Many families sent their daughters off to camp during or after moving to the area to make new friends before school started. Marcia Kessler (1959-61) remembered her friend Buffy, who had just moved. Had she met her at school and not at camp, she still would have been an instant friend, she admitted.
For Priscilla (1968) and Amy Johns,their family had been transferred back to Michigan from New York the summer before. “Cilla” went with two friends, Evelyn Biggs and Doris Engibous, and loved it from the beginning, happy to get away from a less than peaceful household. The parents had decided that camp would be a great way to acclimate the two sisters to the move. The sisters had travelled a great deal with family, were very independent and begged to stay extra sessions. “I never looked back”, said Amy, who continued every summer until 1978 between her freshman and sophomore years of college. “It was easier than getting a real job during the summer.”
Kathleen Clement’s family moved to Bay City when she was nine, shortly after her parent’s separation. They lived with her elderly grandfather at the time, and helped to care for him after multiple strokes. “When I got to camp, it was like Heaven! I was never shy and I didn’t want to come home. When my Mom came up on visitor’s day, I hounded her to stay another week, so I finagled three weeks and was happy. I was always good at begging. I don’t know how he afforded it because he had a greenhouse and lost it, but it was the only thing I got to do. I only went the two summers of 1961-62 at aged eleven and twelve, since I helped to take care of my grandfather.”
“My parents moved a lot and I had gone to five or six elementary schools when I grew up. Some kids could handle that, but I wasn’t one of them. My Dad was an educator and if he was offered a better job, we would move. I didn’t know anyone when I moved into my new neighborhood the year I was eleven. It was 1973 and I was out walking my dog and I met a girl who was about a year younger than me. We hit it off,” said Mardi Jo Link. “Then my parents announced they had signed me up for camp. All I could think of was they had signed me up for some stupid camp and here I had just met a great friend and I was going to have to leave. I told Michele Patterson, you are not going to believe this, but my parents signed me up for this stupid camp! She said, you’ve got to be kidding, so did my parents! Well, when we compared camps and paperwork, we were at the same camp, same session and same cabin.”
Michele and Mardi Jo became such inseparable friends in the sixth grade that they camped every year together. “One parent would drive us up and one would pick us up”, said “Mike”, (who was such a good friend to Mardi Jo that she garnered a mention in her bestselling book “Bootstrapper”). Michele was the youngest of three and was fairly certain her parents were looking forward to their time alone, too.
Judy Alcorn’s memories of camp in 1946 involved the move from Chicago to Bay City. Before she moved, she and her cousin Carolyn Alcorn boarded the bus from the Bay City YWCA with a group of excited girls. “Of course there was anxiety on my part”, she admitted, “but soon overcame it and didn’t miss a year of camp from then on. When I began school in the fall, I already knew lots of girls from camp who became friends for many years.” Her sister Kay was allowed to come at the early age of seven with Judy there.
“I think our parents wanted to get rid of us because they were in the process of moving”, said Buffy Elizabeth Kixmoeller, whose family had just been transferred from Minneapolis to Bay City in 1961. “My parents were very smart to send me to camp to connect with new friends before I started school. The friends I made at camp between the summer of seventh and eight grade became some of my best friends on through high school.”
How many of you were sent to camp to adjust to a new move and make friends? Was it a smart move on your parent’s part?