My Lost Summer

Jerry Orbach was my fourteenth birthday present. He was the booby prize for having my long dreamed-for summer plans high-jacked.

I’m a July baby, a Cancer, and my birthday celebrations were coincidental with summer vacation, sunny days and sandy beach picnics. When I was young, pre-school, this was just fine. Daddy’s break from work in the City was always during the first two weeks of July. We would cram into the green Dodge for a road trip, driving up and down the Hudson River valley, becoming familiar with its mountains, caves and parklands. The summer I was five, Santa Claus bounced me on his lap and jovially serenaded me with a birthday song on a visit to Santa’s Village. When I was seven, we spent two weeks bunking in at a working family farm – my party was held next to the mud-bottomed swimming hole and I learned to milk a spotted cow. I drank the warm milk and ate slices of homemade cake.  I loved my summer birthdays.

We moved to New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City, when I was in third-grade. It became evident that in this new world, summer protocols were different. Most of the kids I played with during the year had plans, made months ahead by their families, to go off to sleep-away camp for eight weeks. By early July, the streets were empty and the days, eerily quiet. My city-bred parents who had believed that moving to the suburbs would be enough fun for any kid, were forced to rethink the next year’s plan and find a camp they could afford to send Stevie and me to for the summer. Otherwise, they realized, my mother would become our chauffeur and Daddy, our sometimes playmate. Or, more than likely, we two kids would kill each other out of boredom.

Overnight camps were how suburban parents got a break from the tyranny of their children. Starting mid-April, The New York Times listed summer camps in the back pages of The Magazine Section. Postage-stamp sized photos accompanying each classified ad, promised rustic lakefront cabins,  lush tennis courts and riding rings for prices comparable to a European tour. My parents, rightfully sticker-shocked, asked among their friends and learned of Wel-Met, a camp that was favored by left-leaning, Jewish, labor-friendly urban folk. It was a bare bones operation, staffed with wannabe social workers and with an affordable tuition. Black painted cardboard and tin footlockers were purchased at Sears for my brother and me and our underwear, socks and tee shirts were counted and name-tagged. Stevie, and I were put on a Peter Pan bus filled with city kids we didn’t know.  We motored out of lower Manhattan and were deposited on the western side of the Catskills for a summer in the great, green outdoors.

My usual birthday excitement paled in comparison to the exhilaration of being away from home, among a new group of potential best friends. I was no longer the not-so-fashionable, four-eyed, gap-toothed klutz, surrounded by and excluded from the in-crowd.  At Wel-Met, I reinvented myself and became one of the cool kids. For six weeks each summer, I was – at last - who I knew I was meant to be.

The camp was located in Narrowsburg, on the crook of New York State’s westward arm. Across the Delaware lay exotic Pennsylvania. The locale was rife, we were told, with old German Bundists, no friends of the immigrant offspring populating the camp. That all added to the mystique, the “you vs. them” mindset. Echoes of war-time anti-Semitism glued our summer friendships even tighter.

I learned to swim, build a lean-to in the woods, cook a meal in an open fire-pit and make friends, temporarily, with my little brother. Perched on wooden benches circling Friday night campfires, our counselors, a ragtag group of exotics from all over the world, told us stories of campers kidnapped by a local, Jew-hating maniac with the scarily evocative name of “Cropsey”. With their guitars strapped over their shoulders, the staff taught us the folk songs and the anthems of the labor movement. Instead of crooning about Clementine and her over-sized shoes, we warbled about the union girls who weren’t “afraid of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raids.” Pete Seeger and The Weavers were our rock stars, Joe McCarthy and Hitler, our enemies.

Best friends were made, practice boyfriends crept up to our cabins at night, and major crushes developed on staff members, both male and female. Summer camp was my heaven – school was an interruption tolerated for nine months so that I could experience six weeks of bliss each year. As well, I got a camp-issued birthday celebration in the mess hall with everyone singing “Happy birthday, dear Ellen”, followed by a vanilla-scented, raspberry-filled sheet cake to share with my bunkmates.

Like any other establishment, Wel-Met had its own hierarchy – based on age, since what else do children have to use as bargaining chips? The older you were, the more freedoms you had. Each age-based Unit built on the sports abilities, social awareness, and wilderness skills of the previous ones. At the end of every summer, the staff sent home reports to our parents of our progress through the ranks. The culmination of the Wel-Met experience was to become a Pioneer, one of a group of elite campers who were fourteen years old or had finished seventh grade. Being a Pioneer meant living in semi-permanent tents set apart from the rest of the camp, having more privileges and most importantly, contact with the opposite sex. Pioneers were the camp’s peerage; our left-wing, egalitarian politics counted for little - we all bowed their superiority, their ultimate coolness. Summer in the Pioneer Unit with its guarded secrets and ceremonies, was like joining a regal cult.

My goal, my dream, was, of course, to spend my fifth summer at Wel-Met as a Pioneer. After that I would be a counselor. My life would be complete. In the winter of 1960, I started reminding my parents of the deposit they needed to post in order to hold my place among the other royals slated to spend their summer in pup tent palaces. I was especially anxious to make sure that my six-week escape was insured – life at home was becoming very stressful. My brother and my parents were constantly fighting over almost everything. His behavior both in and out of school was beyond my parents’ understanding. I couldn’t wait to get away from the mess that was home.

May 1 was the deadline to send in the check securing my place among the other Wel-Met princes and princesses. I wrote notes for my parents, reminded them during conversations at dinnertime and left no opportunity for them to neglect their responsibility – writing a check to guarantee my bunk in a Pioneer tent. My summer plans were set. I would enter the kingdom. Perfection.

“Ellen, Daddy and I need to talk to you,” my mother announced one early June night. Stevie was banned to his room and we three sat down at the wrought iron, Formica-topped kitchen table.  My father explained that, although he had sent in the camp deposits for both my brother and me, he hadn’t realized that the deadline for the Pioneer Unit was earlier than the cut-off for the rest of the camp, and he had, in fact, missed it. I wouldn’t be able to go to camp that summer.

I’m sure that I reacted badly to this most unexpected announcement, but, I knew that crying and foot-stomping wouldn’t change the course of the coming summer. I was not going to be a Pioneer with all my summer friends. I went off to my room, licking my new and very unfair wounds. My parents had failed me.

Several weeks later, Daddy came, as he often did at the end of the day, to sit on my bed and say good-night. He handed me an envelope. In it were three tickets to the new off-Broadway hit, The Fantasticks, starring a young handsome baritone, Jerry Orbach. “Mom and I want to take you out for your birthday and to a special dinner,” he told me. I knew nothing about the play and I was still angry at having to spend the summer in New Rochelle. I grumbled and accepted his offer ungratefully. “I’m so sorry,” he spoke softly, “I know how disappointed you are.” I turned to the wall, and he walked out, quietly closing my door.

Stevie went off to camp, and I spent that summer at home, sulking and making my parents feel guilty for what I believed their lapse. They did what they could, taking me in to the City, planning day trips when they were free and trying their best to cheer me up. Begrudgingly, and I hope, because I really did recognize what an effort they were making, I rallied. I succumbed to their loving attention, luxuriated in summer dinners without the usual shouting matches, and, as well, whole-heartedly enjoyed a Sunday matinee performance of The Fantasticks. Not surprisingly, I developed a sweet teenage crush on the handsome romantic lead, though that was hardly a substitute for forever missing a chance to make out with some fantasy Pioneer boy in the Catskills.

More than thirty years later, I was eating a lobster roll at the beach, celebrating my birthday with my husband and fourteen-year old daughter and telling them the story of my own unhappy fourteenth summer. The saga of my lost dream unfolded and mid-bite into a chunk of lobster, I realized that what I had understood to be my parents’ careless mistake in missing the deadline for my dream summer had, in all probability, not been an error at all. Through the prism of memory, in a “eureka” moment, I knew why I had never been a Pioneer.  My parents simply hadn’t had the money to send two kids to camp. They’d made a choice, at my expense, to send my troubled brother away for the summer, believing that I could manage at home. Perhaps they felt it was best for him, for them, or for all of us to have a break from the stress of living together – a summer free from yelling at each other and from the almost constant level of anxiety we were used to living with. They understood that he needed camp more than I did.

I never went back to Wel-Met. By the following July, I had moved on and was hanging around with a group of friends who stayed in New Rochelle for the summer. I’d saved my baby-sitting money and was able to get a junior membership at one of the beach clubs lining Long Island Sound. I met some cute boys and was almost popular.

 Some years later, I did apply for, and was accepted as a Wel-Met counselor for the summer following my sophomore year in college. That June, as I was thinking about what to pack for my return to Narrowsburg, my father died unexpectedly. With a heavy heart, I knew I couldn’t leave my mother alone for six weeks. I wrote a letter to the camp directors and forfeited my position. As I dropped the envelope in the mail box, I understood that part of my childhood was disappearing.

I still have dreams of my perfect summers around the campfire, embraced by friends, singing labor-organizing songs. The nights are warm, the days, lovely and languorous. The woods smell deeply of pine with overtones of laundry soap, Prell shampoo and adolescent lust.  And I know that someday, when I am older, I will be a Pioneer.