If pressed, you can sing a few bars of the old songs. You can almost taste the charred hot dogs cooked over the campfire, the singed marshmallows and the awful ”bug juice” that tasted the same whether it was green, red or purple. There was always sand in your bunk, and you hated the days you didn`t get mail. You still shiver recalling those early-morning flag raisings and icy lake swims.
But remember the friendships-and romances-that you pledged would last forever? The late-night bull sessions. The sunsets-and sunrises. The snacks stolen from the dining hall, the jubilant feeling when you finally got a sailboat moving or kept your canoe from capsizing.
All of you millions of ex-campers out there, rest assured that the good, bad and ungainly of summer camps still exist as you remember. It`s one American tradition that`s managed to endure for more than 125 years. But that`s not to say that summer camp hasn`t changed.
Like everything else, it is weathering the effects of soaring costs, real-estate greed and capricious tastes as many youngsters choose to spend summers doing other things.
Still, Bernard Stein, longtime director of Wisconsin`s Camp Nabagamon
(established in 1939) echoes many camp aficionados` sentiments when he says, ”As long as there are kids and summer, you`ll have camping.”
New England Camp Broker and expert Peter Shays agrees: ”People are very much interested in camping again. Parents want to give their kids the very best.”
Despite the enrollment drop, this summer more than 3 million American youngsters are attending 7,200 resident camps from Maine to Illinois to California, according to the American Camping Association. Some will stay just a few days; others for seven or eight weeks.
Some camps, Nabagamon among them, have now enrolled a third generation from the same families ”I would love to go back to camp now,” said Bill Laytin, laughing. He`s an Arlington Heights attorney whose son now is at Camp Nabagamon, which he attended as a boy. ”It`s too bad you outgrow it.
”Camp is what our lives used to be-good old-fashioned fun. And our kids need more of that,” agrees Marjorie Bramley, a Winnetka mother of four and camp veteran whose 10-year-old son Grant just left for the same Wisconsin camp his grandfather had attended.
”It`s an experience you can`t get anywhere else,” adds Grant`s grandfather, Thomas Anderson Sr., who couldn`t be more pleased that a second grandson enroll at Camp Highlands in Sayner, Wis., some 60 years after he went there.
But at Camp Highlands, as elsewhere, many youngsters who do come are opting for shorter stays. Camp directors find they have to work harder to fill slots and to hire staff. Potential counselors who face mounting college tuition bills say they need jobs that pay higher salaries.
”It`s just demographics. There aren`t as many kids,” explains Mike Bachmann, director of Camp Highlands, which was founded in 1904 and remains the oldest boys` camp in the Midwest. ”Kids have so many more options today, travel, sports clinics, summer school.”
To see how camping stacks up against other activities, the American Camping Association is considering commissioning a survey to determine how today`s kids view camping.
Those who go are doing the same things their parents did. They sail and swim, make collages and leather wallets, hike and fish and sometimes ride horses. They get homesick, gripe about the food and the bugs. They confess their deepest secrets and fears to bunkmates.
They still play pranks on counselors, like stringing up their underwear on the flag pole or short-sheeting their beds.
Most important, campers revel in the freedom from learning to manage on their own, without parents, television, microwaves and stereos. They learn new skills and what it means to be a member of a team-without the option of going home if they don`t like the rules.
”I liked being on my own. I wish I could have stayed longer,” said Audrey Noblin, a 12-year-old from Wilmette fresh from a 2-week stay in a tent at a Girl Scout camp in central Wisconsin. She didn`t mind cleaning out the horse stalls every day or the food, though she is accustomed to her parents`
gourmet cooking. And though she has her own room at home, she loved sharing her tent with a couple of older girls. ”I liked coming home, but I liked being there, too. I`ll do it for as long as I can,” Audrey said.
”Camping is even more helpful to children now than 75 years ago,” says Virginia Spiller, who has been involved in camping for more than 35 years and now is president of the Illinois Section of the American Camping Association. ”We have so many things done for us. For some children, camp is the (the only place they learn) self-reliance.” At the same time, Spiller said, in this era of heightened environmental concern, there is no better place to teach children to appreciate nature and how to protect it.
Reveille in 1861
Despite all the tradition, a lot has changed in the camping world since Frederick William Gunn, a Connecticut prep school headmaster, camped out on Long Island in August, 1861, with his entire school. His aim: to strengthen his students` character, self-discipline and muscle. Gunn`s efforts are believed to represent the first organized summer camp in the United States.
Many of today`s camps-taking their cue from an increasingly specialized society-now are geared for more specific needs. There are music camps, tennis camps, camps that specialize in drama and riding and wilderness survival. There are camps for kids with learning problems and those for kids who are overweight.
Special camps are run for kids who have cancer, diabetes and myriad other health problems. There are Bible camps and Zionist ones. Even the John Birch Society runs a youth camp program, where, its brochure says, ”young people receive a large quantity of truth.”
At the same time, some camps have closed though no one seems to know exactly how many. Sometimes, when a camp owner retires or dies, there is no one to take over, camp experts say, or the heirs sell the property.
A big factor clearly is cost. Some private camps charge more than $350 a week-even Scout camps can cost over $100 a week-and many families can`t afford it, camp directors concede. ”The people in the middle are being squeezed out,” said Gordon Kaplan of the Illinois section of the American Camping Association.
Day camps, meanwhile, are flourishing. A million children are enrolled at 4,000 day camps, the American Camping Association reports, and the number has doubled since 1980-the result of the demand for day care, experts believe.
Demand also is up for camp slots for underprivileged children, forcing some facilities to turn away youngsters.
This year federal funds will send some 5,000 Illinois children to camp, according to Gordon Kaplan of the Illinois section of the American Camping Association. But, directors of these camps report, some agencies are beginning to question whether a camp is a luxury they can no longer afford.
”(Some think) the land is too valuable to keep as a camp,” explained Gary Devore, director of the Chicago Youth Centers` Camp Rosenthal in Dowagiac, Mich. ”There is the misconception that the money could be better spent.”
”It`s hard to raise money for something people think is fun. It`s hard to explain that children learn by having fun,” added Jane Pirsig, who directs United Charities` Camp Algonquin near Algonquin, Ill.
Those bureaucrats, Devore and Pirsig and other directors suggest, have never seen an inner-city child swim in a lake for the first time or have enough to eat or cry because of the sheer beauty around them or make friends with someone of a different race.
”For some of these kids, just feeling safe is a big deal,” observes Lynne Jenkins, director of the Girl Scouts` Camp Juniper Knoll, in East Troy, Wis.
No slacking off
The tradition of sending poor children out of the city to camp goes back to the first years of this century. There was strong belief in the curative powers of fresh air, and dozens of camps opened to serve children of immigrants and others flooding the cities to work in factories, the American Camping Association reports.
Curiously, the earliest camps, like Frederick Gunn`s, were started to protect wealthy children from their environments, too-to prevent prep-school youngsters from slacking off all summer and forgoing the discipline that had been drilled into them at school. Camp Highlands, for example, was founded in northern Wisconsin by University of Chicago Lab School Headmaster Harry Gillett at the urging of parents who wanted their sons taken out into the North Woods.
By the 1920s, the Scouts and other agencies had gotten involved in camping and, increasingly, middle-class children began to share the experience.
Camp was rugged in those early years, with few comforts of home, morning exercises and dawn dips into cold lakes. ”Camp stresses loyalty, honesty, bravery-all the good things,” recalled Thomas Anderson, who attended Camp Highlands in the 1920s.
Even today at the most exclusive camps, there aren`t a lot of conveniences of home. Nor are there the same pressures. ”The children are quite relieved to be away from some of the pressures to look good and of school,” observes Sunny Moore, the director of Camp Clearwater, a girls` camp in Minocqua, Wis., founded in 1939. ”They come and relax, be themselves and they have the freedom to succeed or fail and it`s okay. That doesn`t happen a lot of times (at home).”
Jane Pirsig is one former camper who recalls an incident just like that. A good student, Pirsig says she was ”a klutz” as a kid. ”But when I got to camp nobody knew that. You come in with a fresh slate.”
Pirsig, as it happened, was a great campfire builder-and became known for her prowess. ”I got self-confidence I just wouldn`t have gotten (at home),” she said. ”Definitely camp helped make me feel I could be good at something outside of school.”
At Camp Juniper Knoll the other day, the campers didn`t seem bothered by the mosquitos or the heat. They liked their tents and narrow cots-mostly because no adults slept in their cabins.
At the lakefront, a few girls sat dangling their feet from the dock trying to catch the fast-swimming fish. Others splashed in the lake, their different-colored caps conveying swimming ability.
Others had spent the morning horseback riding or painting cardboard jigsaw puzzles. As they waited for lunch-tacos, fruit cocktail and the inevitable bug juice-they sang enthusiastic choruses of some old camp songs and learned a new one.
That night they looked forward to a campfire and ”staying up late and telling jokes,” one camper said.
”At home it`s really boring,” said Desiree Versetto, an 11-year-old from Chicago who was bouncing on her cot and said she liked her counselors and tentmates, that the food ”was better than school,” but that she could do without the bugs.
”I`m going to come back next year,” she declared.
Camp Director Lynne Jenkins smiled. ”They`re learning and they don`t even realize it,” she said.
