Brian Lehrer: Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things with thing number 15, 100 years of summer camp. This will definitely include your oral history calls, but we don't just want your wacky or nostalgic summer camp stories. We actually want to get more serious about this, too, because the hundred year history of summer camps in the United States is also a history of parental anxieties about modern life in the urban and industrial era.

I'm going to throw a question out there to you from the start of this hundred year segment to try to point you in that direction. Why, as a parent, did you send your kids to any kind of summer camp? Or why did your parents send you? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Why, as a parent, did you send your kids to any kind of summer camp? Or why did your parents send you? Answer the why question and then you can throw in your favorite summer camp utopian or dystopian memory. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 call or text. Maybe you have a dystopian memory like this from the 1994 movie Camp Nowhere.

Speaker 1: What if we made our own summer camp? It's deranged.

Speaker 2: No counselors.

Speaker 1: It's brilliant.

Speaker 2: No rules.

Speaker 1: We need an adult to pull it off.

Speaker 3: I'm an adult, thank you very much.

Speaker 2: Technically, and no parents, she'd be gone for eight weeks.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: Camp Nowhere.

Brian Lehrer: That from the trailer for Camp Nowhere exactly 30 summers ago with Christopher Lloyd, Jonathan Jackson, Wendy McKenna, Emmet Walsh and others. That clip included in a fun article that I'll give credit to on Vulture right now, New York magazine's Vulture, that ranks 17 summer camp movies. We'll excerpt from a few more as we go. Listeners, why did you send your kids or why did your parents send you to summer camp? You can give us a favorite summer camp story. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Call or text.

We'll also talk about the finances of summer camp. A recent article noted that about half of American parents want to send their kids to some kind of summer camp but can't afford it. 40% so close to half from a survey released in June and reported by USA Today. Joining us now on these angles and more is Ashley Stimpson, a journalist who writes most often about science, conservation, and the outdoors. She wrote an article in June for Atlas Obscura called The Anxious History of the American Summer Camp. Ashley, thanks for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Welcome to WNYC.

Ashley Stimpson: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We'll do lots of timeline, as we do in these hundred year segments but let me start with a key concept around why I'm asking callers to say why they were sent or sent their kids to summer camp. It really relates to the central theme of your article. You quote from a book by historian Michael Smith, who wrote that camp has always involved adults projecting their own ambivalence about modern life onto children. Can you take us further into that? Have there been a few central anxieties that drove the invention of summer camp as we know it as far back as you want to go?

Ashley Stimpson: Yes, sure. I think the very first anxiety and one we see multiple times throughout the history of summer camp is one about war. Most historians, like Smith, recognize the first American summer camp as taking place in 1861, just weeks after the Civil War broke out. The point of that camp, which was run by an abolitionist named Frederick Gunn, was to prepare the kids for their eventual service in the Union army.

They marched 42 miles to a nearby beach, and they set up camp, and they sang patriotic songs and performed military drills, and they had a great time. The camp was repeated every other year after that. We see that again, happens again before World War 2, where summer camps are thought to-- Their purpose is to encourage patriotism and a readiness for war. That's one example that we see.

Brian Lehrer: What's not funny about that answer, when you started and saying, one of the anxieties that comes up is anxiety about war. I'm sure a lot of listeners thought, "Oh, yes, anxiety about the prospect of war and that a lot of people are going to get killed," but what it really is, is preparation to go to war.

Ashley Stimpson: Yes, exactly. To be fair, after World War 2, we do see this transition from a militaristic vibe at summer camp to one that acknowledges that kids probably have been through a lot of upsetting trauma in the years of World War 2. You start to see summer camp take on a more therapeutic or recreational aspect that I think is more familiar to us today.

Brian Lehrer: Going back to the timeline, but after that first camp in 1861, that was Civil War related, you pegged the first independent summer camp, meaning not affiliated with a year round school, as dating to 1876 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with the goal of whipping so called weekly boys into shape. Can you talk about that first known independent camp and that disparaging term weekly boys that you cited from the founder.

Ashley Stimpson: That was founded by Joseph Rothrock, and he was pulling on his own childhood experience. He was a sick boy, a lot of maladies. He was housebound, and his parents sent him to a farm, a relative's farm, where I think the sunshine and time outside with other kids he thought healed him. He really wanted that experience for young men who increasingly, were spending a lot of time in crowded cities or in factories and wanted those kids to be able to get outside and embrace that American agrarian heritage like he was able to.

Brian Lehrer: Then you tell the story of a Dartmouth dropout named Ernest Balch, who started a camp for wealthy boys who he thought were losing something by being so pampered in their family's summer resorts. What was this crusade to save the wealthy from themselves?

Ashley Stimpson: He felt like they were losing something, again, kind of essential about being American, which I think is self reliance, by having their beds made and their meals prepared for them. He took them outside, and they worked hard, many for the first times in their lives. They cooked their own meals. They cleared trails in the woods and washed their own clothes. You see that flip side of you have young, disadvantaged youth going outside and getting some sunshine and some recreation, and then you have these wealthy young men who are learning how to take care of themselves. You have those two strains of summer camp for a while before the turn of the century.

Brian Lehrer: Those examples, those first several that we've touched on, were all camps for boys. When did camps for girls begin?

Ashley Stimpson: The first summer camp for girls was founded in 1902 in New Hampshire, notable for the bifurcated garments that the girls got to wear. Today, we know those as skorts, so they were able to run and play. Then in 1910, you see the establishment of the Camp Fire Girls, which was a really big organization, a corollary of the Boy Scouts before the Girl Scouts came along a couple years later.

Brian Lehrer: Quoting historian Michael Smith again, there's narrative arc as you write it, that by the end of World War 1, according to Smith, summer camp had evolved, "From a loosely organized collective of camps for very poor or very well to do children into a nationally recognized youth-serving institution. At the turn of the 20th century, there had been fewer than 100 summer camps. By 1918, there were more than 1,000." Before we get to what made it explode in that period leading up to 100 years ago today, part of the interesting thing to me about that quote about the early camps were that there were some for very rich kids, but there were also some for very poor kids way back then, subsidized by someone. Do you have that history at all?

Ashley Stimpson: I don't have that history, actually. That's a good question. I know that the YMCA did take a lot of kids to summer camp, and I imagine that was a pretty, I would imagine, affordable way for the less well to do to get outside.

Brian Lehrer: These days, there are certainly programs for lower income kids to go to camp but we still see that statistic from the survey that was released in June, that 40% of American parents say they'd like to send their kids to camp, but they can't afford it.

Ashley Stimpson: I did not get to go to summer camp, so I feel a little bit-- I don't know for sure, but I have friends that send their kids to camp, and I do know that they have gotten just crazy expensive.

Brian Lehrer: You didn't get to go to camp. I'll say the camp has played a pretty big role in my life. My parents sent me to day camp starting around age six, and it was recreational sports and arts and crafts mostly. Then later I went to sleepaway camps for a few years, same kind of activities. Then my parents got this, "Camp should be enriching and not just fun," so one year, they sent me to a music camp, and then they sent me to a teenage performing arts camp in the Berkshires, which turned out to be amazing, informative for me.

I was already doing a little theater, and I was growing up learning music anyway. It was like it wasn't school where music was an extracurricular activity. It was everybody was there to do theater and music. I experienced some firsts that I won't talk about here. Then in college, I was so imprinted by that that I hardly thought of any summer job other than camp counselor for what I would do in the summers between college and with a particular arts background that I had, I became a drama counselor at a few different camps and different summers during college.

They were sports campsite, so some of them would just see me as the weirdo making kids do theater. At another camp that I worked at a few years ago, it was very well integrated. The trick that I found was at one camp, every kid had to do theater for a week. Their group, their age had to do theater for one week. They hated me, and I hated them. At the other camp, which was also largely a sports camp, theater was an optional activity, and people could decide to get involved and do the plays that they would do. One big musical and then some other smaller things.

That was great because the kids wanted to do it by choice. I have friends to this day who I made as a camper and then in those college years as a counselor. The bond that gets formed at summer camp is incredible. I imagine you heard some of those stories, too.

Ashley Stimpson: Yes. First of all, you're quite the camp connoisseur. That's very impressive range of experiences. I am certainly jealous. I wish there was some kind of way for me to experience summer camp now as an adult because you do hear that from people. The outsized impact of summer camp on their lives and the relationships that are forged at camp seem to be very unique and very intense, and they do seem to last a long time.

Brian Lehrer: They have produced all kinds of movies. I mentioned that Vulture article, the 17 best summer camp movies ranked, and one of them was Meatballs.

Ashley Stimpson: Classic.

Speaker 4: These children are going to the most glamorous of all summer camps, Camp Mohawk. There's a two year waiting list and every child has to be voted in. On top of all that, it costs $1,000 a week to go to Camp Mohawk. The question is, is it worth $1,000 a week?

Speaker 5: It sure is.

Brian Lehrer: There a reference, a comedic reference to the high cost of camp, even in 1979. Meatballs was from 1979. By the way, here's the whole list. You ready for this from Vulture? This is the way they tell it anyway. They have some fun with it. This is, I don't think, supposed to be a very serious ranking of the best summer camp movies. They note that the hook is that there's a movie summer camp out this summer that's getting some good reviews with-- Oh, I'm trying to remember the actress who was in the early Woody Allen movies. Who am I thinking of?

I get it, but that's a movie that's out now called Summer Camp. Their countdown is Ernest Goes to Camp, 1987, Indian Summer, 1993, Space Camp, 1986. Some of these are loosely defined as camp movies, like Space Camp. Camp Nowhere, Friday the 13th, 1980. People will forget that that classic horror film was a camp film. But I'm a Cheerleader, 1999, Heavyweights, 1995, Addams Family Values as a summer camp movie, 1993, Meatballs, The Parent Trap made in 1961 and then remade in '98. The original with Haley Mills and Haley Mills. Wet Hot American Summer, 2001, Camp, 2003, Crip Camp, which we'll get to because that's in a category by itself in 2020. Theater Camp in 2023, Little Darlings, 1980, and Heavyweights in 1995. Oh, I said that one already. Those are all the ones [chuckles] that I have from the list. But oh, my God, the movies that summer camps have inspired, right?

Ashley Stimpson: Absolutely. It's again, another testament to just, I think, how important summer camp is to American childhood.

Brian Lehrer: Michael in Bethpage, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I can hear you.

Michael: Before I get to the point, for the caller that you have on with you now, there is a summer camp for adults called Camp Getaway in the Fairfield County, I believe it is in Connecticut. They sponsor weekends all summer from May until October, just so she knows that. Now, I have nothing to do with that camp, so I'm just offering it as information. My siblings and I spent about eight years in the Catskills at a bungalow colony day camp, which was a fabulous experience. Then all of a sudden, when I was about 12, I guess, we all got shipped off to summer camp, which was a great experience. Sleepaway camp, as it turned out because my parents decided they wanted to travel.

Brian Lehrer: Ah. So that was the reason. They wanted to park you somewhere.

Michael: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. We're getting a lot of that. Mimi in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mimi.

Mimi: Hi there. A first time caller, everyday listener.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Mimi: I have two children. They both went away to sleepaway camp starting at about six or seven years of age. I worked in a hospital and in those days we had two weeks vacationed through the whole year and maybe they allowed us to take one week off during the summer. I needed to have my kids somewhere safe and wonderful where I didn't have to worry about them. Sleepaway camp again, they started very early and they went to the same camp until they were about 16 and then became VIP's, was a counselor in training.

They made friendships that they still have. It was a very special camp in the Adirondacks and it left a strong influence on them of loving nature. It was expensive for me. I was a social worker in the hospital and we worked out a deal that during the year I would make phone calls to recruit and I could immediately tell over the phone what the hesitation was and I would zero in on it. I was a great recruiter. I had two for one for camp for those years and by helping out [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like it started for one reason, for you, which was since you had to work through the summer, giving your kids an experience of being able to do something where they didn't need your supervision, and then it turned into something else if I'm hearing you right. It turned into an appreciation that you developed of the connection with nature that your kids would develop out there and the friendships.

Mimi: You hit it right on the head there. They both now close to their fifties. Their weekends are hiking and getting out as much as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Mimi, thank you. Thank you so much. Paulette in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Paulette.

Paulette: Hi. Good morning. My closest friends in the world I met in camp, so I wanted to give that experience to my daughter. She's an only child. We're in New York City, and it really made a difference in her life. We sent her to an all-girls camp, and I really wanted her to really learn how to nurture friendships. I think that's extremely important. She just left the college. I see the difference between the kids who went to camp and who didn't. She's just having the time of her life, and she's really comfortable meeting new people and being away from home.

Brian Lehrer: It was a way to manage her existence as an only child originally, right, since she had-

Paulette: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: -that living with other kids experience. Paulette, thank you. That's an important story. By the way, it was Diane Keaton who I was trying to think about before, who is in the new movie Summer Camp. Greg in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Greg.

Greg: Hi. It's such an honor. I had an amazing experience at a camp called Camp Vermont. Hippie type friend of my dad's and a group of folks. The camp was super amazing. It brought kids from New York and Boston and all over from the East Coast. One thing that was really unique, that led to the diversity was that the camp [unintelligible 00:21:02] a lot was the union. A lot of people from New York and stuff who couldn't afford to send their kids to camp were able to do so. We did everything from taking romantic walks in the woods to archery and horseback riding. I had some of my most amazing camping experiences in White Mountains and things like that. I just wanted to share, say hi.

Brian Lehrer: That's great, Greg. Thank you very much. Certainly for me, as a city kid, I wouldn't have ever done archery, wouldn't have ever ridden a horse if I didn't go to camp. His story also reminds me of something else that you touch on in the article, Ashley, since it was a camp run by a leftist called Camp Thoreau, in this history of summer camps, there have been many camps that have been either for religious purposes, ideological purposes, other kinds of groupness purposes, keeping people involved in the culture of whatever the parents community was and things like that. It's not just getting kids outdoors.

Ashley Stimpson: Yes, absolutely. You see in the 1940s, camps for Black children begin to open, camps for workers' children. Jewish summer camp is a huge tradition. You do see these summer camps start to appear that are especially for those groups.

Brian Lehrer: You write, "In the wake of World War 2, American summer camp morphed into the recreational version we recognize today, where kids practiced assembling s'mores, not a mobile defense unit." [laughs] It went from practicing for wars to practicing how to make s'mores over a campfire. That's where we are today or it's really, I think it's let a million flowers bloom in summer camps because there's what the s'mores represents. Also, now there's science camps, there's math camps. I think a lot of parents today are seeing it as enrichment as well as just let the kids go out and have fun.

Ashley Stimpson: I think that that's right. I think there's a camp for everyone but I think the goal is largely the same for most parents that are sending their kids to camp. That's where they have a character building experience, but also one that is joyful and memorable and fun.

Brian Lehrer: We certainly heard from the callers so far. We'll have time for one more caller. But childcare. It's not so much in the history of summer camps when people talk about the anxieties, whether it was anxieties about war, anxieties about urban life, anxieties about modernity, but also childcare, and especially now when most parents work outside the home.

Ashley Stimpson: That's a hard thing to kind of quantify but I do get the sense, just anecdotally, that summer camp is a real relief for parents, especially, if you can afford to send your kid to a really nice summer camp for two weeks, even a month, and the parents get a little bit of alone time, a little time to relax as well. It's a win-win for everybody.

Brian Lehrer: That brings us to our last movie clip. Again, thanks to Vulture, who aggregated clips from 17 summer camp movies. Recently, the Obamas produced the film, this is a documentary in 2020 called Crip Camp, a disability reunion. Here's a few seconds.

Speaker 6: I wanted to be part of the world, but I didn't see anyone like me in it.

Speaker 7: I hear about a summer camp for the handicapped run by hippies. Somebody said, you probably will smoke dope with the counselors and I'm like, "Sign me up."

Speaker 8: Come to Camp Jened and find yourself.

Speaker 9: There I was, I was at Woodstock.

Speaker 10: You wouldn't be picked to be on the team back home, but at Jened, you had to go up to back.

Speaker 11: Even when we were that young, we helped empower each other. It was allowing us to recognize that the status quo is not what it needed to be.

Brian Lehrer: The status quo is not what it needed to be. From the trailer for Crip Camp. Do you find in your reporting, Ashley, that inclusivity these days, camps for all kinds of people who may not be the stereotype of the middle class or upper middle class kids who's going to go off and have a recreational camp experience, that there's more inclusivity in summer camps now?

Ashley Stimpson: I think that's a big theme in summer camps now. I think summer camp, for a long time was not inclusive. They were segregated. There were bans on gay youth in Boy Scout camps, for example. There's been a real turnabout now and I think you see that with just the diversity in the types of camps that are offered. Again, I think there's something for everyone.

Brian Lehrer: What about appropriation of Indian names? All these camps that have all these names, we can all think of them, that really had nothing to do with the indigenous peoples who they're named after.

Ashley Stimpson: Other journalists have written about this. I have not. I've only read about it. There is a long history of cultural appropriation there. I think it has a lot to do with the American psyche and our idealization of nature and our past. I think it's been a really painful thing. Most camps are now turning away from that and have even gone so far as to rename because a lot of camps actually had native American names so a lot of camps now have gone with something else.

Brian Lehrer: Journalist Ashley Stimpson, who wrote an article in Atlas Obscura in June called The Anxious History of the American Summer Camp. That's our 100 Years of 100 Things, segment 15, 100 years of American summer camp. Ashley, thanks for doing this with us.

Ashley Stimpson: Thank you so much.

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