005

We are in the process of entering everyone's name into FV's master database. Many former staff are already in the system, but some are not. Of course we don't have accurate addresses for most of the folks whose names we find on old staff lists, but creating a database entry is a start.

all the T's in 1970

Just the T names from the 1970 staff list:

Cheryl Teare - LIT
Wil Thigen - counselor (C)
John Paul Thomas - out-trip director
Paula Mary Thomas - JC
Doug Tompkins - C
Lee Tompkins - camp doctor
Caroli Thompson - C
Cindy Titsworth - LIT
Tim Tracey - LIT
Sue Trummel - LIT
Betty Jane Turner - program counselor

Tim Tracey and I roomed together in cabin 14 when he was a counselor and I a JC, two summers later. Wil Thigen, a star at camp (and quite a character), ended up in California and attended the 2001 reunion. I don't think he'd been back to camp in nearly 30 years. Lee Tompkins, a resident of Liberty, was no relation to Doug who was from Westfield or Summit NJ. Doug was later a VC (of Totem, I think) and LIT
Director. I recall Cheryl Teare as a few years later one of those counselors universally admired--talented, fun-loving, just great to have in camp. BJ Turner was the daugther of Ed and Jane Turner, who lived at FV year-round; Ed worked maintenance with Carl Hess and Jane worked in the kitchen. There were long-time friends and South Jersey neighbors of Carl and Marie Hess. The Turners were always extraordinarily kind and generous to me.

Above: Peggy Hope and Wil Thigen at the 2001 centennial reunion.

Castle hostesses on final day of summer '67

On the final day of the summer of '67, the Castle "hostess" staff were literally leaving the old stone mansion through the basement door when this snapshot was taken. From left to right, they are Kathy Ketcham* (sister of Billie Jean and Mike and John--of Westfield, NJ), Shirley King, head of the Castle staff (long-time camp partner and of course wife of Dave King**), and Linda Gridley (of Grahamsville, NY). The Kodacolor Print was given to Shirley who gave it to me. On the reverse, in Shirley's handwriting: "Castle Goodbye, Aug 1967 - notice the tears?" She also notes: "(missing Carol ________ from Westfield.)"*** FV folks who came along later might not know that in the late 50s and 60s the Castle was run like an inn, with rooms for rent (for visiting parents and others), 3 meals a day served in the dining room and (I think I'm remembering rightly) men's jackets required at dinner. I believe tea was served on the veranda in the afternoon. My own memory: summers '67 and possibly '68, during "holdover" weekends, my parents took a room in the second floor (probably #24) and we had a heavenly two days away from the cabin mattresses and mildew and lived in luxury on what truly seemed the other side of the Wawayanda tracks. This otherness was surely emphasized by the rule against any camper crossing the Biscuit Creek bridge near the Ad Office. No campers lived in Pigeon or Biscuit Lodges in those days and only for special programs and events did we visit Reflection Pond. There were certainly no "Castle tours." The Castle, by the way, functioned as a quiet/alternative staff lounge (with snacks served) every evening well into the 80s. I'll leave it to others--perhaps Shirley herself--to write me with more details about this extraordinary and mostly forgotten history of our use of the Castle as an inn, after which I'll add it to this entry.

* Kathy is listed on the staff list as "Hostess--Housekeeper."
** Shirley is listed as "Castle Director." By the way, in '66 Shirley's position was "Staff Lounge Hostess."
*** According to the '67 staff list, she was Carole Plenty, indeed of Westfield.

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."

staff list for "The Hird" 1985

Here (click on the image for a larger version) is the beginning-of-summer staff list for "The Hird" in July of 1985. The roster changed a bit as the summer went on, but only a bit. It was a superb staff--the best group of VCs I ever directed. I believe this was the first summer of PAC, possibly the second--only called "Quinnipiac" at the start of the summer. Notice that there were just two staff there--Dave Gold and "Flash" Gordon--for all those boys in Hird Lodge. What's odd-seeming is that Hemlock's sister village, Sacajewea ("Sacky"), is not here. It's not that Sacky was in Wawayanda that summer; Sacky was in The Hird, run by Wendy Brady, but not until session 2. (Session 1 that summer had low enrollments. Sacky's staff was spread throughout other villages.) Lenape matched with Tacoma and Pac with Windsong (also new--it has been "Sunburst" before that and "Cherokee" before that). Note too that in 1983 Lenape lived in what had been for many years the home of that village--cabins 16-20 (currently numbered 13-17 and currently the home of Hemlock), but in this year, '85, we moved Lenape over to where Tacoma had always been, cabins 46-50, atop "the Hill," so that all of the Hird could be together on that side of camp. Tacoma now moved into 31-35 where Pokey had been and Sacky was where Susky had always been (36-40), while Hemlock was with Lenape on the Hill, in 41-45. All this moving around was made necessary, or made possible at least, by the destruction of the main "boys" dining hall by fire on New Year's Eve 1982. I'll save that story for another post, but gosh, my memory of all this detail scares me; looking at this mimeographed staff list of a group of good young people 23 years ago, it all seems ridiculously clear. I note finally this was also the first summer of "The Hird" as such, after "Camp Henry Hird" or "Camp Hird." We were a herd...for sure.