Lifelong lessons from summer camp

Summer camps are fairly sophisticated these days, with a wide array of choices to meet just about everyone’s tastes and needs. That’s good news for today’s families, and especially for the kids who will be flocking to them, but it wasn’t always that way.

Back in the ’60s, camps were more basic, and there were fewer choices, perhaps especially for those growing up in Boston. But looking back after more than a half-century on my four summers in two different day camps, I realize that the people who ran the camps must have done something right, because they taught me lifelong lessons and helped me forge memories that still make me smile.

The first lesson – always be prepared for the worst – came in the summer of 1963, when as a 10-year-old going on 11, I attended a day camp on the grounds of what was then a Yeshiva in Roxbury, Massachusetts, run by the Lubavitchers. They bought the building on Sever Street in 1958 from those who had run the Mishkan Tefila synagogue, which had moved to Newton. The rabbi who ran the camp was one of the teachers at my Hebrew School at Agudas Israel, an Orthodox synagogue on Woodrow Avenue, in the heart of what was then the Dorchester-Mattapan Jewish section of Boston.

Campers were bused from home to the Yeshiva, where my favorite activity was playing ball in the asphalt parking area. As fate would have it, I volunteered to carry the first-aid kit, a most fortuitous decision because on an almost daily basis, the contents came in handy for treating my bruised knees and scraped elbows.

Later on in the summer, the kit proved essential during a hiking excursion to nearby Franklin Park. Back then, the klutziness gene in my decidedly non-Jedi body was asserting itself, and the same mysterious forces that caused me to trip on the playground kicked in during the hike on a park trail, where I took a nasty tumble on some sharp rocks, cutting my hands and knees. 

I’ve never forgotten that lesson, which may explain why I seldom leave home without a pocketful of Band-Aids.

I learned other lessons over the next three summers while attending a more traditional, non-religious camp run by a couple in Foxboro, Massachusetts, long before the town became the home of the New England Patriots. Two of these lessons stand out: be a team player and live life to the fullest. 

Being a team player at Camp Peter Pan – no, I wasn’t one of the “Lost Boys,” though maybe attending the camp was responsible for my proclivity for getting lost – meant, among other things, never complaining about the position I was assigned to play during our frequent softball games. That position inevitably was right field, because most of the infield positions went to right-handers and I was a southpaw. 

Usually, my time in the outfield was relatively uneventful, but near the end of my third year of camp, my tenacity paid off. With our team protecting a lead in the top of the last inning during a game against a neighboring camp, a fly ball came soaring toward me. I never took my eyes off the ball, moved back a couple of steps, and put my glove up just in time to feel the ball slam into the pocket. I quickly squeezed it shut for the last out of the game.

I’ve never forgotten being mobbed by my teammates, who were just as shocked as I was that I had caught the ball.

There were many ways that I had fun by being a team player, but none more productive than when I joined my cabin mates in the annual talent show. The boys in our cabin decided to sing a couple of songs from one of the more popular British invasion bands that was not the Beatles: The Dave Clark Five.

My voice was hardly even good enough to be considered what now would be called karaoke-worthy, but when blended with the others, it must have been fine, because no one threw tomatoes at us, and the audience seemed to get a kick out of us singing two of the group’s signature hits: “Bits and Pieces” and “Glad All Over.”

I apologize if mentioning these songs has given you an unwanted earworm, but you can take solace in the knowledge that you don’t have to listen to my voice, which has become even more tone deaf over 50-plus years.  Sadly, learning how to sing wasn’t one of my takeaways from camp.

LARRY KESSLER is a freelance writer based in North Attleboro. He can be reached at lkessler1@comcast.net.