Patsy Walsh (1938) remembered one of the sweet girls in the bunk above her had jeans. “I was so fascinated. I had never seen girls in jeans. She let me wear them and I was so excited! We always wore shorts or dresses. Honestly, it was one of the highlights of being there. I felt sharp. We had to wear our whites on Sunday, though, for our services at Chapel Hill or when the counselors took us to mass.”

One summer Helen Hasty (1943-50) noticed many of the counselors were wearing jeans. She had been sent off to camp with lovely clothes, mostly in white. She wrote home begging her Mom to send some blue jeans, but the request was denied. {“The next summer I went back and I had them”,said Helen.)

“We had footlockers and my Mom made us (sisters) shorts and we almost always dressed alike,” said Susie Utter (1954-56). “We were not allowed to wear jeans at home, but had to buy some for riding horses.”

Then came Shelley Harris (1965-75), who desperately wanted bell-bottom jeans. “Oh man, I remember making those jeans from two pairs. I cut off the thigh parts of one pair, turned them upside down, and laced them to the other pair at the knees with rawhide laces!”

“Camp WAS my summer,” said Laura Taylor (1964+), who was a self-professed goody-goody, but hated the matchy-matchy clothes her mother sent her off to camp with in her footlocker. “”I wanted to be cool and be with the cool kids who turned their shirts inside out and dressed sloppy with bell bottoms and no bra. I copied everybody and tried to dress the part. Cute outfits were not cool and the trendsetters were the counselors. Camp sweatshirts were the symbol of cool.”

Tube socks and bib overalls were trendy when Anne Esau camped from 1972-74. Anne Obey (1960-70) remembered clearly that the girls had to wear socks and they would be sent back to their cabin from flag raising to put on their socks.

Jan Mosier (1947-52) and Mary Lu Clay (1947-48) loved their sweatshirts. “I loved getting up in the morning, even if it was cool. I still had shorts on, no matter how cool it was. I would throw on my sweatshirt and go to the flag raising,” said Jan. (Mary Lu recalled hers had her name on it.)

Jan Mosier and Carla Wilhelm (1945-49) both remembered the year they made hats out of anything that grew and had a fashion show in the lodge. “We used to make skirts out of the roadside ferns and use the belt loops for our branches”, said Carla. Judy MacNicols (1946) also remembered hooking the lodge tables together to create a runway for a style show, where she wore her jodphurs and English riding boots, while other girls wore different outfits and walked like models up the runway.

“One counselor, who had been in the Peace Corp but was as American as apple pie and had been to Lebanon, came to camp with her “garb”, said Buffy Kixmoeller (1960-61). “I thought it was cool that she had the clothing with her. I have often thought of her with all the unrest in that area. I think her name was Michael.”

One camper in the early sixties remembered the fads that were picked up from the Detroit girls, which included a very heavy type of sweat sock that you wore with loafers, as well as a certain necklace that was silver and had the person’s initials.Traditions also included the rawhide bracelets that were tied to each other’s wrists. “We would wear them until they wore out, sometimes six to nine months,” said Sue Michelson (1963-73).

What garb or trends did you remember from camp?

 

 

 

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