Campers often ask me, “What was the camp like when you first had it?” Parents and friends say, “It must have been so much easier to run camp back in the early days” I’ll let you decide as I tell some true stories of “The Way it Was.”

1946 was the year we first opened as a children’s camp. We had looked at camps for sale and they did not meet what we had envisioned. We did not want small cabins around a central flag pole. We wanted larger groups for a feeling of community and we wanted a feeling of being spread out. We did not find a children’s camp, as such, but were told of this Adirondack estate with many buildings. Earl and I took a train to Lake Clear Junction to see it. Gasoline was rationed at that time – it was the end of World War II. After looking over the estate, we knew that this was where we wanted to be.

As I said before, gasoline was rationed. So was food. Any purchase of meats, sugar, butter or oil, or products that contained them needed food stamps. Can you imagine the time spent in keeping track of all camper and staff food stamps? A popular dinner was baked potatoes with tiny Vienna sausages in them, a vegetable, milk, and jello.

Earl and I contacted the embassies in New York City because our vision of an optimum camp learning experience included children from every religion and background. Our first year we had two little contessas from Italy whose nannies had sewn the family crest on their shirts. We promptly replaced the shirts with ones from the local Army-Navy store. We also had three children out of the concentration camps who had been kept alive with barley water. The 12-year-old had the identification numbers from the concentration camp on his arm.

On our staff that first year was Michline Beaumont who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre for saving some 5,000 children during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. She had the bullet holes to prove her bravery. We also had a black counselor, a teacher from Bermuda who had two little girls from South Carolina in her group. Today we do not often think of these differences, but back in the early years it caused much questioning.

The fastest way to come to camp back then was by train from New York City. There was no Thruway or Northway, and by car, through small towns, it took 12 hours or more. There were airplanes, but no scheduled flights to our area. So we gathered at Grand Central Station for a long ride to camp.

Our second year we found a boy in our train group who was not on our lists. It seems he was enrolled at a camp in Vermont. When we contacted them, he did not want to leave Camp Regis. We had a hard time convincing him that he would have a good time at his camp too.

Our program was different from most children’s camps. First, we were co-ed and second we sent even the youngest children on overnight camping trips. This was rarely done in those years. For some reason age 12 was the beginning year for “camping out.” We prepared our children for the experience of learning that they sky and stars are as comforting as electricity, and with your dolls and teddy bears in the sleeping bag with you, you could even manage to accept a portable toilet.

Another way our program differed was our music listening nights. We would gather quietly on the Main Lodge porch for listening – “Peter and the Wolf,” Viennese Waltzes, “The Nutcracker Suite” – and we would share our imaginations as we felt the music.

Was it easier to operate a children’s camp in the late 40s or early 50s? I’ll let you decide!

Every time a child or adult got a stiff neck we worried. Polio was rampant and we had no cures or preventions, and then a BIG epidemic of infantile paralysis hit the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. It was as extensive that we were informed at the end of camp that we had to stay open and detain any campers or staff who would ordinarily go back to the contagious areas. The frightening news at that time was that our head chef and the head of our swimming were from the Midwest and had jobs to get back to. No one else remaining in camp could leave the premises and no one could come in. All food deliveries were left at the main road, Route 30, where Earl, my husband, collected them in a truck. We rearranged groups and programs and we reassured parents as to our situation and that the health and safety of their children was foremost on our minds.

During this period, we were not sure who would be responsible (individual families or the government) for the extra monies the camp spent on food, salaries, and electricity. This quarantine lasted for over 10 days and it was one of the few summers that I was glad when everyone finally left.

The 1950’s were a very interesting and exciting time at camp. In the 1940’s and early 50’s, our camp had only one phone line and it was a party line shared with three neighbors on the lake. With a camp community of approximately 70 campers and 20 staff in those days, we felt sorry for our poor neighbors who, not only heard the constant ringing of call for camp, but they hardly got to us their phones at all. By the mid-1950’s, we finally were able to get a private phone line for camp. Although the phones were the “ring down” crank type with all incoming and outgoing calls needing to be placed through our local operator at Paul Smiths, we finally felt that with a private line we had arrived in the “modern world.”

This was also an unusual era in the United State’s political history. During this time we heard that we were ready to be investigated by the McCarthy Committee. Could it be that the reason for this was that we had accepted, as campers, the children of the author Howard Fast? (April Morning, Confession of Joe Cullen, Crossings, Immigrant’s Daughter) He was in Federal prison for refusing to testify before the Committee. Or, maybe it was our openness in enrolling Japanese, German, or Muslim children?

This same year we had the children of New York Senator Jacob Javits as campers. During our parent visiting day Howard Fast had just been released from prison and was visiting camp at the same time as Senator Javitts. Relatives and friends asked Earl and I, “What are you going to do? This is awful. There could be an incident with Mr. Fast and Senator Javitts being together at the same time in camp.” Others warned of a communist “witch hunt” which could come about because of Mr. Fast’s visit. We replied, “Well, were going to have a happy time seeing the campers and parents share our picnic on the field.” We decided that it was best to treat Mr. Fast as we would any parent who was visiting. During the day, Senator Javitts became aware that Mr. Fast was visiting the camp and he spoke to Earl and I towards the later part of the afternoon to inquire if we could set up a confidential meeting at camp that evening with him. The meeting was arranged for 10:00 PM at our cabin, and we send our camp’s shopper into town to pick up some hors d’oeuvers and brandy. We had an exciting and informative evening listening to both of these brilliant men speak of the future of our country.

No, we were never investigated by the McCarthy Committee. How could they find sufficient reason to question two peace loving camp directors and educators?

Every year brought its challenges. There was a year, in the mid-1950’s, that brought a tornado along with very turbulent weather. Although many camps in the Catskills had to be evacuated, we were mostly undamaged and unhurt, except for no electricity for four days, no phones for a week (a blessing in many ways), food ruined in the freezers and refrigerators, and there was n way to leave camp to get supplies because the roads were not yet cleared.

We didn’t have a generator to run our pumps, although it was the first thing we bought for the following summer. In order to cook and have drinking water, everyone, campers and staff, had to lend a hand to form water delivery groups. Every hour a new group would dip water from the lake and take it to the kitchen for boiling or to the cabins to flush the toilets.

Besides the water bucket brigade, there were many other tasks around camp that needed to be done and the entire camp community pitched in. In some ways it proved to be a great adventure. Eating canned foods by kerosene lamps while reliving the day’s activities proved to be a source of bonding and caring. Every morning was fun as groups lined up at the lake shore, at their assigned spots, to wash up and brush their teeth. We didn’t know at the time that we were not practicing good ecology.

The campers and staff remembered this summer and felt that it was an exciting and rewarding experience. I am not suggesting that I would even want to repeat the events that Mother Nature shared with us, but I am realizing that we learn how to cope and how to care and how to enjoy challenges as we go through life. Good camping provides an extended family/community in which we all learn, be it in the 1940’s and 1950’s or the 1980’s and 1990’s.