[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gave me an opportunity for a week of Summer CampStudying! Leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]
First, I wanted
to share here my most recent
Saturday Evening Post Considering
History column, on the worst and best takeaways from an enraging
experiences my boys had at camp this year.
Some great
responses to Wednesday’s
post on Jewish camps:
Betsy Cazden tweets “Do
you have the book Raising Reds?
It includes the camp I went to as a child, Camp
Woodland, which was a lot of NY Jewish lefties plus Black
kids and staff plus Pete Seeger and Odetta—pretty radical in the 1950s. My
parents were staff; Katha Pollitt
was in my cabin.”
Elissa Taub tweets, “Love this! My
son is at Jewish summer camp in MS (yes, you read that right). The camp is a
great connector for Jewish kids from small and large towns thru-out the Deep
South. Some campers are the only Jewish kids in their schools. It's such a
great outlet for them!”
And
Eric, the Animated Chef
shares these
couple books on Jewish
camps, as well as a few
great blog posts
of his own on those settings
and experiences.
Other
great CampStudying responses:
Olivia Lucier
writes, “I went to Camp Green
Eyrie in Harvard, MA for many many many years and loved it. Some of the
best summer memories…except one summer. Our platform tent had an ants nest
under it and they traveled into my BAG and laid eggs in my bag! It was
disgusting and traumatizing because of the thousands and thousands of ants in
my suitcase! Other than that happy memories.”
Robin
Field shares, “I went to a ‘young writers’ camp for two weeks at Duke when
I was 13. It was gratifying to be around a lot of writer nerd teens. Later I
went to a journalism camp for a week when I was 16 at Ball State University,
since I was about to be editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. I won
first prize for my feature story on interracial dating. These academic camps
were really helpful in showing I had a tribe.”
Alison
Dassatti Allegresso writes, “My dad went to an overnight camp as a kid, and
on the first night, all the teenage councilors cruelly threw the young campers’
rolled up sleeping bags down a hill, only to take them and throw them back down
when the kids retrieved them. It was so miserable, my dad decided on the spot
that when he one day had children of his own, he would never send them to
summer camp. So, my brother and I never went.”
Mimi Murray shares, “I went to Rockbrook
Camp for girls for eight summers as a camper and two as a counselor—I'm
still in a private FB group of women I'm friends with from camp. RBC just
celebrated its 100th anniversary.”
And I’ll end
with this
wonderful poem from Floyd Cheung.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?
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