As I was writing about berries in last week's
posting on heirloom fruits and vegetables, I was thrown back three quarters
of a century. During the latter part
of the 1930s, I spent five summers at Camp Mooween in Connecticut. ("Mooween" was said to be a
Mohegan word meaning "bear.")
It was a boys' camp sited on a large lake. Often on Sunday mornings we campers were allowed to paddle
canoes along the lakeshore, picking berries from overhanging bushes. I don't remember whether they were
blueberries or huckleberries, but they came from wild bushes and thus qualified
as heirlooms. We would get empty
#10 cans from the kitchen and fill them with berries, each full can containing
4-5 pounds of plump fruit—what hadn't gotten into our bellies first. If we returned to the kitchen by noon,
we would have scrumptious berry pies for dessert at dinner.
Thinking of berry picking at Camp Mooween opened a floodgate
of memories. I was fortunate to
escape New York City during July and August for all those years. Remember, almost no one had air
conditioning then, so the summer months could convert dwellings into
infernos. The only relief could be
to go to an air-conditioned movie theater, public swimming pool or a beach, all
of which were forbidden to me during the polio season, which peaked in the
summer months—indeed they were often closed by the authorities for that reason.
Leaving home for two months was not an easy thing for a
child younger than ten; I remember crying each time in the earlier years as I
was delivered to the camp counselors at the railroad station. We boarded a train to Norwich, CT, and
there transferred to buses to the camp, which was near the hamlet of Gilman,
about 20 miles north of New London.
The facilities were rustic—open-air cabins with outhouses behind
them—but embedded in countryside that even a city boy knew was spectacularly
beautiful. We often carried our
cots onto the central campus around which the cabins were arrayed and slept
outdoors entirely, under a canopy of stars unlike any a city boy would ever
normally see. On one such occasion
in 1937, there was a huge auroral display, which I remember (I think correctly)
as white "searchlights" emanating from a point in the north, from
which alternating bright red and green arcs swept upward.
Many more memories of those idyllic summers have stuck with
me:
• The
camp's owner and director, "Cap" Girden, had a rare rapport with
children that made us all adore him.
His dog, a Doberman pinscher—normally an attack dog—had been trained not
to attack a child who might seem to threaten Cap, but to push Cap away from the
child; it was thus a worthy mascot for a children's camp. Cap had an old truck of 1920s vintage,
named Bedelia, with wooden benches mounted on its flatbed (no seat belts
then!), using which he would sometimes drive a group of campers to Gilman for
an ice-cream treat. We never saw gasoline
being put into it, and Cap had us convinced that it ran on water.
• Each
summer, there was a week-long "war" in which the camp was divided
into two factions, the Brown and the Tan.
It would be fought over some nonsensical question like whether toilet
paper should spool from the top or bottom of the roll, or whether the left or
right shoe should be laced first.
The battles were athletic contests. Not being very athletic, I didn't fare well in them,
often being the last picked when teams were chosen. In softball, I was usually placed in right field, to which
the ball was seldom hit. When it
was, my attention was usually far away, so I would miss it.
• There
was a mandatory swimming test consisting of twenty laps to the raft and
back—about a mile. I remember that
each camper attempting it (including scrawny me) would be cheered by his
friends during the last few laps with screams of "S. A. T.
F.!"—"Strong at the finish!" To this day, I find myself chanting that mantra to myself
when engaged in a tiring task.
• We
frequently had campfires at night, complete with ghost stories and songs. Some of the songs were camp staples
("When the day is done/There's a setting sun/And the tribe of Mooween meets
…"). Others were introduced
each year by camp counselors, who were mostly college students. I still remember many of those,
particularly "Waltzing
Matilda," full of Aussie argot like swagman, billabong, coolibah tree,
jumbuck, etc. Another was a
socialist song of the day, "Bandiera
Rossa" ("Red Flag").
Despite its being in a foreign language, I remember bellowing out lines
containing such stridencies as "Avanti popolo!", "Bandiera rossa trionferà!",
and "Viva il socialismo e la libertà!" ("Onward people!", "The red flag will
triumph!", "Long live socialism and liberty!"). I had no idea what the words meant, but
thoroughly enjoyed singing them.
The counselors must have reveled in teaching them to us middle-class
children. I do hope that none of
them was caught—as were so many unfortunates—in the hysterics of McCarthyism a
decade and a half later because of whatever socialist/communist enthusiasms
they might have had during their college years.
At the last night's campfire, I would silently weep at the thought of
leaving camp at the end of another lovely summer. I weep a bit now to find that only remnants of Mooween still
exist—foundations of some of the cabins and the dining hall—but am glad that
they and the lake are part of Mooween State Park, rather than having become
just another housing development.
If I am ever again in that part of Connecticut, I will visit it,
cherishing my memories.