I never went to a commercial summer camp as a kid, as I gather that many East Coast middle class and upper middle class kids did. There are no fond memories of Camp Sissimanoonoo from my childhood. Or horrific ones, for that matter.
I do have memories of summer day camp. My first experience of any summer camp was day camp. I couldn’t have been more than five or six and my recollections from that far back are pretty vague. I can’t tell you what the activities were, how long it ran, or how many years I attended. I remember riding on a yellow school bus to a local high school or, possibly, college campus. I have fuzzy memories of stringing beads. They may have shown us film strips or 8mm versions of cartoons or old movie serials. I have memories of sitting in the shade of a large, old tree with a bunch of other unruly kids and having stories read to us.
I suspect I went there for two consecutive years, once by myself and once with my next younger sibling. I’ve compared notes with that sibling who remembers day camp, riding on a bus, and hordes of unruly kids but not much else.
Maybe a year or so later the whole family went to stay for a week at Bunker Hill, at that time under the auspices of the Missouri State Teachers Association. You’ll recall that my mom was a public school teacher. Judging by the pictures in the gallery it’s been spruced up a bit over the decades but otherwise it hasn’t changed much. I remember catching a fish right from the shore in the third picture in the gallery and having it served to me that night in the mess hall. During the day we swam, canoed, fished, or just walked through the woods. At night there were square dances and, if memory serves, they showed 16mm prints of reasonably recent movie releases. Either they were mostly westerns and musicals or that’s what my parents took us to. I remember Athena and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I’m sure there were others. I also remember large (in every dimension) loud women with Ozark accents.
A bit later, from about the time I was 10 to about 13, there was Scout camp. I loved Scout camp. For a week we would camp in tents with cots, eat our meals in the mess hall, march around, engage in various competitions, swim, canoe, hike, and engage in all sort of other scouting activities. No plumbing. Just outhouses and gravity showers. My dad, who was the president of the troop’s board, usually joined us for the last couple of days.
At night the troop whould sit around a huge campfire, sing songs, tell stories, and recite poems. I can still recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” from memory.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
by the men who moil for gold
And the arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold
And the Northern Lights have seen queer sights
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake LeBarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
One night during the week all of the troops in the camp would play “Capture the Flag”. Imagine 500 boys aged 10 to 13 running in the woods in the pitch dark shrieking at the top of their lungs and it will give you the general idea. It’s a miracle that more of us weren’t injured.
The camp was Irondale, deep in the Ozarks, and it was wonderful. In addition to the mess hall, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and several lakes, it had a climbing tower, lots of woods, and open fields. My last year there I was inducted into the Order of the Arrow. Irondale closed a few years after my time but I understand there’s a movement to revive it.
And those are my memories of summer camp.
