When we moved from Hancock to Thirty-seventh Street, I transferred to a Camp Fire group, the Pukwudjies, an Indian word for “little people,” in our new neighborhood. We were a group of eight, including Claudine and three of the five Miles girls, led by Lucy Grow, the childless wife of a physician whose lungs had been damaged by gas during the war. Mrs. Grow was short, rotund, with sparse dyed hair, cut short, that stood straight up. She was the first married woman I had ever known who did not devote her life to being a good housewife. For this she was considered eccentric. Mrs. Grow thought much that went on in Camp Fire Girls was nonsense and said so, but she recognized the importance of such an organization for girls “too old for toys and too young for boys.”
The Pukwudjies took turns meeting at one another’s houses, where our mothers provided refreshments. We never looked forward to one girl’s house because her mother, who believed in plain living, handed each of us a simple, nutritious apple. My mother served warm gingerbread with whipped cream or cream puffs with hot chocolate. “Girls always enjoy whipped cream,” she said, and she was right.
Mrs. Grow was full of ideas. She gave us a course in first aid and taught us how to bind a book. She drove a big old Franklin sedan that could hold the whole group, and sometimes, in good weather, she drove us out to Canyon Road to cook our supper over a bonfire in a clearing. We charred kabobs, baked bread-on-a-stick (biscuit dough wound around a stick that always, because of our impatience, turned out slightly raw in the middle), and ate vegetables wrapped in cabbage leaves for salad. We enjoyed the meal, which we topped off by toasting or charring marshmallows. Mrs. Grow was a woman of courage who did not fuss about details.
When Mrs. Grow told us the administration of Camp Fire Girls was offering a five-dollar prize for the best linoleum-block print cover for their bulletin, she suggested we try. I attacked a square of battleship linoleum with my father’s jackknife and produced a cover of sorts. Once again I won a prize, not because my cover had any artistic merit, but because no one else entered the contest. I saved my five dollars for a bathing suit.
Mrs. Grow was concerned about the Pukwudjies she was shepherding through the Depression. When Camp Fire headquarters announced a contest with a prize of a free week at Camp Namanu the next summer for the group that earned the most points, Mrs. Grow said, “There is no reason why you girls shouldn’t win.” She organized us.
Points were given for visiting factories. Mrs. Grow packed us into her Franklin, and we took off to surprise owners of small factories by our sudden interest in their products. In one afternoon we whipped through a pencil factory, a spaghetti factory, a candy shop where chocolates were dipped (free samples!), and, of course, the Jantzen Knitting Mills, that haven for any adult stuck with providing an educational experience for a group of the young in Portland. I was fascinated by a woman who stretched knit fabric over a lighted glass panel and circled flaws with chalk and by the razor-sharp, whizzing machine that cut out stacks of bathing suits at one time.
Another method of earning points was writing a letter to a Camp Fire Girl in another city. Mrs. Grow gathered us around Claudine’s dining room table (brownies for refreshments), where we combined our efforts to compose a joint letter, which Claudine’s aunt, who worked in an office, mimeographed for us. The next week, on someone else’s dining room table, we shared and signed a ream of letters which Mrs. Grow shipped off to Camp Fire headquarters in other cities, to be passed around to other groups. We earned a lot of points that way and did not break any rules. We also received credit for answers. I heard from a girl in Minnesota and from another in England.
Camp Fire headquarters was upset when our group turned in the most points. Another group was expected to win. We were accused of violating, if not the rules, the spirit of Camp Fire. “Nonsense!” said Mrs. Grow, who had once handed a traffic officer a nickel and told him to go buy himself an ice cream cone, and was not easily intimidated. The discussion grew more heated, with Mrs. Grow defending her girls, who needed that week at camp. There was no rule against mimeographed letters, no rule against visiting more than one factory in one day.
Mrs. Grow was so feisty that headquarters had to relent and award us the prize. The other group was also given a free week because they were true, in winning their points, to the spirit of Camp Fire—something as vague as the requirements for the Namanu Honor I had failed to earn on my first trip to camp. We Pukwudjies did not mind sharing the glory of the prize, even though we caused hard feelings at headquarters. We would have our week, free of the Depression, and camp with friends would be fun. Those of us who could not find hand-me-down blue middies went to work making our own out of the cheapest blue cotton we could find.
The Pukwudjies, in our homemade middies and black gym bloomers, enjoyed our week at Camp Namanu, where Mrs. Grow came to visit and once more found a loophole in a rule. Eating between meals was strictly forbidden in our cabins, so she invited us all to the counselors’ lodge, where she gave us each a candy bar. We were shocked at this violation of rules. “Eating between meals is not forbidden counselors,” she said. “Why should it be forbidden you girls?” We ate with wicked pleasure, not at all in the spirit of Camp Fire.
Campers at Namanu had a custom, whenever a girl was late for a meal, of singing at the top of our voices, “You’re always behind like an old cow’s tail.” One member of our group, a girl who was always neat, punctual, and efficient, discovered one day she was going to be late for dinner. Rather than face what she felt was the humiliation of being sung to, she skipped the meal—one of Namanu’s greater crimes—and hid. No counselor missed her. At the final evening camp fire, when she was awarded Namanu’s highest honor, the Namanu Girl Honor, some of our group were bitter about this injustice, but I was already hardened, from my early experience, to Namanu’s honor system.
What mattered to me was the carefree feeling I enjoyed that week. This time, Mother had not sacrificed to send me to camp. I had come to dread Mother’s sacrifices for me because they made me feel so guilty.