Camp

by Michael D. Eisner

  So then, “Help the other fellow” is not a piece of empty rhetoric on a plaque at Keewaydin. Instead, it’s an authentic way of life that begins on the trip, where it all makes sense.

  Unfortunately, a few days later, on Lake George, there is no prevailing motto on Pepe Molina’s Waramaug trip. Despite two productive days on the lake in canoes, tempers have once again flared up among the campers. Every time Evan and James think that they’ve put out one emotional fire, another one seems to crop up. Meanwhile, the wind that so conveniently helped move the canoes down the lake at the beginning of the trip has now become a violent headwind, and the staffmen have had to suspend canoeing and remain at their current campsite.

  Squabbles continue. Several of the boys, including Pepe, go over to the water, playing among the pebbles and rocks as dusk begins to fall in. And oddly enough—maybe it’s the placidity of the slowly setting sun and the sounds of the lake—the boys begin quietly chatting. After all the problems, they need to make it through one more night. The conversation somehow turns to parents and family. One camper talks about his parents and sister back home, and another talks about a divorced father who lives in another state. One kid says his father was once in jail, and another volunteers that his father should be in jail.

  This is finally familiar territory for Pepe, who tells the group, no matter how odd it sounds coming from an eleven-year-old, how much he loves his mother, and how much she loves him, and how hard she works for him. He also talks of a father he doesn’t know, in a city far away. After all the difficulty that the group has endured, the boys have worn themselves out from fighting and are finally bonding. They’re no longer kids from Westchester and Connecticut and Orange County, California. They’re members of the same trip.

  The evening activity is a unique one: Using one of the tents, the campers make a sweat lodge—a saunalike atmosphere created by heating up stones in the fire and putting them inside the tent. The boys take turns sitting in the steaming tent for a few minutes, then jump into the lake to cool off. It’s a highlight of the trip, as the stress of everything else is metaphorically sweated away and rinsed off.

  The trip has taken a final turn. It’s actually now an adventure to remember. “You had to be there” becomes the catch phrase for the trippers. You never return from a trip really able to recount and give the true flavor of the experience to someone who was not on the trip.

  Most heartening about the whole story to me is a coda that Evan and James provide back at camp a few days later. Sitting on the lake’s edge, waiting in a parking lot for the van to pick them up, Pepe proudly expresses how much he liked the trip. The fact that he was uncomfortable in the beginning, unhappy to be in the woods for five days, uncertain about teamwork—this is a silent memory of the past. Pepe proudly announces that he now believes they had the best team of any trip that summer. He was embracing the group, realizing what it means to be on a Keewaydin trip.

  Years ago, a few days after we returned from the Algonquin trip, a letter from Keewaydin arrived at our family’s house in Bedford Hills. It was from Brownie, the trip leader. Staffmen write letters home to parents during the summer to update them on their kids’ progress at camp. It’s not so much what it said—that I was one of the better trippers on the Algonquin—but, rather, what it meant, especially to my father. It was the Keewaydin way of saying that I had succeeded. I had met the ultimate challenge, and while I may have pleased, or at times displeased, my father in other ways, that letter showed him who I was, or who I could be.

  In my business life, I’ve learned that the group is much better as a whole than any of the individuals separately. Working in business can be another canoe trip. It’s about figuring out different roles for people, and those people fulfilling their tasks. It’s about, as my friend John Angelo says, determining, in a pinch, who can sit in the stern of their canoe and set the course and who is better suited for the bow.

  That said, subscribing to this virtue in the business world often meets resistance. How does one work in a team and “help the other fellow” when so much else is fueled by jealousy, envy, and greed? Do money and competitiveness create the environment to ignore, or even deceive the other fellow? Does entrepreneurship breed a general desire to unseat the other fellow, who is going after your idea, your promotion, or your job? These concerns are legitimate. Just as it is at Keewaydin, the challenge in business is to foster an enthusiastic atmosphere of teamwork that becomes self-reinforcing.

  It’s tough, though. The world is not camp—and that’s too bad.

  Chapter Eight

  Second Place

  1955

  When John Angelo was growing up down the street from me with his single-parent mother, my father became his surrogate father. The friendship went back two generations; our grandparents knew one another, and our mothers were best friends. My father watched over John’s family, and balanced his mother’s checkbook. Meanwhile, John and I went to the same grade school, Allen Stevenson in New York. John’s mother dated Mr. Waters, our English teacher. Later, we married roommates in New York City, and we are both still married to the same great women, Jane Breckenridge and Judy Hart.

  In 1950, as soon as I got home from my first summer at Keewaydin, the first thing I did was tell John all about it. There was no doubt he was going to join me the following summer, and, accordingly, I decided at Christmas to drag him to the camp’s winter reunion at the St. George Hotel in Manhattan. At the lunch, John and I sat down and said hello to everyone, then stood for the camp song. I sang along loudly to show off to John, who, of course, didn’t know the song. I was a beat behind most of the way, as the song sounded different from the way I remembered it, but then again, we were in Manhattan, not Vermont, and everything seemed different. Then a prayer to start the meal; I said “Amen.”

  We started eating, and I felt a tap on the back. It was Waboos. Smiling, he led us from the table and walked out of the banquet room, down a hallway, and into another room, where the faces were more familiar.

  I had gone to the wrong camp’s reunion.

  It was not an auspicious start to John’s camp career. He still makes jokes about it at my expense, doesn’t trust my sense of direction, and insists to this day on being the one who picks our meeting spots. But he did go to camp with me anyway in 1951 and the years that followed. My parents and John’s mother always visited us together at midseason. As I went to camp a year before John, I remained the expert in all things Keewaydin. Besides, John never cared for the bugs, the mud, the portaging, and all the things about the place that I loved. He had a good time, but, as he’d readily admit to you today, he would have preferred a baseball camp with the accommodations of a bed-and-breakfast to the tents that Keewaydin offered.

  In 1955, I was thirteen years old, a camper in Wiantinaug, in Tent 10, at Keewaydin as usual for the full eight-week season. By the seventh week, I was riding the high of another great summer; I had already been on an Adirondack canoe trip, a Mount Mansfield hiking trip, and a five-day Saranac Lake trip. Furthermore, I had passed nearly all the requirements to get several coup certificates, given for completing requirements in a wide variety of activities. There were required coups to be won, like swimming and canoeing and tripping, plus elective coups from an assortment of activities that would give the camper the needed number for the certificate. Ninety-nine percent of these elective coups were drawn from rugged camping experiences, but the silliest among them—the dipping coup and the silence coup—had an appeal to me.

  The dipping coup was given to campers who for a series of successive days jumped into the frigid water of Lake Dunmore at 7:00 A.M. for a dip. It was agony then, and surely it remains agony now. I don’t think I ever made it to the lake more than three out of the thirty days at this early hour. That dip is like an 8:00 A.M. class at college. The mind has a yearning, but the body won’t respond. Anyway, I eventually abandoned the dipping coup.

  The silence coup was awarded to campers who managed to stay silent for
an entire day. Once again, though this didn’t exactly coincide with my real interests at camp, it was a challenge. I thought it should be a simple thing to do, not to speak for twenty-four hours. I tried several times during the early days of that summer, and several times I failed, at one point or another tricked by other campers into offering my opinion about something. Finally, with just a few days to go that summer, I managed to stay silent for most of an entire day, learning, unfortunately, that “close doesn’t count.” Perhaps it was why, on the way home that summer, I yelled and screamed with the rest of the kids on the bus all the way from Vermont to New York City. As a result, I lost my voice for two months. I couldn’t talk until October. I didn’t get a coup, and I’ve been hoarse for the fifty years since. At least it gives my hosting of our Wonderful World of Disney show a unique sound.

  The final week of camp meant that the awards ceremony at the Indian Circle wasn’t far away, and my attention, admittedly, was strongly focused in that direction. I was confident that I would win several awards that night. Within my grasp, I thought, was best tripper in Wiantinaug, and best canoeman, possibly best boxer, best sailor, and best tennis player, and maybe even best all-around camper. Tripping and canoeing were the most prestigious. The best canoeman in the entire camp, the winner of what was known as the Talmen Competition, was awarded the Eisner trophy. I knew I wouldn’t win that one—it was almost always awarded to a camper from the oldest wigwam, Moosalamoo. I assumed everyone in camp believed that the award had been named for my family because my father or uncle—or both—had been such great canoemen.

  That night, the senior staffman who stood in front of the camp assembly clarified the origin of the award. He noted, “We thank Mike Eisner’s father for donating this trophy to the camp, a beautiful silver canoe made at Tiffany in New York.” The award, it was suddenly clear to everyone, was named for my family because we had donated it (something I had never mentioned to anyone), not because we had mastered the treasured skill it honored. Omitting is the same as misleading. I felt embarrassed.

  The fire in the center of the circle was glowing as 250 campers sat waiting to hear the winners’ names called. Best tripper in Wiantinaug passed me by, as had best canoeman. I gulped.

  Immediately after came best camper; they wouldn’t wait for the end to announce this big honor; this wasn’t the Academy Awards. I stared silently at the fire when my name wasn’t announced for this prestigious trophy. Even though Keewaydin wasn’t a competitive camp, I was still a competitive boy, and I quickly tried to determine by process of elimination what award could still be open to me. Some apprehension was setting in.

  The boxing award, I soon realized, would be next. A week earlier had been the final boxing card of the year—kids from the different wigwams squaring off in front of the rest of the camp. And I was ready. Earlier in the summer, at midseason, I had suffered a regrettable experience in the boxing ring. My parents were there, and of course, so was John’s mother. John and I were to square off against each other, best friend against best friend. We were in the ring, ready to fight, but within thirty seconds of starting, we got the giggles. It had been pretty embarrassing, and the fight was called. Our mothers were happy, I suspect, because we didn’t get bloodied, but my father had seemed somewhat vexed. He didn’t say anything. I perhaps got the message, and in my final boxing match, against a new foe, I won big-time.

  When the ceremony got to the award, though, I came up short again. And my unhappiness grew. I thought I might have one more opportunity for an award, but after best sailor was given to someone else, all that remained to be announced was best tennis player. For the previous few weeks, I had worked my way through the wigwam tournament, then advanced to the final. But on the other side of the net was John. The final had taken place that very morning, the morning of the awards ceremony. It was a contest much anticipated, at least by us, fighting it out for best tennis player. I had beaten John the preceding two years in Waramaug, but in those two years I had grown a lot. My feet were too big for my body, and my body was too tall for my control. I wasn’t as good an athlete, while John, conversely, had gotten better. I lost the match, and had conveniently also “lost” its details until this past New Year’s Day, when I was coming out of a movie theater in Westwood, California, and decided to broach the question to John.

  “Do you have any idea what the score was during the finals of the camp tennis tournament in 1955?” Without a beat, he replied, “I won, I believe, is the right answer! Third set, you were up 5-2, 40-15 and lost. You want to get coffee?”

  “What? I was one point from winning? How do you remember that?” I asked.

  “How could I forget that kind of comeback? I was finished. The fight had gone out of me, and I was completely prepared to finish second.”

  We walked across Westwood Boulevard. And he went on. “You served. I hit the ball to your backhand and raced to the net. Trying to end the match, you lobbed the ball over my head. It was long: 40-30, again—match point. You served. I repeated the strategy. This time you swung over the ball, and it sailed into the net. Deuce.”

  We entered Starbucks. He went on and on. “On the next serve I changed strategy. I hit to your forehand. You were protecting your backhand as you always did and you never moved. Then, uncharacteristically, you double-faulted. The match was mine.”

  “What kind of coffee do you want?”

  “As the air left your body, I received an adrenaline charge so great that in that moment, I knew I was unbeatable. I won the next four games as well as the third set. The monkey was finally off my back. I finally beat you.”

  “One cappuccino, one regular coffee with milk, one espresso, and one frappuccino,” I ordered. John was on a final fifty-year victory lap, amazing given that we hadn’t once discussed this since the middle of the last century.

  “The only piece of memorabilia on display in my dressing room,” he said, “is a small bronze statue from that tournament. It’s a young man with his serving arm broken off, much like a Roman statue. I look at it often. It never fails to make me smile. I had won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open all in one.

  “Do you remember the match with Waboos and Abby?” he asked as we walked back to the car. “Wasn’t it that afternoon just before the awards ceremony?”

  Later that afternoon at Keewaydin in 1955, after what appeared to be my big loss of the day, during free time before the awards ceremony, Waboos and Abby Fenn had finally agreed to play John and me in a doubles match, taking up a summer-long challenge we had issued them. We had been baiting them, pushing for a match—young, agile, and fast against old, slow, and just short of dyspeptic. The entire camp—or what seemed like it—had come out to see the match. But they played soft, with a Texas slice from Abby and continual drop shots from Waboos. They killed us—more humiliation!

  No matter—that night at the Indian Circle, John got up to accept his award, clearly no longer upset about our exhibition loss to the directors. I stayed seated, like the majority of the other campers. All evening, I had stayed in my spot, never getting up in front of the whole camp to receive anything, except my coup certificate with thirty other boys. I must have come in second, I comforted myself, in sailing and boxing and tennis. I felt isolated as I walked back to my tent. It was soon bedtime, after brushing our teeth, taps, and the good-night song. I lay awake feeling something that even today is hard to describe—kind of like waiting after a job interview for a phone call that you know will never come.

  The next morning, I woke up, and in my first few seconds of consciousness, I had those elusive feelings of “I know I’m upset at something, but I just can’t quite remember.” And then I remembered. I stumbled out of my cot to the fort, then came back and slipped on a pair of shorts and a relatively clean shirt for breakfast. I looked at the boys around me, saying nothing of my disappointment from the night before. I simply walked off to the dining hall.

  On my way, there was suddenly someone next to me: the someone who had cost me my tenni
s award. John looked over at me, and I looked back.

  “Are you packed?” he asked. We would be going home together later in the day.

  “You’re kidding,” I answered abruptly.

  “There’s no inspection today. Let’s play tennis after breakfast,” he said.

  For some reason, it seemed like a good idea. Maybe it was because I liked to play tennis, or maybe, frankly, I just liked the fact that I might be able to have another shot at beating him. For the record, I also asked John if he remembered who won this rematch. Graciously, since it’s my book, he agreed to let me say I did.

  Years later, admittedly, it’s tough to reconcile my competitive urges with Keewaydin’s “be a fair winner and a good loser” philosophy. The fact is, one remembers his losses more vividly than any successes because losing stings. Losing is solitary, while winning is crowded; everyone has room for a winner. The Keewaydin idea that you can’t fail summer camp, that you can always start over again, that there’ll always be another match with John Angelo, is something that stays with you forever. And you never forget a comeback.

  Chapter Nine

  A Fair Winner And Good Loser

  present

  On a well-swept dirt court, the bounce of a basketball is truer than you might think. Sure, rocks, pebbles, and the occasional twig make for a bit of a Boston Garden-like unpredictability, but for the most part, the ball comes back to your hand pretty much where you think it should. This fact is largely irrelevant to the ten- and eleven-year-olds currently playing basketball on the dirt court in Waramaug. (In 2003 the camp built a concrete court near the laundry barn after ninety years of dirt. For those of us against any change at Keewaydin, this was acceptable.)

  For nine of the boys, this fact is irrelevant because they haven’t yet mastered the art of dribbling a basketball without looking down to see what they are doing. They will probably learn this skill in a year or so, but for now, ball goes down means head goes down. For the tenth boy, however, the exact trajectory of the bounce of the ball is, in fact, a relevant element to his game. Not only can he easily dribble downcourt while keeping his head cocked straight ahead, but he has also been known to let the ball barely bounce while speedily dribbling to the basket. He’s just as likely to let it bounce masterfully off the front of his bent knee and back to the ground once or twice—essentially dribbling with his legs—before returning the ball to the normal bouncing pattern of hand to ground and back to hand. It’s a Globetrotter-like move, the likes of which have probably never been seen on the Waramaug court.