By Eleanor Kazdan, June 11, 2020 — I was a camper at a camp in Ontario, Canada … I was a Jewish camper. So even though I hadn’t planned to talk about it I can’t resist because it was just one of the greatest experiences of my life. I started in—I think it was the same time, in 1959, I started as a camper, I guess I was about 9 years old. It was a Jewish Y camp in northern Ontario on a beautiful lake. I did write a memoir about it, but that was a while ago. It was a very rough camp. We had to walk to a central bathroom and we didn’t have any electricity. There were people from all income levels, which I thought was fabulous because the camp fees were on a sliding scale. You just had a very egalitarian group. We did all [camp] things … [like] canoeing and swimming. It wasn’t a fancy camp (some of the other camps had horseback riding and we never had that). But you know, I learned to be an expert canoeist.
When I was 15 – I went every summer for three weeks and made just fabulous friends — I became a counselor in training and stayed for the whole summer. After that I went up to be a junior counselor, where, by the way, I made $35 for the whole summer. Then as a senior counselor in 1967, I made $150 for the whole summer. And we also got tips.
That was one of the best experiences of my life—one of the best days of my life so far was summer camp in northern Ontario. Unfortunately, the best friend that I made there, Kathy, she died many years ago. So I met Kathy and I met another woman who I sometimes keep in touch with. And the singing…we just got hoarse every summer from so much singing of camp songs. [I remember] walking around with our arms around each other, the campfires, the roasting marshmallows, roasting hot dogs, and canoe trips.
First, when I was a camper, we went on canoe trips with — they were called “Trippers”— mostly guys, they were trained to take people on canoe trips in this pretty remote park called Algonquin Park where you can’t get anywhere except by boat and canoe. When I was a counselor I actually was one of the leaders of those canoe trips. We’d go out for four days and camp outside, and just canoe the whole day long.
From the age of 9 until 17, I went to summer camp … It wasn’t religious, it was secular. We had no religious affiliation. But it was mostly Jewish kids. So that’s my story!