“Pushing through fear as children turns into fearlessness as we carry on, as every step to and through adulthood is competitive and hard.”
I am on my usual walk on the Baltimore & Annapolis Trail, through a pastoral stretch of fields filled with peonies and sunflowers. My camp friend Liz Weinstein is on her usual walk in Glencoe, Illinois, on the Green Bay Trail, bordered by train tracks and a canopy of oak trees and maples.
We like to talk on the phone while we are huffing 750 miles apart, singing the songs we sang on our hikes long ago. On this morning, we are belting out “Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day,” from Oklahoma, a production we staged at Agawak in 1967.
When we get to this line, we draw it out and scream in unison: “I’ve got a beeeeuuuteeefulll feeling. Everything’s going my way.”
When talking to a camp girl, I always feel like everything is going my way.
I ask Liz how many miles she generally walks. She says, “Four,” and I instantly feel the fire of competition from my camper days. I do only three. The following week as I am panting near the four-mile mark, I call Liz and sing this line from Annie Get Your Gun: “I can do anything better than you.”
That night, we talk on the phone about how this instinctive urge to be the best, this undying competitive streak, was primed at camp. Whatever we played, we played to win, whether to top our last performances or to topple the other team in Blue and White games. The quality of ambition that we gained at camp was fierce and constant—and has stuck for a lifetime.
Our drive was at its most extreme when the teams faced off in Capture the Flag, the most adrenaline-pumping and points-bearing of all our competitions.
Capture the Flag meant everything at the time, and it remains a capstone Agawak game. During our camper years, it was the season’s biggest competition between the Blue Team and the White Team, the culmination of dozens of lesser-point games that had taken place over the past weeks. The team that emerged victorious at summer’s end got a large silver trophy and an immeasurable burst of gratification.
It was played at night, with limited use of flashlights, making this competition also the most injury-producing. Capture the Flag inevitably resulted in lots of bruises and sprains, and sometimes a few breaks.
The game begins with a long whistle, then the two teams crisscross en masse and charge through enemy territory with the goal to grab the other team’s flag. The collective screams, which sound like the high-pitched cries of red foxes, combined with the velocity of a full-on assault of bodies, always reminds me of soldiers with bayonets charging on horses.
The roots of Capture the Flag actually do harken back to battles between soldiers on foot and on horseback, who knew the outcome once a flag was taken. The job assigned to the color guards during the Civil War was to protect their flag, and they often risked their lives to ward off the enemy.
And like those battles, then and now, Capture the Flag at Agawak can get ugly. We turn from one family into divided warriors. In her best-selling book A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled, comedian and talk show host Ruby Wax took sarcastic aim at the intensity of team games she played as an Agawak girl in the 1960s. As she wrote: “It was called Camp Agawak, which probably means ‘go for the jugular…’ and the message was: Beat the opposition at all costs! Conquer! Conquer! Conquer!”
The name Agawak has no hidden meaning, other than it is our brother camp Kawaga spelled backward. The will to conquer was very real, and it did take its toll.
In my camper days, one flag was on the top of a steep hill, the other on the bottom. Tripping over gnarled roots in the dark and on steep inclines resulted in so many injuries that in recent years the location was switched to a flat expanse of grassy field that is still used. The nursing staff is now parked on the sidelines.
Getting the flag takes a swift dive into the dirt, dodging several pairs of the guards’ firmly planted feet. By the time a flag is captured—a process that can take several hours—there are only a few players left on the field. Because if you are tagged by an opponent, you are immobilized in a roped area called “jail.”
It is the final night of our alumni reunion, and we are standing around a bonfire. As inevitably happens when the group is together, we start reminiscing about which team won the team trophies in years past and who lost Capture the Flag.
I feel again the pain searing through my head that I felt when I was twelve. A burly older camper did not just tag me out; she tackled me out when my outstretched hand was three inches away from grabbing the White Team flag. The force of that tackle hurled me to the ground and gave me a large bump on the right side of my nose.
The fire has turned into glowing embers, and we are holding hands that are sticky from the marshmallows we pulled off our sticks to make s’mores. We decide to go around and each share a lingering memory from our camper days.
Flashbacks of the ferocity of team games, particularly Capture the Flag, come up immediately from nearly off of us. We will never get over the urgency and passion of that game. We will never get over the big wins and big losses at camp that remain fresh in our aging minds. I have a ridge on my nose more than fifty years later that makes it impossible for me to ever forget.
Liz Weinstein and I stay behind to gather a bucket of lake water to douse the last of the fire. We are silent in the familiar hiss and smoke that ended all of our campfires for so many summers. Sitting on a wooden bench near Cabin 15, where we lived with these friends as teens, we talk about how Capture the Flag has become a metaphor for how we have steered our lives, knowing the value of hard work and teamwork with an eye on the prize.
“In that game, you had to give one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time,” says Liz, owner of a graphic design firm, a former Blue Team captain, and one of only twenty campers in Agawak history to earn the most advanced level in swimming, a purple cap.
“I’ve channeled the spirit of Capture the Flag all of my life, as I have built a team in my company, faced fierce competition, and avoided getting tagged out,” she adds.
Competitiveness driven by tenacity, focus, and ambition is the foundation for success in team games at camp. Long after camp girls become camp women, these qualities become the drivers of a successful life. We climb relentlessly for the prize in our careers; we search for prize relationships.
Susan Green, sixty, was captain of the White Team and a three-time Olympic Day queen, and joined Liz in the small group of purple caps. She is now a senior vice president and partner of a major Wall Street wealth management firm. She says her formidable career has its roots in the drive developed during her summers at camp.
“The personal and professional choices I have made are directly related to the confidence I received from my achievements at camp,” says Susan. “This gave me the ability to develop a belief system that I could do anything I wanted if I set goals and worked hard to achieve them.
“Then working as a team in games like softball, volleyball, and Capture the Flag become critical building blocks as you enter adulthood and become team players and leaders in professions,” she continues. “Like high-jumping, once you clear a certain goal, you raise the bar and work hard to clear that next height. We certainly learned this at camp.”
When we discuss our present-day achievements and the challenges we faced to get over subsequent bars, talk swerves to the old days. While Capture the Flag was the most coveted game to win, another competition that gets us riled in reverie is the race across the lake between the Blue and White war canoes. Ten paddlers from each team started off together in the middle of the lake in twelve-foot green wooden boats. Today, the camp war canoes are nearly twice as long, hold twenty-two, and are fiberglass.
The boats are steered by a coxswain at the stern, who synchronizes the plowing arms with repetitive shouts of: “Stroke up, stroke up, stroke up!” The war-canoe showdown results in two beachfront huddles, one exalted, one sunken, and both sides with muscles that burn for days.
When I was fourteen, in the second-oldest cabin, the war-canoe race took place on a fifty-four-degree afternoon under leaden skies and pellets of rain. My Blue Team was ahead by the length of two boats from the start until nearly the finish line, which was the outer rope that penned in the swimming area. We were three yards from the end when the White Team shot past us, and with shrieks that rivaled those of howler monkeys, held up their paddles in a victory salute.
As their paddles shot up, our heads fell into our laps.
I have thought of that cold, disappointing day on other cold, disappointing days over the past fifty years. Two important lessons came from that dismal scene, when I watched the winners in their circle of joy from our circle of doom.
For one, although I had been on the losing team throughout many past summers of competition, the magnitude of this loss, an unexpected split-second fall from first place, really hammered home the value of bucking up and being a gracious loser.
Our team captain spoke about sportsmanship, and how we would face lots of other losses at camp. “No one likes a sore loser. Let’s wipe our tears and congratulate the other team,” she instructed, then shepherded us over to the celebrating champions.
I cannot say that the sting of loss was ever completely eradicated after a big game at camp, even with a show of grace. But I can say when the scoreboard tipped our way, it helped us all become humbler winners, knowing too well the pain of being beaten.
I also learned to never again be overly confident. With the sustained lead of the Blue canoe, we assumed we had snagged the race, so the power of our paddles slackened as the finish line was only strokes away. Those of us who occupied those old wooden boats can laugh today about our crying jags after losing war-canoe competitions. We can laugh about our steadfast obsession with other Blue and White games, which were so close, were surely ours, then eluded our grasp in a surprise finish.
Lots of sleepaway camps have Color Wars, though the competition is often played over one grueling week, and the team affiliation for campers changes every season. At Agawak, we play games all summer, and the team we are designated remains our team for life.
A new Agawak camper is assigned a team color during the second day of the season. Up until 1980, at the beginning of camp the new girls picked their teams from a hat filled with crumpled pieces of paper marked blue or white. This tradition has since shifted in creative directions, like handing each new camper a cupcake with blue or white filling, revealed after the first bites.
Whether the games last one week or the two-month season, team competition is an impassioned and unforgettable camp tradition. When I began an interview with Leni Landorf, an Agawak girl in the 1940s, her first question to me was: “Were you a Blue or a White?” I told her I was Blue, and she began singing her White Team fight song, which is still sung today: “When a White Team girl walks down the street, she’s got that one hundred percent, from head to feet. She has a word, a smile, a winning way…”
Our tradition of being a Blue or a White for a lifetime makes team loyalty run deep into adulthood, ridiculous as it seems This is serious stuff because once a Blue or a White, always a Blue or White.
Those games we played that gave us the highest of highs and the lowest of lows are part of the toolbox that prepared us for handling everything we do now.
The competition, which could turn very rough, was frightening to us as youngsters. But pushing through fear turns into fearlessness as we carry on, as every step to and through adulthood is competitive and hard.
I recall my terror as a nine-year-old when the Blue Team captain, a position granted by election, mapped out our Capture the Flag strategy. As sixty girls, then half the camp, sat on the floor of the library, which served as the Blue headquarters, she stood in front of us, holding a clipboard, and thundered our orders: “Run like racehorses and charge for the White flag, no matter what it takes.”
We learned quickly that it takes a lot. Some of the most docile girls could turn savage, so as not to disappoint their teammates and captain.
In 1970, I was that teenager standing in front of the Blue Team as captain, an honor I still revere as one of the peaks of this long life. Seriously. Only a camp girl would understand how much this meant. I talked so often to my kids about my captain year, how I felt like royalty, that when they introduce me to friends they still sometimes say: “Our mom is a writer, and she was the Blue Team captain.”
When I was explaining strategy for Capture the Flag, remembering my own fright at a captain’s orders, I told the girls: “We can win this” and not “We have to win this.” I knelt down in front of the youngest campers and said: “If you do not want to play, you do not have to.”
No one bowed out, and we won the game, because of a tiny but speedy ten-year-old who wedged herself between a big girl’s legs and snatched the White Team banner.
After that victory, I wrote this in my letter home:
Dear Mom and Dad, We captured the flag, and the Blues will probably win the trophy! That game lasted for hours, and I can barely walk now. But willpower beat exhaustion!
I read that now and think of all the times in subsequent decades that my willpower beat out exhaustion. During Capture the Flag, we run so hard our lungs burst in icy agony—and yet we keep going. Our legs are searing—and we keep going. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. Yet we never stop trying.
I know how the hard-earned flag of the opponent felt in my hands when I finally did grab it one game a lifetime ago. I know that it pays to be a humble victor, and not boastful. I know that defeat means you stand tall, congratulate the winners, and fight harder the next time around.
A show of grace with both victory and defeat are necessary character traits to succeed at summer camp, tempering ambition with empathy and humility. These lessons are crucial in a community where competitive games go on all summer.
The four biggest honors at camp, which overshadowed all others, were to earn a purple Cap, to be crowned Olympic Queen, to be named All-Around Camper, and to be elected a team captain. My alumni pals Liz Weinstein and Susan Green were each bestowed with all four of these coveted titles, and they both count these events as some of the most thrilling of their lives.
I see now, though, that in our camper days perhaps too much of our focus was on beating out the other team, or on beating out the other person, to land first prize. Because decades later, I found out that camp winners do not always feel like winners. I was surprised to find out that one of my dearest camp friends did not feel the power and pride many do after getting voted captain by her whole team.
Peggy Gilbert was the stunning and popular daughter of the former director of Agawak. She became captain of the White Team the year I was at the helm of the Blues. Just recently, she told me, “I made myself throw up all that summer.” Peggy and I had been cabinmates since we were ten, and I would never have imagined she was racked with a faltering self-image that led to an eating disorder.
Like gaining the “freshman 15” in college, it was easy to pack on the weight at camp, with family-style servings in large bowls, refilled with seconds and thirds. Peggy reminded me how painfully aware we all were of how much we would gain, as we had to get on the scale every Saturday during weekly weigh-in at the infirmary, a policy shelved long ago. We also changed clothes five times a day, and could not help but check each other out, seeing tighter bodies and better curves that could make us feel fat and inferior.
Peggy’s fight with food lasted decades, and the struggles she surmounted put her on the path to becoming a licensed clinical social worker and addiction counselor. She now works as the director of education at a nonprofit organization that provides programs and resources on depression awareness and suicide prevention for middle and high school students.
With her professional expertise and personal plight, Peggy was also tapped by the Foundation for Jewish Camp to contribute to a manual for training camp staff to work with the growing number of campers struggling with mental health issues.
Here is a small excerpt from Peggy’s portion of the manual, which advises camp counselors to speak openly with their campers about anxieties and fears.
I remember my last summer as a camper, when I was fifteen and captain of the White Team, something all the girls in the highest cabin wanted to be. I spent most of that summer in the bathroom secretly vomiting away my fears of not being good enough.
By identifying what you see and expressing your concern, you send the message that there is a different and healthier way to deal with life’s pressures. You have these girls for a relatively short time over the summer, but you have enormous power to make a difference in their lives.
I have talked to Peggy often lately to learn of her progress as she recovers from cancer. We have long conversations about our work and our kids and always about camp, the good and the bad. One bad memory is how we would starve ourselves for a day before our weekly weigh-ins. We regret that we equated skinny with pretty.
I told Peggy I had no idea she was suffering—she was the White Team captain, after all—and here is her response:
Peggy
Oh, yeah, there were many insecurities. I actually got instructions on how to throw up from another girl in our cabin. I lived in a dual world. I was a camp leader, and on the outside maybe everything about me looked happy and perfect. But there is this underbelly to life, right? My internal world said I wasn’t good enough. I developed an eating disorder to fill a void. And this went on for years.
At camp, everyone seemed confident all the time, and there were times that I didn’t. At home, I would look at my beautiful mother, who herself never thought she was thin enough, and I would always feel huge, even at a normal weight.
It took a lot of therapy to get into a place where I was more self-accepting. Back in the 1970s, when we were fifteen and struggling with our self-images, we didn’t have a name for what I was going through and we certainly didn’t talk about it. I needed help, but there was no structure in place to recognize I needed help.
Many young kids come to camp today on medication, with psychiatric histories, and there is an understanding now that those issues are real and that camps must be equipped to deal with them.
While I was studying at the University of Chicago to become a social worker in 1981, Time magazine did a cover story on eating disorders, and Jane Fonda was featured as she shared the story of her struggle with bulimia. Suddenly I had a name for my destructive behavior. I sought out one of the doctors featured in the article for help, and my recovery began.
Body image issues are often generational and can be hard to shake. Even today, I worry about the inevitable weight gain that comes with the medication I am on that will help prolong my life. At least today I recognize how crazy that thinking is.
We worry so much about superficial things when we are teenagers, like how to fit in with the cool girls, who seem prettier and better. As adults, we have deeper things to worry about, and it is then that we understand what really matters.
As Peggy describes, there is now pervasive awareness of how “not feeling good enough” can take its toll on teens grappling with self-identity. This, in a world that is far more stressful and competitive than the one we faced. More camps are adding professionals to support camper and staff emotional and social health. At Agawak, there are persons who oversee cabin life for each of the age divisions, Junior, Intermediate, and Senior.
When cabin conflicts occur, they sit with that group and they talk it out. Girls with unhealthy dietary habits are sent for supervision to camp nurses, who are also in charge of dispensing medications, which grow in volume every summer, according to people I spoke to representing a variety of camps.
“Children are more stressed than ever, and are expected to have high performance in every facet of their lives,” says Keala Strahan, the head nurse at Camp Matoaka in Smithfield, Maine. “I am definitely seeing an increase in younger and younger kids being placed on antidepressant medications, as well as medications for the treatment of ADHD and ADD.
“As the campers get older and learn appropriate coping mechanisms to better self-regulate their symptoms, I strongly encourage parents to discuss a drug holiday with their physicians as an option for summer, when kids aren’t expected to perform on demand,” continues Keala. “This, as long as their medication is not one they have to take every day to maintain its efficacy in their system. I’ve seen positive effects of these no-drug summers, as camp allows for more learning through play, imagination, and creative thinking.”
I have also witnessed how competition in a camp setting, away from the intense pressure of academics, can be a positive force in strengthening character in a place where kids learn by experience and not on demand.
Both of Keala’s daughters were Matoaka campers and Color War captains, and have served as counselors there. As a mother who watched her girls mature and toughen from camp competition, like I did with my boys, Keala reinforces the sentiment that working hard for a win at camp can be the scaffolding for a winning adulthood, and that ambition is a good thing, if kept in check.
“Camp kids learn at a young age that someone wins and someone loses, and that’s life,” says Keala. “Team competition has been fundamental in shaping our girls. Wanting to win has set the foundation for them to be driven to succeed, to learn that it’s okay to be determined—not to be ruthless, but to be strong.
“Children growing up today will vie for positions in a very competitive society, and it’s good to be ambitious,” she adds. “No matter what facet of life you are dealing with, in college or in jobs or in relationships, wanting to win forces you to dig down and find courage within yourself that’s going to carry you throughout your life.”
At summer camp, we do learn that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and that we can never win it all. This knowledge has been an indomitable force that has softened my response to failure and fortified my determination to succeed.
I have heard from my college students who did not go to camp that coming of age as competitive female athletes in high school and college—something my generation of women was unable to do—can instill the same sense of tenacity and drive. I, too, have found that pushing myself hard physically helps fan my mental fortitude to keep climbing the rungs in a long career.
My first job out of college was in a drab brick building next to the glass-and-steel John Hancock Building, where the coolest public relations firm in Chicago was housed. The Hancock Building, which sparkled in the sun, was like the White Team’s flag, beckoning me to capture it. I wanted in to this firm that handled publicity for the best restaurants, stores, theaters, and rock-and-roll venues. I wanted out of my windowless office, where I was the account executive for a retirement home, and where colleagues chain-smoked and wore glum expressions.
Unfailingly, surly bosses would make assignments near the end of the day, press releases to be completed on deadline before work ended at 5 p.m. This, just as I was applying my Revlon red lipstick and prepping to escape to the singles bars a few blocks away, on Division Street.
I was the lowliest staff member, and therefore a servant. My dad, who started at the bottom and worked his way to the top, would tell me to put a smile on my face and do whatever I was asked to do, that this would pay off.
It was dreadful work, and I got a pit in my stomach every morning as I boarded the northbound 151 bus on Michigan Avenue, en route to a job for which I earned $150 a week. But I listened to my father, did my best, fattened my media contacts, and sharpened my writing skills.
Six months later, I got an interview for an account executive/writer position at my dream firm in the incandescent Hancock tower next door. I wore a black suit and pearl earrings and channeled the camp-girl spirit: Believe in yourself. You can do this.
When I was asked about my writing experience, I said I had churned out dozens of press releases at my current job, had written for my college newspaper, and had been a published author since the age of eight at Camp Agawak. Turns out Susan, the daughter of the boss of the agency, Margie Korshak, was also an Agawak girl.
Like so many other times in life, camp karma served as a guiding angel on my shoulder. In this case, I conducted a confident interview, solidified by my writing ability and helped by my Agawak connection. I got the job, and my four years with the Korshak agency gave me some rip-roaring twenties.
I moved from promoting the retirement home into dazzling new places and accounts: supervising publicity for Arnie Morton’s restaurants, which included the launch of the very first Morton’s, and for Park West, Chicago’s premier entertainment venue.
I had my own office, on the thirtieth floor, with a wall of windows and a swooping view of Lake Michigan. From my perch on top of the town, I typed out press releases and dreamed of other jobs to capture. My work in public relations introduced me to top Chicago newspaper editors, who came to know my writing and would go on to hire me as they moved upward in their own careers.
When the sports editor of the Chicago Daily News moved to the Dallas Times Herald to become managing editor, he recruited me to be the paper’s fashion writer. Four years later, when the executive editor of the Chicago Tribune became the executive editor of United Press International, he tapped me to become the wire service’s national features writer, based in Washington, DC.
The will to capture the best assignments, the best interviews, is something I feel every day as a journalist. Like a young girl at camp, I keep forging onward when a goal eludes me, propelled by irrepressible willpower to keep on trying.
It took me three years to get an interview with Senator Ted Kennedy. He was my top pick to be the first in a series of five-thousand-word profiles I was assigned to do for UPI, spotlighting writers, actors, artists, and politicians. This was 1984, long before a reporter could dash off a text or an email for an interview request. It was the era of pleading over a landline in fast-talk, before people had the chance to hang up on you.
Melody Miller was Kennedy’s deputy press secretary, and during my initial ask, she did not say yes and she did not say no. She told me that the senator, then spearheading a push for expanded healthcare legislation, did not have time currently for an hour sit-down interview and to call back in a month.
I called back in a month to the day. Melody did not say yes and she did not say no. Again, she deferred a confirmation due to his hectic schedule and instructed me to call back in a month. Which I did, and did again, and did again—for almost three years.
During the months that she did not say yes and did not say no, I acted on a maybe. Maybe I will win and maybe I will lose, but I will stay in the game, like at camp, and keep playing with all of my might.
In November 1987, I made my monthly call on a Tuesday. Melody told me to come to Kennedy’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building that Thursday. Despite the short notice, I was quite prepared with interview questions, having accumulated mounting research on his political rise while anticipating that the yes would eventually come. Camp had turned me into an adult who always worked my hardest toward the yes.
I got a lot of nos to get to this place.
The lasting influence that being a team captain had on me seems just as strong on campers today. When the Blues won the trophy at the end of the 2017 season, after several summers of losing, I shared with their captain, Olivia Baker, how lessons learned on camp playing fields had paved my adulthood with tenacity and endurance.
Olivia, then sixteen and a camper for a decade, told me that she had already experienced how team games had instilled the qualities I described. She was among the top achievers in her high school class, serving as the editor of the school paper, and had just learned of her acceptance to Columbia University.
She laughed at how her friends at home say things like, “Oh my God, your Blue and White competition sounds so crazy. It’s like Viking warfare!”
Olivia then elaborated on how the long tentacles of camp girls’ fighting spirit become even more expansive long after summer ends. “When I’m struggling with my studies or in anything I do, I always think about how I used my whole might to lead a team to victory in Capture the Flag,” said Olivia. “And now, literally, I believe I can do anything. I feel like I can capture the job I want, the friends I want, and eventually the spouse I want.”
My sons also know from their own competitive camper days that giving it their all is the ticket to every capture in life. Now in their twenties, they are maneuvering their way upward in the fields of filmmaking, technology, acting, and writing. They know that they can capture the prize only with grit and determination. They were reminded of this every day growing up in our house by an extraordinary athlete from nearby Baltimore.
There is a large poster that hangs in the hallway between their bedrooms, bearing a photograph of baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr. Above his picture is one word in large black letters: PERSEVERANCE.
Ripken holds the record in baseball for consistently showing up for work. He played 2,632 consecutive games with the Baltimore Orioles, spread out over more than sixteen years. He persevered through sickness and injuries and bad weather and still put on his uniform and came to work.
I tell my friend Liz Weinstein about the Ripken poster, and she shivers as it brings up this memory:
It is the last week of camp and it is raining—not hard, but not a drizzle. She is trying to pass her front-flip, half-twist jackknife dive, the last of ten dives she needs to achieve her purple cap, a goal she has been trying to reach for years. The judge is Beaver, the nickname for our critical waterfront director whose real name was Beverly. (I doubt we would call her Beaver if she were alive today.)
In order to pass, Liz has to do the final dive perfectly six consecutive times.
The completion of the task came on the twenty-third dive of the day, after an hour of climbing out of the cold lake into the cold air and after five summers of trying to go from a yellow cap to perfect purple.
“I can still hear Beaver saying ‘Pass’ as she checked off that dive on her clipboard,” Liz says.
And I can still feel that captured white flag in my hands.