Summers and Summer Camp

Somehow, we got to discussing summer camp on an AOL writers message board. It started with camp songs and morphed into talking about camp. So I thought I'd talk about my summer camp experiences here.

The first camp I went to, when I was 9 or 10 was in the Rockaways. Spartan Day Camp was run by a family that was rather strict. My group of kids (all girls) loved our counselor who was fired after a couple of weeks for, we found out, being too friendly with some of the girls. Fear of lesbianism, or rumors of lesbianism reared its ugly head. The old hag who took over with our group after that kind of sucked the fun out of things.

The following summer, my parents sent me to camp run through a YM&YWHA. It was another day camp and we got driven out to Wyandanch, Long Island where the Y had property on a big, long hill. We did campouts and crafting and there was a pool. I got to suck at lots of new things: Archery, swimming, hiking... I spent a lot of time ducking yellow jackets. Once each month, we had a sleepover and learned ghost stories.

After two years of this, I went to a specialized day camp at the same place, but with emphasis on arts and crafts. There were 3 counselors for about 20 of us and we worked with papier mache, sculpting (my artist figure blew up in the kilm along with many other pieces when someone else forgot to leave a big enough air hole (I know mine was fine). I concentrated on crafts, while other kids concentrated on the sciences and the rest focused on drama and singing, putting on plays and such. I still recall sneaking in reading comic books in my sleeping bag by flashlight (and handing out comics to the other kids) until I found a daddy long legs sharing the sleeping bag with me and my subsequent scream woke the counselors and ended the reading session.

The following year, I went to a camp the Y ran called Teen Trips. We got to go somewhere different each day, and on Fridays, we stayed in the Y and did indoor activities. We went to parks and the beach. We went to see "Carmen" and to a couple of Broadway plays: "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman" (starring Jack Cassidy, Linda Lavin, and someone named Bob Holliday or some such as Superman) and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (long after the original cast left). We drove into NJ to go to Palisades Amusement Park, then sat in the bus in the parking lot for over an hour while phone calls were made to allow us in. It seems we needed an interstate commerce permit. We had a sleepover in the Y's sleepover camp grounds in the Catskills where I learned how to row. We sang songs. We had fun. And our counselor, Natalie, was only a few years older and other than keeping an eye on us, was almost a friend. She really was one of us.

Someone on the message board said he couldn't understand why kids would want to go to camp with kids they didn't know when staying home and doing whatever they want was so much better. What follows is part of my answer.

For me, it was a way to start fresh, with kids who didn't know they were supposed to tease me unmercifully the way the kids in school did — who had been mostly the same kids in my class from 2nd grade thru 6 and half of those were in my junior high classes. I was one of only a couple of kids wearing glasses in kindergarten and the "four eyes" name, among others, stuck. The camp kids were nice enough to call me Shelly.

And since my father could only get a week or two off each summer for family trips (long car trips that I'll always remember and will blog about them here later), and my mother didn't drive, camp was my one way out of a rather boring neighborhood in the middle of nowhere aka south Queens. We couldn't even swim in the bay cuz it was so polluted. Raw sewage as I recall. It's protected and cleaned up now. Or so they say. They closed our movie theater — something about it being owned by the mob, I believe — and it was a 10 min bus ride to the next nearest theater.

The highlight of a lazy summer day was to go to Heller's Drug Store to see if they got any new comic books in. Or maybe over to the pizza place to watch the pizza maker toss pie dough. It became a rather famous pizza place, unfortunately, for a very wrong reason. If other kids were around, we played stoop ball or punch ball. Winter was better. We could go sledding in the ditch on the corner, until they filled it in and put four houses up in its place. I think that was the year they put in sewers, which meant no punch ball for about 5 or 6 months while a trench ran the length of the street. Or for thrills, I could play with the girl across the street who was 2 years younger than me and was an accomplished thief by age 7 and tried to intoduce me to the joys of sniffing glue.

Geez, that neighborhood was boring. Camp was mostly a positive experience and I had fun, once I got past my natural shyness and the fact that I had to get up way too early to be picked up by the camp bus. I lived one block from school, so I wasn't used to catching a bus. But looking back, I'm glad for the experience.

Feeling:

summer camp