stephenwinbaum
Communications Coordinator
/ Moderator
Jul 28, 2006, 8:27 AM
Post #1 of 1
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Recently, a co-worker at MySummerCamps.com asked me if I had attended Woodstock. I knew I was being lured into revealing my age but I obliged him.
“No,” I said, “I was at summer camp.”
“How old were you?”
I was impressed by his savvy. I wouldn’t have to disclose my age – he could do the math.
“Seventeen,” I said. He responded — “Cool.”
It was kind of cool. I was a counselor in mid-August, 1969, a watershed in teen culture, when the news broke about 400,000 young people gathered in upstate New York.
It was my summer camp’s hottest topic of conversation. Mass circulation magazines pumped out fresh copy and dazzling pictures to capture the event. Counselors and campers bonded around The Festival.
The camp owner and director were benevolent about this upturn in teen culture. Camp is a microcosm of the outside world and it could not be immune to its latest headlines and news stories.
Woodstock fever burned through summer camp’s inherently gentle nature. Hair was the senior play — last year — Fiddler on the Roof.
Yet, by summer’s end it seemed the owner and director were conspiring to usurp King Woodstock’s reign. The word was discreetly spread to quiet the hubbub about the festival and to resume the semblance of a summer camp.
It was time to get back to our planned activities — waterskiing, canoeing, basketball, swimming, and arts and crafts — the capsulated normalcy of those two months squeezed between school years.
That message did not sit well with counselors or campers. We understood the hidden agenda — our parents wouldn’t approve if their children arrived home like wild hippies, drunk on the message of a 400,000-strong bacchanalia — Woodstock.
But I was a seventeen-year-old counselor when Woodstock skyrocketed in 1969 — I’ve done the math. Parents and camp owners must expect a quality summer program that enhances the lives of children and teens, yet recognizes the influence of the world outside.
Baby boomers who reveled in the idea of a Woodstock collective are now the parents who send their children to camp. Camp owners who may have attended the Festival of ’69 can anticipate a new generation with a different outlook – wired into computers and cell phones.
It might become incompatible to structure an outdoor program if campers have access to iPods with 10,000-song capacities.
There’s that math again — take 40 campers with 10,000 songs = 400,000. That’s one Woodstock for every camp.
Summer camp will always mirror the outside world. Yet it’s the structure of camp that’s unique. Woodstock – iPods – piercings and tattoos; that’s the outside world. Camp is the great two-month break from those realities.
That’s cool.
Stephen Winbaum is the Communications Coordinator of MySummerCamps.com
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(This post was edited by stephenwinbaum on Dec 14, 2006, 5:59 PM)
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