This book began as an ode to Sy Friend, the retired director of The Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, Pa. Like many works of fiction, it morphed into something else. I worked at the camp for four summers when I was a student at Oberlin College. That was more than forty years ago, but Sy’s lessons of inclusivity, love, and acceptance—delivered not with condescending kindness but with deeds that showed the recipients the path to true equality—remained with me for the rest of my life. In that spirit, I am thankful to the entire Variety Club family: the late Leo and Vera Posel, who donated the land for the camp in the thirties; the late camp trustee Bill Saltzman, who insisted I become a counselor when I applied for a job as a dishwasher at age nineteen; my friend and former co-counselor Vinny Carissimi, who later became a brilliant, two-fisted Philadelphia attorney who dug me and many former camp staffers out of several horrible legal scrapes, usually for free. And of course Sy and his husband, Bob Arch, now living in retirement in Lake Worth, Fla. Sy served that camp from age sixteen until his retirement three decades later (1950–1979). I’ve never met a more brilliant, compassionate person. He was a slender, handsome man, a fast-moving object who slipped around the campgrounds like a spirit, in clean white tennis shoes, shorts, and golf shirt, bearing an ever-present cigarette between his fingers and the melody of some spellbinding opera in his head, for he loved that genre. He knew the name of every camper and often the names of their parents as well. He was decades ahead of his time. His staff looked like the United Nations, long before the word “diversity” echoed around America. We were all poorly paid and overworked. But the lessons we learned from Sy left us rich. Many of the former staffers went on to excel in various fields.
The kids loved him with an extraordinary intensity. Each night at bedtime, he played a scratched recording of a bugle performing taps on the camp’s ancient loudspeaker, followed by a gentle “Good night boys and girls.” And if you stood outside facing the rows of cabins, which were not air-conditioned—he refused to let the trustees install air-conditioning, saying, “They need to feel the air. Let them live. They’re inside all year”—you could almost hear the murmurs of all ninety-one campers, the children lying in their bunks, the words echoing up and down the row of dark cabins, “Good night Uncle Sy.”
He served as a principal in the Philadelphia school district during the year, but was a summertime legend to the children of the camp. One of my campers, Lamont Garland, now fifty-five, a born-and-raised North Philly kid who never allowed a lifelong dependency on crutches brought on by what was then called cerebral palsy to stop him working for the Philadelphia Electric Company for twenty-five years before his retirement in 2014, told me a story about Sy years ago that I never forgot. Lamont, who today lives in Columbia, S.C., told me this story when he was seven or eight. He was attending the Widener Memorial School in Philadelphia at the time, which has admirably educated Philadelphia’s children with disabilities for the last 116 years. We were sitting on the porch of one of the camp cabins on a summer afternoon and he said, out of the blue, “Uncle Sy came to Widener once.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he work there?”
“No. He just showed up. We were in assembly in the auditorium one morning, and he just walked in.”
“What happened?”
“We gave him a standing ovation.”
I leave it to you, dear reader, to picture that crowded auditorium more than forty-five years ago, the conglomerate of crutches, wheelchairs, and children with all types of disabilities bursting into roaring ovation. Those who could stand, I suppose, stood, the rest roiling into the usual roar of joy that I witnessed when Sy would turn the camp on its head via some special event he or some staffer had dreamed up to make it into the dazzling carnival of life that every one of us would remember for the rest of our lives: the hooting, the clapping, the yelling, the cheering, the howling, the crutches being waved in the air, the gorgeous cacophony of humanity in wheelchairs, some wearing special eyeglasses, others in hearing aids, signing and gesturing, the winks and chortles and grunts of pleasure, the grimaces and shaking of heads and excited howling of those without “normal” ability. It’s impossible to describe.
But it all boils down to the same thing.
Love. Of a man. And the one principle he gave his life to: equality.
Thus this tome.
The author
Lambertville, N.J.
December 2022