Camp Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by The Eisner Foundation, Inc.

  Foreword © 2005 by John McPhee

  All rights reserved.

  Endpaper maps and photograph accompanying the dedication © 2005, archives of Camp Keewaydin; photograph accompanying author bio courtesy of the Eisner family.

  Song lyrics found in the prologue are from “Go the Distance,” music by Alan Menken, lyrics by David Zippel, © 1997 Wonderland Music Company, Inc. and Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-1398-3

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword By John Mcphee

  Prologue: It All Started At A Knicks Game

  Chapter One: The First Trip

  Chapter Two: A Return To Roots

  Chapter Three: A Million Miles

  Chapter Four: Traditionese

  Chapter Five: The Freedom Not To Fail

  Chapter Six: On The Algonquin

  Chapter Seven: Help The Other Fellow

  Chapter Eight: Second Place

  Chapter Nine: A Fair Winner and Good Loser

  Chapter Ten: License To Drive

  Chapter Eleven: The Lengthened Shadow

  Chapter Twelve: Men At Work

  Chapter Thirteen: The Four Winds Ceremony

  Chapter Fourteen: Dances With Wolves

  Chapter Fifteen: Breck’S First Day

  Chapter Sixteen: Indian Circle

  Chapter Seventeen: Visiting Day

  Chapter Eighteen: Good Night, Keewaydin, Good Night

  Epilogue: Skills Forever

  Glossary of Keewaydin Terms

  About The Author

  To Waboos

  Niminwenindam Kikeniminán.

  (Algonquin for “I am happy to know you.”)

  Acknowledgments

  If forty years in the entertainment business have taught me one thing, it’s that any creative project requires the devotion and dedication of many. This small labor of love was no different. Larry Kirshbaum at Warner Books believed in this book long before I had written its first word, and his wisdom, enthusiasm, and good humor . . . and the fact that he went to Camp Indianola in Madison, Wisconsin . . . were all appreciated along the way. Also, I want to thank Aaron Cohen for his tireless efforts in helping to bring this book to life—without him it would still be just a good idea. I want to acknowledge my three sons, who carried on the family tradition at Keewaydin and kept my love for the place alive. I also want to thank my lawyer of thirty years, Irwin Russell, for riding the currents with me. My office staff, Virginia Hough, Beth Huffman, and Dee Case, helped me track down old scrapbooks, photos, and memorabilia from my days—and my sons’ days—at camp. Peter Hare and his staff at Keewaydin couldn’t have been nicer, more supportive, or more accommodating. And Sandy Chivers and everyone at Keewaydin Temagami were the most gracious of hosts during our visit. But of course I want to especially thank my wife, Jane, who patiently listens to camp stories told often more than once.

  Foreword

  John Mcphee

  At Vassar College a few decades ago, I read to a gymful of people some passages from books I had written, and then received questions from the audience. The first person said, “Of all the educational institutions you went to when you were younger, which one had the greatest influence on the work you do now?” The question stopped me for a moment because I had previously thought about the topic only in terms of individual teachers and never in terms of institutions. Across my mind flashed the names of a public-school system K through 12, a New England private school (13), and two universities—one in the United States, one abroad—and in a split second I blurted out, “The children’s camp I went to when I was six years old.”

  The response drew general laughter, but, funny or not, it was the simple truth. As I once began a piece of writing in The New Yorker magazine, “I grew up in a summer camp—Keewaydin—whose specialty was canoes and canoe travel.” It was at the north end of Lake Dunmore, about eight miles from Middlebury, in Vermont. In addition to ribs, planking, quarter-thwarts, and open gunwales, you learned to identify rocks, ferns, and trees. You played tennis. You backpacked in the Green Mountains on the Long Trail. If I were to make a list of all the varied subjects that have come up in my articles and books, adding a check mark beside interests derived from Keewaydin, most of the entries would be checked. I spent all summer every summer at Keewaydin from age six through fifteen, and later was a counselor there, leading canoe trips and teaching swimming, for three years while I was in college.

  The Kicker was the name of the camp newspaper, and its editor was my first editor, a counselor named Alfred G. Hare, whose surname translated to the Algonquian Waboos, a nickname that had been with him from childhood and would ultimately stay with him through his many years as Keewaydin’s director. Waboos was a great editor. He laughed in the right places, cut nothing, and let you read your pieces aloud at campfires. If this book, in its varied appreciations of Keewaydin, has a hero, he’s it.

  When I first arrived at Keewaydin as a child (my father was the camp’s physician), the name Eisner was all over the place—on silver trophies and on the year-by-year boards in the dining hall that listed things like Best Swimmer, Best Athlete, Best Singles Canoe. The author of this book was not one of those Eisners. When I first arrived at Keewaydin, he was still pushing zero. He had five years to wait before he was born. His father, Lester, was among the storied Eisners, and so were assorted uncles and cousins. Over time, multiple Eisners would follow. In 1949, when Lester Eisner brought Michael to the camp to see if he would like to enroll there (a scene of some hilarity that you will find a few pages hence), I was in the first of my three years as a counselor in the oldest of the four age groups into which the camp was divided. In the two summers that followed (the last ones for me), he was in the youngest group and I didn’t know him from Mickey Mouse. I was aware only that another Eisner had come to Keewaydin.

  Summer camps have varying specialties and levels of instruction. They differ considerably in character and mission. No one description, positive or negative, can come near fitting all of them or even very many. Keewaydin was not a great experience for just anybody. My beloved publisher—Roger W. Straus, Jr., founder of Farrar, Straus & Giroux—went to Keewaydin when he was thirteen years old and hated every minute of it. That amounts to about eighty thousand minutes. Over the years, he spent at least a hundred thousand minutes making fun of me for loving Keewaydin. The probable cause was Keewaydin’s educational rigor. Gently but firmly, you were led into a range of activity that left you at the end of the summer with enhanced physical skills and knowledge of the natural world. You wanted to go back, and back. Mike Eisner went back in 2000 (hardly for the first or last time). He was fifty-eight. Keewaydin was celebrating the career of its eighty-five-year-old emeritus director. Three people spoke at a Saturday night campfire. Each was introduced only by name, with no mention of any business or profession or affiliation, just, in turn, Peter Hare, Russ MacDonald, Mike Eisner. In his blue jeans and ball cap, walking around the flames with his arms waving, Eisner told three hundred pre-teen and early-teen-aged kids escalating stories of his own days at Keewaydin. They listened closely and laughed often. Few, if any, knew who else he was.

  Prologue

  It All Started At A Knicks Game

  New York, Madison Square Garden, courtside, 2001. The Knicks against the Pacers. The score was tied, and halftime was about to end.

  I could sense that I was about to be approached by a stranger. His intent, I assumed, was to offer a comme
nt about a new ride at Disney World or hand me a movie script.

  Instead, he gave me a card identifying himself as George Stein, head of the Tri-State Camping Conference. Above the noise of an impatient crowd as the second half began, he said he’d heard I was an enthusiast of summer camp. His group was holding an annual conference and wanted me to speak about my experiences. Without hesitation, I said, “yes.” The word camp had taken away my usual reflex to slow things down and come up with a polite no.

  Sitting next to me was my oldest friend, John Angelo. He looked at me quizzically. “I thought you only speak at colleges where one of your sons is applying,” he said. “True,” I replied, “but this is about camp, after all.” As I turned my attention back to the game, and Reggie Miller sank a three-point shot, I was already thinking about what I’d say at the conference.

  My family has been attending Camp Keewaydin in Salisbury, Vermont, for over eighty years. I started at age eight and finished as a “staffman” when I was twenty-two, a recent college graduate. The next summer, I entered the television and movie world as an usher at NBC. Keewaydin is a hiking and canoeing camp, with a dual focus on the wilderness trips campers take each summer and in-camp activities like sports, all guided by a low-key philosophy with an emphasis on self-improvement within a framework of group accomplishment. To this day, I fondly recall the challenges of building a fire, pitching a tent, climbing a New England mountain, canoeing on a lake. Camp songs still resonate inside me. Competition exists at Keewaydin, of course, but nobody fails summer camp, a nice respite from winters of fortune and misfortune at school.

  To the uninitiated, camp may sound like one grandiose cliché—teamwork, brotherhood, helping the other guy. But clichés are often constructed on truths from the past. Away from the modern comforts and parental safety of home, summer camp may seem like boot camp to some, with its lack of privacy, wilderness rituals, mosquito bites, freezing lake water, tent clean-ups, and canoe portages (carrying your canoe over land). When you’ve been a camper, though, the planned deprivations are fun, exciting, the stuff from which character is built. As I’ve gotten older, they make more and more sense. Camp taught me a lot of little things, and the experiences accumulated into some big “stuff,” stuff that builds backbone and teaches lessons that keep popping up in adulthood.

  At first, writing the camp speech was purely recreation, something very different from my usual routines at investor conferences or annual meetings, at story conferences or production meetings. Then, as I started to put words on paper, a funny transformation took place. I realized this simple idea of institutionalized fun was much more serious than I had originally thought. For me, camp really mattered.

  I gave the speech to a surprise standing ovation (my first and only, I think), and afterward continued prodding my camp memories. I have always thought that those who spend too much time reflecting on the past aren’t focusing enough on the present or future, but in those times, it was a welcome escape from the chaos. Around me, the world was changing, due to the September 11, 2001, attacks on American soil in New York City and Washington, D.C., and the war on terror that followed. In my business life, a weakened economy and personal vendettas exceptional even by Hollywood standards led to shareholder discontent and crises in the boardroom. Just as physical exercise so often proves to release consuming tensions, the mental exercise of reflecting on camp, doing a bit of writing early each morning or late each night, made it all seem a bit easier, if only for a moment here or there.

  For everybody, life at the beginning of the twenty-first century was tenuous and complicated, and we all looked for strength in different places. Family, religion, friends, childhood institutions—the entire structure of one’s past factors into the fiber that holds us together. For me summer camp was part of that bond. It was this world that had taught me that if you maintain faith in your values and knowledge, and stay true to yourself, the bears in the woods will eventually disappear. The Alan Menken and David Zippel song from Disney’s animated movie Hercules could be a camp song written after a rainy and windy wilderness trip. As one of the lines goes, “And I won’t look back, I can go the distance and I’ll stay on track; No, I won’t accept defeat.” I realized that I had developed my values and knowledge at summer camp. Many of my principles were Keewaydin principles.

  My speech at the camping conference jump-started a family goal: My children have long wanted to share our actual camping experiences with other kids who might be less fortunate and would never have the opportunity for camping. This notion jelled with Keewaydin’s growing desire to foster diversity among its campers. Three years ago, my wife Jane and I, and my three sons, Breck, Eric, and Anders, were able through our family foundation to send promising kids from less advantaged backgrounds in California to camp—boys to Keewaydin and girls to its sister camp, Songadeewin. In this book, I describe some of the experiences of the Southern Californian boys and how camp changed their lives, just as it changed the lives of all the Eisners.

  Thinking more about Keewaydin, and getting involved with the camp again, I found myself wanting to learn more about the institution. Most important, I wanted to reconnect with Keewaydin’s greatest teacher, Alfred Hare, better known as Waboos, a boy from Philadelphia who started at camp with my father when he was eight in 1923, who became the camp director in 1945, and who is still there today, over eight decades later, a guiding spirit of American camping.

  In some ways, I’ve been working on this book for fifty-six years, ever since my first night at Keewaydin. In other ways, it’s been a labor of love for the past three years, completed largely on my laptop computer in spare moments. A few times, the project was put on the back burner by distractions from people who could have used a few summers at camp earlier in their lives, but as on any Keewaydin trip, I never lost faith or focus that it would be completed. It only seems appropriate that, after such a tumultuous few years, I can produce a response that has nothing to do with Hollywood antics or boardroom politics, but everything to do with the experience you need to survive them.

  When I decided to write this book, I decided I needed a researcher and editor—a good bowman, in canoe-speak—to get it done right. I found a young writer and television producer named Aaron Cohen. I had read an essay he had written about watching his beloved New York Mets play each year on his birthday, all the way back to when he was in the second grade. That appealed to me. Aaron became my eyes and ears at the camp when I couldn’t be there. He observed some of what you’ll read about in this book. In the interest of simplicity, we’ve combined our voices.

  Yes, this book is a valentine to summer camp, but it also contains, I hope, the answers to questions that have vexed me since I started writing the speech about camping. Why does summer camp matter as an institution, and why is it so important?

  Let’s start at the beginning.

  Chapter One

  The First Trip

  1949

  It was the summer of 1949, and I was seven. Some forty miles north of New York City, my family had a summer home on sixty acres, “in the back” (as we called it) of my grandfather’s gentleman’s farm. I was attending a day camp, Camp Mohawk, to do what kids in Bedford Hills and Mount Kisco and Chappaqua and Armonk and White Plains did when their parents wanted every minute accounted for during the summer. I had been at Mohawk just one week, already the survivor of a lost baseball mitt and my sister’s throwing up in the bus, when the subject of overnight camp came up.

  We were sitting at dinner on the screened porch of the house when the voice of God (God was my father) said, “I thought I’d take you up to Camp Keewaydin to see if you might want to go there next summer.”

  I was excited and paralyzed. As far as I can now remember, I had never gone on an overnight trip with my father alone, without a sister or mother. He was a father I called by his first name, Lester. Yes, he was my real father, and no, I cannot imagine why he liked that. They said it was because my sister couldn’t say “Daddy,” but I d
oubt it. For much of the first three years of my life, he had been flying planes in the “war” (World War II), and, since then, had remained the man who inspired enduring respect, love, admiration, envy, and fear, and all that was fatherhood to me.

  My father was a man of adventure. After the war, he had started an airline in Ecuador that he scraped together from two army air force planes. Flying to South America with your father as the pilot was certainly an adventure. But then he had settled down as a lawyer in the world of New York City. Surely everyone thinks their father is unique, and at a young age, the impression I had of my father was no different. He was athletic, a bold entrepreneur, clever humorist, attentive husband, matinee idol to my sister’s friends and simply bigger than life to my friends. The women loved him, and children were awed by him. As a seven-year-old, I saw all this, and was at once respectful and impressed and mesmerized and sometimes daunted by his power.

  The prospect of sleepaway camp was a family tradition that he would not let drop. So, we were scheduled to do this “father-son” thing and go off for the weekend to Keewaydin, a summer camp that my father and uncles had attended. I sat at the dinner table contemplating the many hours in the car where I’d be alone with my father, wondering about the camp in the middle of nowhere, amid millions and millions of acres of woods, billions and billions of miles from Bedford Hills, without a sister or mother in sight.

  Memories of the trip up are hazy. I’m sure my father explained to me that this was a great camp, and shared some of the happy memories he had of going up to Vermont each summer. We headed in our Buick toward New England. We probably drove up Route 7 in Vermont until we passed Brandon, then made a right toward Salisbury and drove onward on Route 53 to Keewaydin. I do remember that it was dark when we arrived, and I was nervous. Placed inside a sleeping bag, I slept on a cot, within some sort of dark enclosure, and I fell asleep wondering what it looked like outside. My father had disappeared.