All that kept me awake for what seemed like hours, though it was probably more like ten minutes.
The morning light was welcome; everything, if only for an instant, seemed much simpler and easier in the light. Jim was delighted to see me. The other ancient staff, at least twenty-five years old, greeted me as they would a younger camper, though it did seem they were happy to see me. The daylight couldn’t completely ease my mood; I was still overwhelmed by the day before. We all walked down to breakfast together to begin getting the wigwam ready for the arrival of the campers.
After breakfast, the familiar figure of a man with a duck walk came across campus. I had seen Waboos at breakfast, off at the other end of the dining hall. I’d caught his eye several times, but we hadn’t talked. He was busy, running things that needed to be run. Now he came toward me. I couldn’t see anybody else around whom he could be heading to. He kept coming and then stopped in front of me.
“You didn’t seem to be talking too much this morning,” he said to me. That was odd. How did he know that? “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” was my response. And then it slipped out. “Do you think I’m too young to work in Moosalamoo?”
“You are a little young for that. I guess you’re just a year or so older than some of the other kids. Let’s put you in Wiantinaug.”
“Great,” I said. And that was that. Waboos knew right away what I was feeling, what I was thinking. He understood. I went to work with the kids who were twelve and thirteen, and had the most wonderful summer. At the end, as I was leaving, Waboos came up with my hundred-dollar check for the summer’s work.
“I’m glad we decided that you shouldn’t work in Moose,” he said. “That probably would have been a mistake, though you could have handled it.”
I thanked Waboos and left for Bedford Hills. I drove carefully and didn’t pass any trucks along the way.
Chapter Eleven
The Lengthened Shadow
present
At lunchtime, a meal gong sounds. All activity ceases—in tents, in forts, on fields—and the campers swarm in a collective rush toward the dining hall. Some of the younger campers choose to sprint, some of the more distracted (or less hungry) kids walk absentmindedly, and some of the older kids do nothing, at least for a few minutes, too cool to be part of the mad rush.
The staffmen at the doors hold a new weapon—waterless hand-soap. Each entering camper, staffman, and visitor gets a squirt in the hand. They pass inside through this human checkpoint and through the open wooden screen doors, scores of hand pairs rubbing together.
It is then he walks into the dining hall, or, rather, is walked in, today by daughter Laurie. In the summer, his whole family has traditionally been together again, the family that started here. This year, the kids are all here—Laurie in from Seattle, Peter up from Philly, and Steve just down the road from the health club he owns—only their mother is absent. She is not well, and her absence at camp is noticeable.
Laurie escorts her father to a familiar spot, aptly numbered Table 1, then to a familiar chair at the end of the table, a camper on each side and a Waramaug staffman directly across.
“Who’s going to go up and get the lunch meat? . . . Okay, good, you can go.”
“Where is the pitcher of juice? Where is the water? . . . Okay, pass the water around starting here, the juice around starting there.”
He doesn’t seem to know the names of the faceless campers around him, yet he still indicates some understanding and recollection of their personalities. “Oh, that’s right, you don’t like milk. Well, I know you’re the one who didn’t like syrup at breakfast, and you don’t like mayonnaise; you like your food plain!”
After the meal has been eaten, a camper waiting the table takes the dishes and glasses back into the kitchen and returns with apples for dessert. The bowl of Macintoshes is placed in front of Waboos, and no one seems sure what to do next. There aren’t enough for the whole table; they’ll need to be cut in pieces.
As if he could see the problem himself, Waboos asks the camper next to him for a knife. He feels for and grabs one of the apples from the bowl and begins slicing it. The first slice is made, and then Waboos, in a swooping movement, impales it with the knife and holds it out for the camper next to him, who grabs the apple slice from the knife and takes a bite. Another impaled slice is held out for the next camper, and so forth. Even the other staffer at the table reaches across to Waboos and grabs a slice off the knife.
What’s most intriguing about all this—aside from the tableau of the blind octogenarian holding apple slices out for campers with his knife—is that during the whole scene, which goes on for about fifteen minutes, nothing is said. The camper chatter ceases; Table 1 is silent amid the sounds of neighboring lunchers. It is almost as if the ten-year-olds are reflecting as they eat about the history of the process. Waboos has cut apples like this for generations of Table 1 residents, for hundreds, if not thousands, of campers.
To understand who this man is at this camp, why he is such an icon, one must travel far back in time, decades earlier, when my father and uncles canoed, swam, and played as young men. And during those days, those years, some seven decades ago, the camper with that funny name, Waboos, kept coming back, summer after summer after summer. Soon the legend would be created that the little kid named Waboos was either born in one of the green Annwi cabins or perhaps had lived there permanently ever since he was four years old.
Indeed, with his practically white head of hair and joyful spirit, the boy was well known and well liked at the camp, and he became a fixture on Lake Dunmore, returning summer after summer through the 1920s and 1930s, progressing from the youngest Annwi wigwam through Moosalamoo and onto the Keewaydin staff. There, he made his closest friends, had his best memories. Meanwhile, the camp continued to grow under the guidance of director Sid Negus, who not only set the tone for the camp but also improved its facilities, adding a boxing ring, new cabins, and more.
In 1938, the expanded greater Keewaydin Camps, Ltd.—with camps in Maine, Florida, and elsewhere—ran short of resources. The corporation dissolved, and each camp got a new, independent owner. For Keewaydin Dunmore, it was a man by the name of Speedy Rush, who by default became its director as well as its proprietor. After fourteen years as director, the icon of the camp, Sid Negus, had left Lake Dunmore.
Speedy Rush stayed on as camp director for five years, before financial pressures led him to investigate selling the camp in the early 1940s. With many of the loyal young staff away in Europe and the Pacific, fighting in World War II, Keewaydin was suddenly in some danger. Fortunately, thanks to an unlikely reunion overseas, the camp was soon to find enthusiastic suitors.
In Paris, in the spring of 1945, Waboos was in an army unit near the city, and Abby Fenn—a fellow Keewaydin Papoosiwog, or veteran—was in the air force, stationed in England. One night, flying across the Channel, Abby’s plane had mechanical trouble and his squadron was forced to spend the night in Paris. Via some phone calls and a bit of investigating, Abby discovered that Waboos was due to be at the Grand Hotel at 11:00 P.M. Sure enough, as he retold it years later, while Abby stood outside the hotel waiting, a soldier approached out of the darkness, with a familiar gait and a customary pipe in his mouth.
“Waboos?” Abby asked. The soldier did a double take—as Abby described it years later, “a proper reaction from a man who hadn’t expected to hear ‘Waboos’ come out of the pitch-darkness of Paris.”
That night, Abby told Waboos of the sale situation at Keewaydin, and that he and Slim Curtiss—another peer at camp—had already discussed buying the camp themselves but didn’t have sufficient money for a down payment. According to some rough calculations done in the dark, it seemed that Waboos could make up the difference. They agreed to investigate the situation and to approach Speedy Rush when they got back to the United States.
Soon, Speedy, who had been reluctantly entertaining offers from outsiders, decided to sell the camp to the W
aboos-Abby-Slim triumvirate for considerably less than he was offering Keewaydin to the other bidders, and just like that, the camp had three new owners, all prepared to continue the camp’s legacy. The story reminds me now of White Christmas, when Bing Crosby puts on a show to save the hotel while singing one of the most famous songs ever written, one of Irving Berlin’s best.
“Keewaydin has meant that which is the most inspiring and the happiest and the best in my life. Keewaydin is the great ideal realized, and much of the credit must go to Waboos Hare.”
This is an excerpt from a letter written by Richard Garnett, included in a collection of such tributes at a celebration commemorating Waboos’s sixtieth anniversary at the camp in 1983. The celebration took place at a fall reunion, with perhaps the most special of Waboos’s gifts that day being an album full of letters and tributes from seven decades and multiple generations of campers, alumni, and parents. Richard Garnett’s letter was included in this album, which now, still in great condition, rests in my lap as I sit across the desk from Waboos in Hare House, the small cottage on the edge of Waramaug ball field. In the middle of my second visit to Keewaydin—a few weeks into the summer—I’m trying to determine what it is that has made Waboos such a legend at Keewaydin, and what has made me return to camp this summer to spend time with him. What has happened since my first meeting with him—when he called my father “Les” and put me in a boxing ring with a boy twice my size—that had left me so bewildered? Why did I care?
“We never ceased to wonder,” wrote Doc Mather in his 1983 letter, “at how quickly you learned the names of all the boys and at your efforts to make sure all of them understood the ‘Keewaydin Spirit.’”
It really is a wonder that the man could remember the names of every child in camp, and always knew what to say. “How’s the K-stroke coming, Timmy?” to a boy about to get his first coup in canoeing. “Nice hit today, Richie,” to a Waramaug camper who had played baseball in the morning. Even more so to parents—parents who could barely introduce themselves on midseason visits before Waboos would give them a full report on their son’s summer, putting them at ease quickly.
“Oh yes, you must be the Stauffers, from Hershey,” George Stauffer, a camper in 1960 and later a Columbia University professor, remembered Waboos telling his parents. “Your son, George? He’s having a great time, I think I just saw him up on the ball field. His team’s leading, four to two. Why don’t you have a look at the campus until the game’s over. It should be finished in twenty minutes or so.”
Today, Waboos can’t see a face, yet he still produces a name. His camera has lost its focus in the last few years, yet he still remembers. At opening day a few weeks ago, outside his cabin, a crowd of people huddled together around Waboos, like the fans around the celebrity of honor at a banquet.
“Waboos, it’s Tom Atkinson, from Armonk. I was at camp from 1968 to 1970. My son Tommy is in Wiantinaug this summer.”
“Right, Tom. Wiantinaug. Great tennis player. Still playing?”
Tom Atkinson, being reduced to a young camper again, is giddy that Waboos remembered him, his tennis skills, just one camper in thousands that have come through. I think Waboos remembers me now by my voice. I only see him once every few years.
Clare Curtin, who was a wigwam leader when I was on staff, summed up what it was like working with Waboos.
“I emphasize working with, for, being a staffman at Keewaydin, I felt that there was never a sense of being made to work for Waboos.”
Staffers decades later still recall the notes that Waboos would leave in their small mailboxes in the camp office. “Nice job running the Frolic last week; your wigwam’s skits were terrific!—Waboos.” “Good job handling the fight between your campers during rest hour today. You did the right thing.—Waboos.” His ability and willingness to trust empowered us as staffers to do our jobs confidently and to do them well. And thus, for many of us who had also been campers, the benevolent yet mysterious and powerful director was transformed instantly into a winning, approachable, and likable boss—a striking paradox in some ways, but very logical for those who knew him summer after summer.
Getting a note from Waboos as a staffman was a moment of excitement for me, a real motivation to do better, a real lift. And I never forgot it. Getting such a note from the president of ABC in the 1970s when I didn’t think he knew my name was similarly exhilarating. And, conversely, somehow being admonished by Waboos wasn’t a lasting indictment.
In his cottage, I continue to flip through the pages of the album. The letters are full of memories, anecdotes, and jokes, recollections of years of tradition, with Waboos in the middle of it all.
I find, surprisingly, a letter from my father, in which he notes that he had known Waboos for “but one year short of his sixty years at Keewaydin.” He wrote also that “today, when we sit together with our friends and family at campfire in the Wiantinaug circle, we have that wonderful feeling of ‘returning.’ Keewaydin remains, as it has always been, a sea of tranquility in a tumultuous world. In no small way, Waboos has made it so.” It’s more insight on why my father never missed a camp reunion.
Scrolling through the whole album, a clearer picture emerges with each new letter. For those who found spirituality and tranquility at Keewaydin, Waboos was the symbol of those attributes. For those who found Keewaydin a place of refuge and comfort for years, Waboos was the one who made them feel most comfortable, or at least symbolized this comfort. For those who remember Keewaydin for the empowerment they got when they learned how to canoe, or hit a home run in a baseball game, or write the Sunday Kicker, Waboos is the one they remember lauding them. For staff members who recall Keewaydin as an institution they loved and passionately strove to make their imprint upon each summer, Waboos was the one who directed these passions, who encouraged them. For my father, who saw Keewaydin as a piece of tradition passed through the generations of his family, a place to which he was sent a few months after his mother had died, Waboos was its caretaker.
My own letter, on Paramount Pictures stationery, supports this notion; I wrote that “Keewaydin may have been the single most important educational experience for me for what I do today.” Like all these other Keewaydinese folks I joined in the album, my letter to Waboos was a thank-you note to him for being the central component of what I treasured—the figure who offered me this unique education—from my Keewaydin experience.
Not surprisingly, the short letter from John McPhee puts it best. “Waboos,” he concluded, “you are what they who boast Keewaydin mean.”
In 1946, the three owners quickly settled upon very different roles. Slim soon began running the summer school at Sidwell Friends in Washington, D.C., and became to us campers, at least, a silent partner, only seen on rare occasions.
Abby, officially the associate director, showed a passion for the grounds and facilities of Keewaydin. Later, he developed other programs: the seven-week Wilderness trip program for older Keewaydin campers, much of it led by Indian guides; nature camps for troubled kids in Florida; weeklong programs for Middlebury schoolchildren during the fall to learn about nature and the ecosystem at Keewaydin. He was also the wigwam director of Wiantinaug for many years.
Clearly evolving as the heart of the camp leadership, though, was Waboos. While his partners ably handled business decisions for the camp, he, as the sole director, threw himself into the heart of the operations—leading the staff and guiding the campers. He modeled his approach to camp leadership after his mentor, Sid Negus, but quickly made his own mark. He goofily led song sessions after dinner; he solemnly led the opening Four Winds Ceremony during the first week of camp; he happily orchestrated the Sunday Kicker festivities at the Wiantinaug campfires. He sat in the front row at Friday Night Frolics; he took the calls from concerned parents and settled disputes between unruly campers. He was everywhere and anywhere for the summer’s eight weeks.
Looking back, I suppose that as a young Waramaug camper, I never gave much thought to the idea tha
t Waboos might have a life outside of camp. Much as children never consider the fact that their teachers don’t live at school, none of us ever considered that Waboos didn’t actually live the entire year in his cabin, eating at the dining hall by himself while we were back home. We never gave much thought to the idea that home for him was suburban Philadelphia, and that his winters were spent not at Keewaydin but at the Montgomery School as a middle school teacher and sports coach. There, he was Alfred Hare, or Mr. Hare to his students.
The arrival of Katie Hare—Mrs. Waboos—came during my fourth summer at Keewaydin, 1953. Women were not part of the fabric of Keewaydin, at least in the mind of an eight- or ten-year-old. They worked as nurses in the dispensary, as well as in the kitchen, in the office, and in the laundry. They were the wives of senior staffmen and also cared for their young children, mostly parenting at the wives’ dock. Nobody knew where they slept or ate, though there was a sense there were some tents “over there.” I never knew that the wives ate a half-hour before we did, or that there was one fort, called “Inwigo,” exclusively for the women.
Yet one summer, suddenly Mrs. Waboos showed up. The main change was that Waboos and his wife moved into the Bug House—the camp’s original nature conservatory. It’s along the path beside the lake, between Waramaug and Wiantinaug—a pretty high-traffic location—and you could always look in. Pretty soon, there were new additions to the family: Steve, Laurie, and then Peter. All in the two-room tiny cottage that used to be the Bug House. The greatest irony, I always thought, was that none of the beds was ever made. Each morning, we spent a half-hour perfecting the corners on our own sheets for inspection, and yet the beds in the director’s cabin were disheveled.
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