“While summer camp is about communal living, teamwork, and collaboration, the overarching lesson is realizing you need to be a big, strong girl on your own.”
Two weeks after the end of third grade, I left the familiar nest of home, bound for the unknown, clutching my teddy bear, Zelda. She was the color of butterscotch and missing an ear. It was late June of 1963, and my sister, Frances, and I boarded an overnight train in Chicago, bound for Camp Agawak, in Minocqua, Wisconsin.
I was eight, and Frances was nine.
At Horace Mann School, in our hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, I had just learned multiplication tables and how to spell big words like “experience.” Our parents used the words “fun experience” a lot as we packed our footlockers, huge, clunky things made of plywood tinted teal blue. They fastened with heavy hardware, and were rimmed with brass tacks.
Our mother had hand-sewn labels in every item, and I still have the packing list, which includes a flannel shirt that I still wear. I was a large child.
I loved that my footlocker came with its own key, like my Barbie diary did.
These bulky suitcases, also called “trunks,” were used by the military in boot camp and at war, images I had seen on Combat!, the gritty TV drama depicting a US platoon during World War II, which our younger brother, Greg, used to watch. Having the same trunk as a soldier gave me a thrill of imminent adventure—and a chill of danger and fright.
When I asked my parents how long we would be gone, a quiver in my voice, my father would distract me by not saying “Eight weeks.” Instead, he instructed me to multiply seven times eight.
As June 25 approached, our mom layered precisely folded towels, blankets, sheets, and our blue and white uniform clothing into our footlockers. Witnessing her packing, the upcoming adventure became real, and my fear slackened into antsy anticipation for a fun experience that would last fifty-six days.
That first camp season turned out to be so much fun that it sparked an experience that would last 560 days, over the course of ten summers. And then, decades later, I am back.
At the age of fifty-eight, I returned to work at the camp of my youth, to walk the same woods and swim the same lake in a place where I learned how to be a true and trustworthy friend, and how to trust myself.
I wish I had thanked my mom and dad more for finding Agawak—because the year and a half’s worth of days as a camper and counselor would turn out to shape the direction of all of my days, and all of who I am. The nature and freedom and friendships and action that camp offered grabbed me from the start and has never let go.
Though in the last minutes before boarding on that first voyage to my first camp season I was petrified. I clung to my father like a little monkey, holding back tears, as he said over and over: “You’re going to love it. It’s going to be so much fun. You are a big, strong girl.”
I hugged my mother, who was not holding back tears. Whenever we left the house, she was afraid she would never see us again. A Polish-born Holocaust survivor, she would have flashbacks of how her immediate family, and seven nieces and nephews, were sent off in trains and never came back.
We were now living in a safe suburb due west of Chicago, in a neighborhood lined with wide sidewalks and maple trees. We were friends with every family on our block. Yet the horror of my mother’s past as the orphan of a slaughtered family was a relentless dark shadow.
My first sighting of tattoos was when I was in second grade and I met two of my mom’s first cousins, Howard and Jacques, who had survived Auschwitz. Their arms were seared with blue numbers.
Flashbacks of dodging killers never leave a survivor, I learned early on. My sister, brother, and I used to wait for the bus on the curb in front of our house to take us to day camp at the Jewish Community Center. Our mom instructed us to hold our tin lunch boxes in front of our T-shirts, to hide the brown JCC lettering. She was afraid an anti-Semitic stranger would stop by in a car and whisk us away.
When we were growing up, the population in Oak Park was largely Catholic and Protestant, with only about 2 percent Jewish families. Our family was not Orthodox in religious practices, but given our mother’s history, our parents were vehement that we identify with a Jewish community. So they started that immersion early, enrolling their three children in a JCC camp at kindergarten age.
One of my first lucid memories is eating a peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwich at that camp, seated at a picnic table in the woods. The peeling paint was rubbing my thighs, exposed by shorts. Swatting mosquitoes, I was hot but content. I ate quickly, so I could resume running through sprinklers and playing Red Rover in the large field.
When I think of the word “camp” now, a word that conjures up play and freedom, I am reminded that not that long ago that word meant slave labor, incarceration, and evil.
My mother died thirteen years ago, and it is only now that I think of asking her how she felt about the word “camp.” For her children, the word meant recreation. When she was in Poland, the age of an American girl headed for a sleepaway summer, the word meant death.
In dispatching us to Agawak, our parents followed the wave of Jewish immigrants before and after World War II who sent their children out of crowded cities to live communally in nature. And many of those Jewish parents went on to be the founders of dozens more of the oldest sleepaway camps in the United States still in operation seventy-five years or longer.
Agawak was started by Chicagoan Flora Pinkhurst in 1921. In a 1946 Chicago Tribune article on the wave of city kids fleeing the sweltering summers to the woods of Wisconsin, Agawak was cited for having lake water so pure it was “used for drinking.”
Blue Lake is still very clean, and the perch, bass, and walleye are abundant, but I drink from the faucets, like we did as kids. The campers now drink from pastel metallic water bottles, attached to them like appendages.
Decades before the flight of Jewish immigrants into the American woods, it was actually the Christian men who launched the summer-camp trend. In 1885, the Young Men’s Christian Association opened Camp Dudley for boys on Lake Champlain in New York, still standing as the oldest continuously running summer camp in the country. By 1916, the number of boys attending YMCA camps had climbed to close to twenty-four thousand. Wisconsin is home to more than one hundred of those camps, such as Phantom Lake YMCA Camp, founded in 1896, and one of America’s earliest camps.
Summer camps for girls were established early in the twentieth century. The nondenominational Camp Kehonka, in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, came first, with its opening in 1902. It closed after a run of eighty-three years. During the next several years, the Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls started up dozens of camps along the lakes of the Northeast and Midwest, of which many are still in existence.
Jennifer Manguera was a Girl Scout from kindergarten through tenth grade. During her elementary school years, she spent two weeks each summer at Camp Butterfly, in southern Missouri. At the age of fifty, she is now a Girl Scout leader and works at Camp Brighton Woods in Maryland. When she talks about her childhood as a Girl Scout camper, her memories mirror the American Camp Association studies that conclude that the sleepaway experience makes a multifaceted imprint, whether sessions run two or eight weeks.
Jennifer
Whether you are living in the woods for one day or several weeks, you gain important life skills. You are learning how to cope on your own, away from home for the first time. You are learning how to get along with a group of kids you just met. If someone is mean to you, you can’t say “Mom, take care of this.” You have to do your own talking.
You are learning the importance of serving others when you are part of connecting with a community 24/7. This is a connection you don’t even get at home with your family, unless you are snowbound. The lessons learned and friendships formed through living in the woods in a tent with strangers for a few weeks of my life have been fundamental lessons in becoming independent, in problem-solving, in relationships, and in all aspects of life. Because of camp, I will always be respectful of the earth. Songs that inspired me in my youth I still teach girls, like “Can a Woman Fly an Airplane? Yes, She Can!” We learned to really live the Girl Scouts’ pledge: “To help people at all times.”
Many friends my age who did not go to camp often tell me they thought it was only the rich Jewish girls who had that luxury. I love informing them that it was Cooper Ballentine, an ex–church choirboy, who built Camp Kehonka, and that it was the Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, of diverse economic and cultural classes, that pioneered the trend of sleepaway summers for girls.
The oldest Jewish camps in the nation, as well, were hardly a haven for the very rich. Like Surprise Lake Camp in Cold Spring, New York, they were for the kids of factory-working immigrants. Surprise Lake was created in 1902 to give Jewish boys from the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side a free summer away from the sweatshops where they would otherwise be working with their parents. Its first year in operation, Surprise Lake Camp had six tents, five counselors, and twenty-five campers.
Surprise Lake grew into a nonprofit institution with a current population of five hundred boys and girls, and it continues to offer scholarships for half of its campers.
Some of those benefiting from Surprise Lake’s philanthropy throughout its 110-year history include celebrities such as Eddie Cantor, Jerry Stiller, and Larry King, and my friend Heidi Marcus Katz, who met her husband, Bruce, on the waterfront when they were both on staff as teens.
“We had this special spot where we sat together at night. It was pitch black, and we would look up at the stars,” Heidi recalls. “I knew who he was before our romance began. He was the skinny kid with glasses, and I had no interest. I skipped a couple of summers, and when I came back, I saw this handsome lifeguard and said to my friends, ‘Who is that big hulk over there?’
“Bruce had filled out. He was six feet tall. He had long hair. I followed him to college in Maryland and never left his side since.”
Heidi, sixty-three and raised in Queens, began as a scholarship camper at Surprise Lake starting in the late 1960s, followed by her two younger brothers, also granted tuition funds. Her father was a postman and her mother worked as a freelance bookkeeper.
“You have no idea what camp meant to a working-class family,” Katz tells me. “I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment that housed five of us. Only the bedroom had air-conditioning. We all ate and slept in that bedroom all summer. And there were lots of campers with worse circumstances than us. From that, we went to the extravagance of sleeping in cabins in the cool mountain air. Oh my God, it was exhilarating. We were transported out of the hot, dirty city into a different world.”
Like at Surprise Lake, when my sister and I began our Agawak summers in the sixties, all the girls were Jewish except two. Unlike at Surprise Lake, the majority of campers were from the affluent northern suburbs of Chicago. Our hometown of Oak Park was mostly middleclass, and lots of our friends’ parents worked night shifts in factories and hospitals. Moms were sturdy, not fancy.
As Frances and I waited to board the train, I noticed that many of the mothers had primped more than ours; I fixated on one with a platinum-blond Twiggy cut, tight white pants, and white sandals with spiky high heels. The white poodle she was holding had a collar of pink rhinestones.
Our mother was wearing navy culottes and a red-checked blouse ordered from the Sears catalog, and just a bit of lipstick. We had a guinea pig as a pet, not a dog. I can still picture my mom near the tracks: understated, natural, and, I thought, beautiful. I also remember that my sister and I, though from an upper-middle-class upbringing, felt different right away.
Our father grew up poor during the Depression, the son of the first Russian-born doctor to settle in Chicago. My grandfather’s patients were mostly struggling immigrants, so he would regularly get salamis or strudels as payment instead of money.
My dad put himself through Northwestern University and started a cabinet company in the late 1940s. His business grew over the decades into a large manufacturer of furniture that encased computers, coffee makers, and copy machines.
Still, both of our parents retained a Depression-era mentality, always Sears over Saks, Oldsmobiles over Cadillacs. Our first year at Agawak, tuition was $750 for the eight weeks. Today, a full eight-week season at Agawak costs closer to $10,000. This is the lower side of tuitions compared to some of the exclusive East Coast full-season camps, where parents can shell out upwards of $12,000 for a whole summer.
Frances and I knew that the $1,500 it cost to send us both to camp was a lot of money, and it corroborated our sense that we were about to enter an exotic new land. As we waved out the window and the train pulled away, we could not see our parents in a view darkened by dusk. We were dressed in the camp uniform—navy-blue slacks, powder-blue collared shirts, and navy cardigan sweaters.
My sister recently reminded me that when we slept on the train, me on the top bunk, her on bottom, I dangled my arm down so we could be touching each other’s fingers until we fell asleep.
What I could never imagine more than a half century later was that I would birth four sons who would also spend many summers at sleepaway camp. And I would feel just like my mother felt—afraid to let them go. So during the several summers they spent at Raquette Lake Boys Camp in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, I went with them, to work on staff.
This choice was as much about staying close to my children as it was about the opportunity to get back into the woods, to get back into a cold lake, to laugh and sing in a dining hall. I also got the benefit of tuition remission as compensation at this high-end camp, instead of taking a salary.
I served as the group leader for the youngest boys and created the camp newspaper, the Daily Raquette. My husband, Chuck, built a carpentry shop and launched the woodworking program.
The campers called him Wood Chuck. I still do.
Over many summers spent living on Raquette Lake, I became close friends with staff members at our sister camp across the lake. Many of them were Raquette Lake alumni, and during our nights out at the local bar, they would tell stories from the cabins they grew up in together, about the thrills of the competition during Color Wars, and reminisce about the counselors they worshipped during their shared girlhood.
One night, we were sitting at an outdoor table, and they were talking about how, as campers, they would heave with sobs the last night of camp, and how sad they were now on this night, even as counselors, as camp was almost over. They started to sing one of their old camp songs, “Pine Trees”:
Like a glowing ember
Our memories linger on
Mid sighs and tears
Yet we will choose to never lose
The friendships we’ve made here
It was a breezy night with a flawless sky splashed with stars. The setting and the nostalgia stirred up from a song of lasting friendship threw me back to the hundreds of nights I sat with my forever friends at Agawak, singing around a campfire, under the stars.
A stranger to their Raquette Lake memories, I left the table and started to cry, fixated on my camp roots, planted not in the mountains of the Adirondacks but in the flatlands of Wisconsin. That was my home. Eventually, I found my way back.
This return happened at Agawak’s ninetieth reunion, when the camp’s owner, Mary Fried, told me she had read one of my books. I credited Agalog as the launchpad of my literary career, and she responded with a puzzled look, “What’s Agalog?”
With the vein in my neck throbbing, spit flying, I went on and on about the camp publication that had died decades earlier. I explained that I had worked at Raquette Lake running a newspaper that I had founded to replicate Agalog.
Nearly in the same breath, Mary said, “Would you ever want to come back and…” as I said, “What if I came back and…” We know instantly those people who are meant to be in our lives. Mary is one of them—a soul sister who also has camp at her core.
We hugged each other hard, and Agalog was reborn. And with its resurrection I, too, have been reborn.
My children are raised, my husband is flexible and loyal. The sense of independence and creativity that camp continues to build in me is the nucleus of my well-being—as it has always been.
As a child, I would steal away to a secluded bench on the waterfront to compose articles and poems on camp stationery, treasuring the silence and solitude. I loved the aloneness, writing what I wanted without the crowding of classmates’ desks and without a teacher doling out assignments and grades.
I wrote this poem at the age of nine, in the summer of 1964:
We’re here at Agawak, a camp so dear
We can run and be free because we are here
Agawak is a camp where it is fun
We work and play in the rain or sun
We all love it so very much
And there isn’t another camp as such.
A rough start, but, hey, it rhymes. At the end of a camp week, which included five periods a day of land and water sports, we downshifted into the Sunday night ritual of the reading of Agalog. Oscar, the camp director, would sit in front of the fireplace in our central log lodge and read aloud all of the entries.
Agalog was pieced together on large construction paper, with covers depicting primitive nature scenes and portraits made by campers in Arts & Crafts. I remember that those pots of thick paints in primary colors smelled really good, and I loved how they swirled onto paper off the bristles of my brush.
Stories were written on a manual typewriter, then cut out and taped onto the pages. Each week, the publication was devoted to one of various themes that reflected character traits campers would develop during the summer, including leadership, loyalty, kindness, courage, and sportsmanship.
Paging through old issues of Agalog, I see that the traits born of the camp experience and fleshed out in those old articles have scripted this long life—and inspired this book.
Then, the camp was composed of 120 girls, less than half the population of its community today. On Agalog nights, we would sprawl on the dusty wooden floor of the lodge in our puffy chenille bathrobes, quietly braiding each other’s hair. It was the only time there was no raucous yelling or laughing. We were rapt as Oscar shared the simple words of contributors. The only other sound was the fire crackling.
I wrote every week, and what a high I was on, heartened by a rush of recognition, each time Oscar would say, “And this article is by Iris Krasnow.” Older campers and counselors would offer praise as we shuffled back to our cabins, in furry slippers caked with dirt.
Decades later, as some of my books have climbed onto bestseller lists, I credit those first fans for their encouraging reviews. That initial praise from people I admired coupled with a passion for my craft turned out to be a potent and lasting combination.
I credit my sister, Frances, most of all, for setting me on my lifelong career path: She was always the first to run up to me and say “You are really good at this.” I believed her and kept at it.
Bringing back Agalog, I am witness to the same emancipation I felt as a budding author. I see campers with yellow pads in their laps, nestled in a pine forest, heads down, their pens racing across the page. Away from the confines of a classroom and a teacher’s steely gaze, open air opens every sense, every pore.
I give lots of guidance and effusive compliments, which builds self-assurance far more than grades.
In times of my own self-doubt, blocked and staring at a blank computer screen, I close my eyes and imagine myself as a child, on that bench near Blue Lake, writing freely from a primal place. Now, I am the adult in the woods telling young girls doubting the quality of their works, “You are really good at this.” And it is me sitting in a chair at the Sunday night campfire, reading the campers’ essays and poems and watching the proud smiles as the writers hear their names.
The self-esteem I gained from writing made those first summers at camp far less lonely. My thoughts were a comforting companion, amplified in depth and clarity in nature, where I was able to access and express the subtlest timbres in my voice.
My campers today tell me the same thing, that writing in nature elicits an unleashing of spirit unmatched in a school setting. An Agawak camper for the past five summers, Madeline Glazier, wrote this ode to her love of words at the age of eleven:
The flick of a page.
Words in the air.
Images in my head
Come alive
Agalog is something to look
Forward to every fourth period
A tunnel into happiness
A portal on paper.
Peace is found within
A spiritual event.
“Writing under a big sky, I am so much more tuned in to what is going on in my head and heart,” says Madeline. “Nothing is restraining me.”
When my sister and I talk about being sent to camp when we were Madeline’s age on an overnight train without our parents, we are incredulous that we did it—that they did it—without mobile phones.
In the first hour of the rollicky ride, we talked loudly to each other to drown out the crying of a red-faced girl nearby and her shouts of: “I want to go hoooommme!”
Any homesickness we felt was assuaged by a new friend, Gina, sitting across from us. My curly hair was freshly shorn, and I envied her long ponytail, sleek and straight.
I also envied the small brown paper bag in her lap, from which she had just pulled out a couple of Bulls-Eyes, soft caramels with vanilla-cream centers. At my age, I do not always remember what I ate for dinner the previous night, but I remember in delicious detail how Gina slowly unwrapped a caramel, put it in her mouth, and chewed slowly, with an expression that seemed otherworldly.
She must have noticed my coveting stares, because she offered to share some of the candy her mom had packed: multicolored dots on paper strips and little wax bottles filled with sugary liquid.
Chewing off the tiny sweet dots, my sister and I realized that camp might really be what Daddy had said it would be: “a lot of fun.” While counselors would be supervising us, they were not our parents, and we could diverge from home rules. For one, it looked like we could eat candy before dinner, something that was forbidden at home.
The strings of red licorice that came next further lessened any lingering thoughts of the increasing distance between us and our parents.
Learning at a young age to cope independently with a brave face, even if it is feigned at first, is a key formative lesson I took from camp, just as Girl Scout leader Jennifer Manguera did. At the end of the first summer, I had pushed through many fears, among them, night frights.
During many times in early childhood, eerie thoughts would shake me awake, like green monsters with fangs about to take a chunk out of my leg, and bearded men holding sacks over their shoulders to hurl me into. I would plod across the hall to my parents’ room and shake my father awake. He would bring me a glass of warm milk laced with honey, then lull me to sleep with a song from the one-week YMCA camp he attended on scholarship for two summers in the late 1920s, which began like this: “Camp Duncan, you know, is the best place to go, in the good old summertime. The grass is so green, the water so clean, oh, how we love it so.”
He would tell us that those two weeks at camp held some of his happiest boyhood memories. Located in Ingleside, Illinois, an hour and change from downtown Chicago, Camp Duncan is still going strong as it nears its hundredth birthday.
In a cabin on a dark hill at Agawak, far away from my dad’s singing and room service, when night frights hit, I had to soothe myself. “We’re all right. Don’t be scared,” I would whisper to my teddy bear. And when cabinmates excluded me, I learned how to turn within for solace and for strength.
At camp, I found that if you acted brave, you felt brave, a lesson I have carried with me ever since.
Camp did turn me into a big, strong girl, then a big, strong woman who knows how to get things done on her own. I learned to be alone without feeling lonely.
In one of my first letters home, I wrote:
Dear Mommy and Daddy, The nights are cold. The counselors are old. They are not as old as you, but don’t worry! I am taking care of myself.
I learned to take care of myself at camp in the 1960s, and I am still learning to do this now, as I have lost both parents and my grown sons have left the nest. While summer camp is about communal living, teamwork, and collaboration, the overarching lesson is realizing you need to be a big, strong girl on your own.
Always.
Most in my circle of adult camp girls have lost one or both parents; many have lost siblings and friends. We are greatly fortified by our Agawak conditioning to carry on through adversity, sure-footed, self-reliant, hopeful.
After my father died suddenly at sixty-seven in 1986, killed by the wrong drug administered to treat a heart attack, I signed up to help lead a group of children with muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, and cerebral palsy on a mountain-climbing expedition in Yosemite National Park. We roped up with the kids and rappelled with them down the peaks.
I had never rappelled or climbed a tall mountain before. It was the spirit of camp that lifted me out of unthinkable agony and pushed me forward, giving me a willingness to carry on, to take risks, to stand on my own. It was confidence stemming from camping trips and my counselor experience that drew me to an opportunity to lead and help children who needed a lot of help, in the glory of nature.
When I was eleven, Agawak counselor Debbie used to comfort us during bouts of missing our parents with: “Remember who you are.” When we remember who we were as campers, we can channel that camp-girl spirit to remember who we are today: capable of forging onward, through anything.
Living away from my parents and learning to stand on my own as a child has made all the losses and disappointments in life more bearable. This priceless gift from camp has become a wellspring for survival. Because, inevitably, as we accumulate birthdays, loved ones die, children leave home, and we must know how to stand alone.
When I was seventeen, I was safe amid the birch and pine trees of Agawak, as the counselor of a cabin filled with adoring ten-year-olds.
When my mother was seventeen, she was orphaned and in hiding.
She used to say that no matter how many loving people we have in our lives, those people could be snatched from us in a finger snap. And that the most important love to nurture, the only one that lasts, is a love of self.
She was not a narcissist. She was a realist.
My mother learned in her youth what we all come to know as we age: that we can have the best families and the best of friends, yet the most important person to learn to count on is ourselves. I learned this at home, and this was solidified at camp: Independence and self-sufficiency are the most critical of traits.