Chapter Six

Responsibility

“With no Mommy or Daddy around, we quickly learned the necessity of taking care of each other.”

In June of 1963, after a jerky overnight train ride, too much red licorice, and not enough sleep, five of us very young girls were led to Cabin 3 by our counselors Tina and Ellen.

They were wearing starched white shirts, navy Bermuda shorts, and smiles that seemed a little too big as they expressed some cheery words of welcome. The sentence I remember most was this declaration, given with stony expressions: “You will become responsible young ladies this summer.”

I could spell “responsible” but did not really know the meaning of the word, only that my third-grade teacher, Miss Kuntz, used it often to reprimand the class clown, Thomas. She would tell him that “responsible” was something he was not.

My understanding of the word changed quickly as Tina showed us a large sheet of cardboard on the back of the door. On it were stick figures of girls with our names in capital letters across the chests. Below the drawings, there was a list of five chores that we would be responsible for completing each day, and alternating each week.

That first week, I was assigned to sweeping.

Tina handed me a broom and told me to make sure I crawled on the floor and got all the dust balls out from under the beds. She then handed me a Folgers coffee can filled with what looked like nuggets of red rubber and smelled like gasoline.

She explained that this was “compound,” and that I should sprinkle it around, to best clump together the dirt. As camp progressed, sweeping the cabin would dredge up other debris, like wrappers from the candy that our parents sent and our counselors only doled out at rest hour as we read our Archie comic books.

We made our beds at home, but my mom did the sweeping. She would whisk through the kitchen, slightly bent over, leaving a few stray bristles of straw from the broom behind. Learning this task, which I had only seen adults do, made me feel like what my father insisted I was: “a big, strong girl.” This when I had cowered about leaving home that first summer.

Since that first time maneuvering a broom over a rough wooden floor, I have loved to sweep. I find the job meditative and satisfying, in mindful movement, and the goal is always accomplished. Unlike many desired goals in which efforts do not guarantee results, with a broom and a dustpan and hitting every corner, floors always end up spotless.

I felt even bigger and stronger as I mastered other cabin tasks—cleaning the toilet and sink, straightening the bathing suits and towels on the clothesline, and raking the entrance to the cabin, making sure I got rid of all the crusty leaves and left perfect rows of parallel lines in the dirt. Oh, how I adored the rich color of camp dirt, the rusty shade of a barn, and it seemed so clean, not like the dirty dirt of the city.

Taking responsibility for the care of our cabins streamed into deeper arteries of our lives well beyond housekeeping. With no Mommy or Daddy around, we quickly learned the necessity of taking care of each other. One of Peggy Gilbert’s earliest Agawak memories was as an eight-year-old in 1964. A bunkmate was sobbing after dropping a suitcase on her foot. She was not hurt but was still yelping “I want to go home to my parents!”—who were a thousand miles away in Oklahoma.

The girls of Cabin 1 formed a group hug around her. “We held her until she stopped crying,” says Peggy. “It was instinctive. In our small cabin, we immediately felt like a bedroom of sisters.”

Margie Gordon recalls that those camp sisters continued to be a circle of support and love throughout her most brutal of grown-up hardships. Margie was in her early twenties when her older brother, Bruce, died of a brain tumor. Then, when she was in her early sixties, Margie’s thirty-year marriage ended in divorce.

“My camp friends were always the safety net, a grounding force,” Margie says softly. “Time and time again, they have reminded me of who I am, resilient and strong. Camp sisters show us, in the toughest of times, that we will never be alone.”

All of us, every day of every summer, witnessed caregiving exemplified from the very top, by camp director Oscar Siegel. His wife, Natalie, had severe multiple sclerosis, which had put her in a wheelchair and with blurred speech, though her mental functioning was sharp. Their daughter, Renee, an only child, was born with cystic fibrosis.

We watched Oscar wheel Natalie up and down hills at camp, and lift her out of her chair and up steps and onto chairs in the dining room. We watched Oscar disappear several times a day into his cottage to conduct breathing treatments for Renee, to loosen the mucus in her lungs, which thickens with her disease. We watched selfless, painstaking acts of love and caregiving.

We suffered with Oscar as we watched Natalie and Renee grow weaker every summer—this as they watched campers grow more robust. Oscar was only sixty when he died of heart failure shortly after Renee passed away in her early thirties.

We camp girls believe he died of a broken heart after burying his daughter. Natalie died in 2010, outliving her husband by twenty years.

We learned a lot from this family.

Feeling responsible for each other’s well-being as children often fans out into developing a penchant for leadership and service. This trio of traits that we are groomed to have at camp often become the drivers of choices we make in adulthood, personally and professionally.

Most of my Agawak friends, along with the dozens of lifers I know representing other camps, have gravitated toward careers centered on empowering others. Many are teachers and professors, like me; others have become healers or administrators in medical fields, or in nonprofit work focused on mental health. They are serving in leadership positions, in law, in business, in their communities, and in their charity work.

They may not have risen to People magazine fame, like this formidable group of ex–camp girls: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, actor/comedian Whoopi Goldberg, and Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But any camper who spends several weeks in the woods and sticks with it, summer after summer, comes to exhibit tenacity, diligence, and responsibility.

We were handed dustpans and brooms as small children, and taught to nab every candy wrapper and ball of dust. We learned to spring back from a loss in team competition and to try harder to crush it the next time around. We slept in tents and heard animals cry in the night—and did not cry ourselves.

We were taught by role models like Oscar, and by each other, to brave adversity and not run from it. It helps that we gained inner strength in numbers and realized, as Margie Gordon puts it: “We are never alone.”

I am remembering the words of Terry Worth, who likened herself to the supporting cast member Rhoda compared to some of her Agawak friends, whom she thought of as stars like Mary Tyler Moore. Being the loyal sidekick played out in Terry’s adult life in the most honorable way, though, as she took on a huge responsibility, to serve and to lead.

The girls in our oldest cabins are assigned “little sisters,” new campers to mentor throughout the summer. Terry’s was Lisa Citow Newman, with whom she stayed connected long after our camper years. At the age of forty-nine, Lisa died of ovarian cancer, in the fall of 2010. She left behind her husband of eighteen years and two young daughters.

During Lisa’s illness, Terry had been working as an assistant for Lisa’s brother, neurosurgeon Jonathan Citow. His wife, Karen, asked Terry to step in and help the grieving family.

Terry then became Terry Poppins:

Terry

My life changed forever because of the Agawak connection.

Karen called and said that Lisa’s biggest concern before she passed away was “Who’s going to take care of my girls?” I knew the family well, as I worked for Karen’s husband and my daughter had been Lisa’s regular babysitter.

And so I became Terry Poppins.

I could never replace Lisa, but I helped to raise those girls from fourth grade until they were each in their freshman year in high school. I got them off to school in the morning, ate dinner with them, did homework with them, then put them to bed. I did Friday night Shabbat with them and helped run a kosher house.

I brought the Agawak spirit into their home, singing camp songs and giving those kids as much unconditional love as I gave my own three kids, who were out of college and grown. I gave those girls the safe and structured environment that Agawak gave me.

At camp, we learned to roll up our sleeves and go to work when we were needed. We learned to love our friends like sisters. We learned to work together and contribute to the greater good of our team. This was Team Citow, and this time I was the captain. I was Mary, not Rhoda.

Lisa fought like an Agawak girl. She had ovarian cancer for fourteen years before she finally lost the battle.

Terry also points to her tenure as a longtime counselor as important conditioning in her ability to become a responsible leader whose goal is to help others live better. Bobby Fisher, co-owner of Kawaga, our brother camp for boys, feels so intensely about the value of the counselor experience that when his former campers hesitate to return as staff because they want to gain “real-world experience” in an internship, he gives them this advice:

“I tell them being a camp counselor is better than an internship. As an intern, the extent to which you get to utilize real-life skills is limited. As a camp counselor, you are taking on a huge responsibility at a young age, and applying those life skills to help children become better human beings. As an intern, you are a follower; as a counselor, you emerge as a leader.”

Leadership and responsibility clearly come to mind when I think of former counselors I admire most. Jill Klein, the dean of the School of Professional and Extended Studies at American University, is a fourteen-year veteran of sleepaway camps, including those spent in the Adirondack Mountains at Camp Red Wing, and summers at Quanset Camp and Camp Avalon on Cape Cod.

Jill Klein stands barely five feet tall, though she is known on the campus where I work as a professor as a larger-than-life dynamo, a person with big ideas who puts her visions into action.

As dean of the School of Professional and Extended Studies, Jill oversees programs and faculty that serve some one thousand students. She attributes her work ethic, which has led to leadership positions on Wall Street and in academia, as a “natural progression” from her responsibilities at camps.

“You learn quickly how to solve people problems as a camp counselor,” says Jill. “At Avalon, I managed a staff of twenty other counselors and made sure a hundred twenty campers sailed every day. With that management training at the age of twenty-one, from there I have felt that I can lead any group, in any profession.”

I am reminded again of how our counselors told us eight- and nine-year-olds starting our first summer at camp that we were about to become “responsible young ladies.” As I listen to Jill’s story and those from my extensive circle of ex-camper friends, I realize that this label does seem to embody what happens as we apply camp lessons and go forward as adults, driven to empower others.

  

In her four-year term as the first female president of the village of Winnetka in suburban Chicago, Louise Holland helped navigate solutions for housing, economic, and diversity challenges for a population of eighteen thousand.

Laurie Holleb helps substance abusers and their families as a certified alcohol and drug counselor.

Liz Weinstein is the founder of the Agawak Alumnae Foundation, which helps girls from underserved backgrounds by providing scholarships to summer camp.

As a partner in a Chicago law firm, with a concentration in family law, my sister, Frances Krasnow, guides her clients through some of the most difficult times of their lives—complicated divorces and child custody battles, prenuptial and postnuptial agreements, and same-sex issues ranging from adoptions to marital dissolutions.

Ann Gottschalk Joiner, who went to Camp Fernwood in Maine, helps every faculty and staff member at American University live better. As an executive director in the Office of Human Resources, she oversees employee health and wellness programs, and the coordination of benefits.

Jill Hirschfield helps people hear better, as an audiologist of forty years.

Her younger sister, Agawak alum Carol Hirschfield, helps babies enter the world, as head of a large practice of midwives at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. The onetime White Team captain compares the cheerleading she did as the leader of a team to the cheerleading she does in the delivery room.

Carol

Our impulse toward caregiving comes from the fact that we grow so close to each other in cabin life and in camp life at a young age. We learn compassion and empathy quickly. It’s almost as if we live in each other’s skin.

I come from a family of three girls. I went to an all-girls’ camp. I realized very early the healing power that the sisterhood offers, in my family and among my camp friends.

Pursuing a profession in which I take care of others in emotional and physical ways just evolved naturally. Camp definitely was a factor in my decision to become a midwife, which is all about healing and empowering women throughout the life cycle, from teens to postmenopausal women.

Midwives are nurses, and our whole job is empathy and empowerment, even in the prenatal stage. Women get scared for labor, and we offer reassurance. We tell them: “You are stronger than you know.”

How many times did you hear that at camp, from your counselors and your friends? “You are stronger than you know” are words that empower us every day at camp, trying new sports, learning to live on our own.

When patients are in the throes of labor, often I’ll literally take them by the face and say: “You’ve got this!” I remember standing in front of my whole White Team and telling them “We’ve got this!” I hear from new mothers during their postpartum visits how much my words meant to boost their confidence and strength.

Camp taught me that words matter, actions matter, to do the right thing for each other. We come back from camp different people, nicer people, more patient people, more capable people. We come back as people who put others first.

And some of us lucky ones are invited back as adults, to keep contributing to others at our childhood camps. As director of Raquette Lake Girls Camp, Kim Gutfleish Sklow serves a community of 270 campers and 135 staff members. She was head counselor the summer of 2000, our sons’ first camper year and my first year on staff at Raquette Lake Boys Camp. The qualities of responsibility, leadership, and service that fueled her evolution from Raquette Lake camper to director is further demonstrated in her role as a teacher in an all-boys K–9 school in Manhattan.

Kim is fifty-six years young, with a vitality she says stems from “being surrounded by energy and youth, curiosity and excitement, all year round.” With this, I could not agree more. Teaching campers and students all four seasons can act as an incomparable pro-aging regimen for us AARP members.

Here is more from Kim on the ways camp shows girls how to take responsibility for themselves and for each other. As she speaks of the growth of campers, she reflects on how she has grown, too.

Kim

Camp raises kids who know how to share, who know how to compromise, who learn to make decisions away from their parents, who learn how to negotiate, who learn how to lead and how to serve others.

My greatest joy is teaching both the campers and counselors these real-life skills. I am teaching girls to feel strong and confident and empowered.

I learned many of these skills as a camper who became more confident and empowered by the older girls and counselors. It was an important awakening to girl power, having grown up with three brothers, one who is my twin.

While childhood has changed from my growing-up years, with more stress from social media and competition to get into the best schools, my goal is to help every girl understand that she has something to give that will enlighten all of us. And to teach them that we are truly at our best as a community when every light is shining. That is the motto and mantra I communicate on a regular basis at camp.

Encourage others. Empower others. Extinguishing one light makes it that much darker for all of us.

While there is competition in individual sports and team games, the competition that is the most formative at camp is an internal competition to be our best. We teach girls that being our best doesn’t mean you have to win. Being our best can mean learning how to rely on each other, to help each other—and to ask for help when you need it.

As I watch the girls grow, I’ve grown as a leader in so many ways. I’ve learned to be a better listener. I’ve learned to be a better collaborator. I’ve learned to be a much better mediator. You never stop growing at camp.

At the end of every summer I get sweet notes from counselors and campers, that I tack above my desk. They are all different, but the underlying message is the same, thanking me for some moment when a girl felt heard, seen, loved. One reads: “I was having the worst day, and you put your arm around me and walked me down to the lake for swimming.”

That’s a reminder to me and a reminder I give to the campers: Open your arms and your heart to any girl in need.

I can’t tell you how much the open arms and open hearts of girls and women at camp have also helped me become who I am today. My mother died when I was just twenty-two, but she was also a great role model. She taught me that women can, and should, feel empowered to become anything they want to be. I am taking that message forward.

  

I, too, credit my years as a camper and on staff for an innate desire to teach, serve, and care for others, in raising a family and sculpting a career. When my third and fourth sons were born in one delivery, I left daily journalism and became a freelance writer at home, where I could spend more time with the children.

During that craziest and most inspirational stretch of my life, I wrote my first book, Surrendering to Motherhood, a project pieced together during their naps and before sunrise that was four years in the making.

I reflect on those days of holding soft babies, now hard-bodied young men, and what I remember most is that I felt capable. I felt like Carol tells her mothers in labor: “You’ve got this.”

I was trained well at camp.

At the age of sixteen, I was the leader of seventy-five girls on the Blue Team. At the age of seventeen, I was responsible for eight ten-year-olds as counselor in Cabin 6. At the age of eighteen, I was in charge of sixteen fifteen-year-olds in Cabin 15.

I was a camp girl. I was a camp counselor. I was used to bedlam. I was used to peacemaking.

I remember soothing our cranky children with the most beautiful of songs that placated us as campers. The boys’ favorite was “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” with lyrics that go like this:

Let there be peace on earth

And let it begin with me

As I sang it over and over, lying on the carpet between their bedrooms, it generally did bring on sleep and peace.

Rereading this passage from Surrendering to Motherhood, I am newly grateful for those fleeting years of their early childhood I got to spend at home.

We look at our children, with joy and wonder, but also with a profound sadness, as they change in an eye blink from babies to third-graders to students in colleges too far away. For me, my absolute centering as a human being comes from holding a child in my lap, or slumped over my shoulder. Soon, too soon, these toddlers will be strapping teens who won’t sit still for their mother’s kisses.

Although my generation was reared to crave big careers and worldly pursuits, I have come to realize that true fulfillment and passion, and I’m talking about real passion of the soul, comes not from ascending in the work force but from spending time with our families, precious time we can never get back.

The choice to pursue a career as a journalism professor with a flexible schedule was made to put family first. This job I have held for three decades also gives me the opportunity to do what I know how to do best—that is, to teach young people to write well and to be their best selves.

Summers off meant I could play with our children, and later work at their camp. With grown children who now plan their own playdates, it means I get to go back to work at my camp.

I watch old camp movies of sports competitions that my father filmed during Parents’ Weekend. I am the captain in braids, crouched next to a runner on third base, urging her to steal home, which she does in a cyclone of dust. As the footage continues, I am crouched in front of a heartbroken girl who struck out.

Shortly after, I am standing in front of my somber team, and in a voice thick and hoarse from cheering them on, offering comfort after a really close game that ended in a loss.

If my dad were alive, he would be filming me again, a woman with hair that is now puffs of silver but who still stands in front of campers, like she did when she wore auburn braids.

He would be proud that I am still coaching young girls to be responsible and to know their power—on the field, in their relationships, in making their dreams come true.