A great moment. Yesterday, Jim Brown, son of Halbe and Jane Brown, presented the plaque marking the Frost Valley Hall of Fame induction of Bill & Eva Devlin to Lorraine Devlin Morse.
Here are the program notes:
On this day we honor two people whose perfect combination of
complete calm and strenuous effort astonished absolutely everyone who worked
with them. They were—at one and the same time—easy-going and hard working. Bill and Eva Devlin could do anything they put
their hands to. “When you needed to know how to do something,” remembers their
daughter Lorraine, “you asked them.” They could figure out anything, correct or
disentangle anything. And that’s a good thing because anything is precisely what was needed to be done when they arrived
at Frost Valley, given its precarious state at the time.
In 1967 Bill Devlin, then working with the Girls Scouts in
Pennsylvania, put an ad in the American Camping Association magazine announcing
his availability for work at a camp, and got a response from Halbe Brown at
Frost Valley. Halbe had arrived in 1966 and immediately sensed he had a
clean-up job on his hands. There was Camp Wawayanda for Boys and Girls, Family
Camp at the end of the summer, and guests during a few non-summer weekends. As
Halbe wildly dreamed of a rapid, radical expansion of programs to serve families
and children, he hired Bill Devlin as his first full-time staff member. The
Browns themselves didn’t even yet live all year at Frost Valley. From September
to June on most days of the week, it would be just the Devlins. Bill and Eva
and their four children first drove down seven dusty miles of unpaved road from
Claryville and wondered what they had gotten themselves into. Then they saw the
large but rather dilapidated grey house through which Halbe guided them, and
Bill thought to himself: “No way.”
Yes, way. They
stayed. They transformed that old house into a home—into, in effect, a model
for how other families (the dozens and dozens who have come to join the
year-round staff in the subsequent decades) could constantly manage to merge living and working at Frost Valley: they
not only maintained for themselves but conveyed to others a strongly positive sense
of family overall—of familial generosity; of home-style care for every building
around camp and for every program; of a brotherly and sisterly hospitality
shared with thousands of weekend guests, teachers and their students, summer
camp staff, many of whom came to know them well and to revere them. Bill and
Eva Devlin made Frost Valley their home, yes, but they also created for Frost
Valley a sense of home.
Luckily, given the exigencies, Bill and Eva felt a keen
desire to fix whatever was broken and, what’s more—could do it! For years Eva
almost single-handedly worked to improve the image of Frost Valley by voluntarily
restoring the Castle (inside and out), re-painting the old totem pole at the
camp entrance, planting gardens, scraping and painting Biscuit Lodge, etc. A
generation of camp staff knew always where Eva was as they passed by her famous
rig—a two-wheeled cart pulled by a little tractor—which carried her supplies
and served as her mobile office.
Bill did more than his share of fixing broken machines; figuring
out an arcane key system for the camp; keeping track of handwritten
registrations of family groups, church groups, youth groups, athletic teams,
and family campers; and managing meals at the dining hall in his
hyperarticulate and charming manner. He was the best and most patient explainer
anyone who met him ever knew. Very quickly those who worked for him recognized
and cherished his legendary readiness to orient and guide, his extreme fairness,
his open sense of ethics and flawless honesty. The high-school-aged people who
helped out by doing dishes and running activities on weekends (most of them
spillovers from summer camp staff) soon knew they had in Bill an employer always
willing to stop and teach. For several of these wayward young people he became a
second father. These men and women, now in their late 50s and 60s—quite an
accomplished group in their own right—recall Bill as the first and fairest boss
they ever had. “We knew exactly what Bill expected of us,” one of these former
staff remembers. “And when we ‘screwed up,’ to use his phrase, as we often did,
he mentored us and gave us another chance.” “Just for the apprenticeship
alone,” another now says, “we would have worked for him for free.”
Bill Devlin was the person who founded and developed Frost
Valley’s Environmental Education Program, a historic achievement. Then he single-handedly
coordinated and led every visit by a school (typically Monday-through-Friday
visits) greeting and orienting the groups, presenting announcements in the dining
hall, teaching field math and stream ecology and astronomy; soon he was
idolized by the teachers and principals. Nearly a half century later, Frost
Valley’s “EE” program is of course world renowned. It has expanded greatly but
its mission and mode of teaching are precisely those that Bill invented back in
1969. On the basis of that impact alone, all those who love Frost Valley’s
commitment to the once-iconoclastic idea of teaching children outdoors, taking
them to a place beyond the classroom, on the ground and “in the field,” owe
Bill a great debt. It wasn’t easy making environmentalism culturally befit what
had been only a summer camp, but once it happened it became the most natural
thing.
When in 1975 Frost Valley’s rapidly expanding conference, EE,
and summer camp programs together exceeded 30,000 annual participants for the
first time, Bill could be counted on to describe unintended consequences of the
new giant scale of operation, and to express concerns about further expansion
without apt levels of staffing, improved facilities, and restatement of the
mission. As Bill and Eva moved on to a new opportunity that year—to Camp Jewell
YMCA in Connecticut, where Bill served as Executive Director until his
retirement—they left very dear friends and anticipated talented future
colleagues, all of whom, whether knowingly or not, have taken the Devlins’
familial ethic to heart: every person who comes to Frost Valley to learn about
the natural world, or to find themselves, or to challenge their settled values,
should be treated by us as an individual
using our site in search of some congenial aspect of our mission. That Frost
Valley has managed to serve as many families and children as it has over the
years, and maintained the commitment to personalizing each and every relationship,
is owing to the marvelous decency of these two people, Bill and Eva Devlin,
whom the Frost Valley YMCA Board of Trustees gratefully and unanimously votes to
induct into our Hall of Fame.
