A great many girls found camp to be their escape and distraction from their tumultuous lives at home. Dawn Kober’s father had just remarried a woman she was not fond of, so her grandmother brought her to and from camp in 1977 with her friend Kelly Kirk.
“It was totally foreign to me”, said Elaine Engibous, who had her first exposure to girls who came from divorced families in 1961 and described girls who were there for the entire summer to escape the situations at home.
Anne Duffield (1947-50) attended with her stepsister from their blended family with a lot of illness. “I was glad to be away. It was an escape for me. At home all we had was vacant lots near our home where we played football, baseball and built tree houses.”
There were three kids in Cindy Raposa’s “dysfunctional family” and as the middle child she could not wait to get away from the fighting. “Camp was such a stable place for me. You got up in the morning, you did this and that and there was freedom there. I always considered myself so fortunate to get away.”
“Camp Maqua was like a dream to me”, said Brooke Sauve, who remembered her days from 1949-51 with her friend Linda. “At that time it was unusual for anyone to be divorced, but her Mom was, so she stayed for six weeks while her Mom worked.”
Sally Allen’s parents were also divorced just before she left for camp in 1968. It was also like a dream for Sally. “My house was in a huge upheaval and allowed me to be a little girl again. I was like a wallflower as a child, and I didn’t stir the pot. I was quiet but I had fun with my friends. Later, I became an extrovert, long after camp”, she said, describing the love for Maqua, where she could get dirty.
“It was the sixties and I grew up in a dysfunctional family. For me Maqua was just the place where I could have fun and be in relationships,” said Jan Schreiber. “I loved the routine, the wildness, the laughter, the sentimentality—it was an extension of my Hebrew school with many of the same friends there. I was the oldest child and Ididn’t have to be responsible as a camper. It was an opportunity to get away from all that.”
Summer camp was even more important for two sisters, Barb and Connie Cruey, when they were eleven and fourteen in 1956. Their mother had passed away suddenly in May and their maternal grandmother moved in with them. “I think I enjoyed that summer the most ever,” said Barb, who was convinced camp helped her tremendously after her mother’s death. “I was so busy that camp took me away from the pain.”
Having lost her mother at nine years of age, Marybeth Morton (1974-75) had a double dose of change when her father remarried and a totally new family was formed. The new family brought a whole new set of problems, creating an atmosphere she could not wait to escape. “When I got back from camp, I just did not want to live at home. I counted the days until I turned eighteen. The step-parent family fell apart and I had become very independent.”
Sue West was the youngest of eight kids when she started there in 1975. Her Mom had died two years earlier and she had gone to live with siblings at seventeen. “I didn’t want to go back to live with my siblings and I felt like I didn’t have a home”; said Sue, who was estranged from her father. Sue Patenge was recruiting staff at Western Michigan’s dorm and found a place for Sue at camp.
“I was the only girl with three brothers and a half-sister in my family and my Dad had just passed away in 1969 at home when I was seven. We had lived in Caro, but moved to Bay City. I had just moved and I didn’t know anyone. It was a difficult time. My Mom probably wanted to get rid of me for a few weeks because I was a bored and whiney crybaby when she sent me to camp in 1970. I was shy, introverted and sometimes belligerent. I felt painfully alone. My life had changed with my Dad gone. I didn’t open up. I think camp helped me assimilate even though I was homesick at first, then not too much later. I wasn’t forced to go, but I didn’t really want to be with other girls in bunk beds in a cabin. When I went the following year I felt like a veteran”, said Andrea Gale.
Did you feel like camp was an escape?