At a children’s summer sleepaway camp in upstate New York in the mid-1920s, two young staffers, Artie and Larry, write a song for the annual camp play. It begins:

I love to lie awake in bed

Right after taps I pull the flaps above my head

And watch the stars upon my pillow

Oh, what a light the moonbeams shed.

Some years later, Artie—composer Arthur Schwartz—is writing numbers for a Broadway revue and gets stuck for a melody. He remembers his camp song, ditches the lyrics (written by Larry—Lorenz Hart—who is by then collaborating on Broadway musicals with Richard Rodgers) and gets wordsmith Howard Dietz to come up with new ones. The result is a hit and quickly becomes a pop standard that will be covered by Crosby, Sinatra, Bennett, Darin, Dylan, and many others:

I guess I’ll have to change my plan

I should have realized there’d be another man

I overlooked that point completely

Before the big affair began

Not all camp songs are written by such illustrious songmakers, nor have such a celebrated destiny awaiting them. But many songs sung at North American summer camps did and do become standards—in the lives of thousands of former campers who can still sing them years later and will remember them fondly all their lives.

What is a camp song—and why do they endure? Unlike “I Love to Lie Awake in Bed,” most of them don’t get composed at camp, nor is camp their subject.

For those of us who spent our summers at camps around Ontario, Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, “camp songs” were the songs we sang, year after year, in the dining hall during “singsongs”; in canoes on three-day trips; hiking in the woods; on bus rides; around campfires after the marshmallows had been toasted; and in the rec hall during rainy day programs. Not to mention the naughty or subversive songs we sang when our counselors weren’t around—mainly seditious parodies and scatological songs that made us laugh.

We learned songs from the staff and from each other; we brought them from home or we made them up for shows and all manner of activities, and to make each other laugh. Favorites included “Little Cabin in the Woods,” “Fire’s Burning,” “Down By the Bay,” and “Boom, Boom, Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy.” What made them camp songs was that we sang them at camp—some, nowhere else—where singing was a natural part of each day.

The children’s summer camp movement was established in North American cities in the 1870s, driven by the growing perception that modern urban society, especially its poorer classes, would benefit physically, morally, and spiritually from a closer relationship with the rapidly disappearing natural environment. Within the next few decades, youth-serving recreational organizations such as the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, and eventually religious and immigrant organizations acquired tracts of rural, wilderness land and organized “wholesome” and active experiences there for urban youth. Besides sports, many favored what were then called “Indian”-themed and -inspired woodland activities, along with programs promoting their own organizational goals.

Author (middle left) playing banjo and singing at Interlochen Arts Camp in 1962. Courtesy of author.

It was an era when group singing was a popular, possibly universal pastime—in homes around a piano, in bars and theaters, and eventually in cinemas. What would be more natural, then, than to include it as an activity at camp, shaped to meet camp’s particular ends, be they recreational, religious, ethno-cultural, nature-centered, or socio-redemptive? Singing offered children self-made entertainment within the self-contained camp environment, and singing led by grown-ups was a superb collective activity for children. Singing could open and close a day, focus energies for rest hour after lunch, entertain in rainy weather, inspire hope or reverence around an evening campfire, promote solidarity, and raise spirits during team games.

From its inception, then, the summer camp was, or was made into, a setting friendly to song. Not all children’s camps may have been singing camps, but my bet is there was singing at every camp in some contexts, regardless.

Camp songs came in many different forms. They included the child-friendly—cumulative songs, make-up-each-verse songs, rounds, action songs with simple lyrics, and funny, silly themes—like “You Push the Damper In,” “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” and “Junior Birdmen.” Then there were the ones that were, paradoxically, not simple or funny at all, but youth-accessible and inspiring: songs of world peace and civil rights like “Listen Mr. Bilbo” and “We Shall Overcome.”  Most of all, they had to be group-singable—with easy choruses (labor songs like “Union Maid”) and refrains (sea shanties like “Haul Away, Joe”), or call-and-response structures (“The Green Grass Grew All Around”), with harmony-inviting melodies (spirituals and folk songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “On Top of Old Smokey”).

Many of the songs that spring first to my mind as “camp songs” aren’t the usual ones. They are old pop standards from the Great American Songbook that we sang at Camp Katonim, a day camp near our summer cottage just outside Toronto, when I was 7 or 8 years old. At Katonim, singing was the day’s first activity. I walked into the dining hall, took a seat on a bench around the perimeter with 60 other kids and counselors, and joined right in as Joanie led us all from the piano. Occasionally, they were “kid-friendly” songs like “I Went to the Animal Fair” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour.” But mostly, they were what I later knew as my parents’ songs: “For Me and My Gal,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Side by Side.” They were great fun to sing, even if some of the lyrics were over my head. I came to understand them later, but I’ve remembered them ever since, and even just thinking about them takes me back, as camp songs do, to the place I sang them, and the people I sang them with.

Summer camp actually helped me become a musician. It was at camp that I learned to play the ukulele, then the guitar, then the banjo; as a counselor, I honed the song leading lessons I’d learned from Pete Seeger records. At one camp where I also taught swimming, the junior boys I bunked with came up with a chant they yelled after every dining hall singsong: “Well DONE Shel-DON Po-ZUN!” Soon, “Well Done” became my camp moniker, then a family nickname, and then—well, Well Done Music is the name of my recording label.

Like Larry Hart and Arthur Schwartz, I found camp the perfect place to create and perform music where music was welcome. Like them, I went on to other musical arenas, but in my case, camp songs and camp singing remained part of my musical life—whether on stage teaching a chorus to an audience, leading a choir, or making up a silly song with my granddaughter as I bounce her on my knee.

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Mine compressed time and space. In dreamland, I toggled between the anxious claustrophobia of summer 2020 and memories of the sun-splashed Santa Barbara County baseball camp I attended as a kid in the mid-1980s.

I’m not sure what took me back to Ken McMullen Baseball Camp in the hills above Carpinteria. Maybe it was because most summer camps were closed, and my three young sons were stuck at home, having lost all interest in everything but looking at screens and fighting with each other. Maybe it was the terrible absence of youth baseball during the pandemic; our family connects to community and to each other via Little League—the boys play, I coach, and my father keeps score.

Maybe it was the power of geographical suggestion. Desperate to get out of our house, the boys convinced us to sneak away for a pair of four-day stretches to a shockingly cheap lodge on the edges of coastal and cool Cambria, in San Luis Obispo County. That occasioned long drives on the 101 that took us through Carpinteria, where we stopped to walk the bluffs and watch the hang gliders float above the edge of the sea.

Or maybe the dreams of those summers past came to me because the spirit of that camp, and of the old ballplayer who ran it, seem especially precious right now.

Ken McMullen was a solid, hard-working third baseman who played for five teams and hit 156 home runs in a career spanning 1962 to 1977. He wasn’t a star. He was someone who knew his role, and obsessed over the details so he could do his job for the team.

Ken McMullen, 1963. Courtesy of Scott Young.

In other words, Ken McMullen is the sort of person who is never in charge of anything anymore. Dodger fans remember him as a skilled pinch-hitter for the team that won the National League pennant in 1974. Some also recall his openness and grace that same year when his wife died of breast cancer, just months after the birth of their third child.

Late in his career, he started a summer baseball camp for kids in and around his hometown of Oxnard, where he’d been a high school baseball and basketball star (Ken’s in the Ventura County Sports Hall of Fame), and where his father had run a service station. His family members and his friends from the baseball world were constant presences at the camp, though the location moved around, to wherever he could find fields and dorms. He wanted dorms because he was trying to recreate, for kids, ages 10 to 18, the experience of the Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, where Dodger players lived and trained together before each season.

“I wanted to run it just like a spring training camp, and so it was a boarding camp—and you had to stay there,” Ken, now 78, told me earlier this summer by phone from Oregon, where he lives part-time. “That way you could have the camaraderie with the kids, and it wasn’t just us teaching them. The kids could coach each other.”

In the 1980s, Ken cut a deal with the Cate School to use the fields and dorms on its campus above Carpinteria. My parents were fortunate enough to be able to send me for one week each summer, accompanied by my Pasadena Southwest Little League buddy, Brendan. We were just 10 my first year there—it was my first, and only, sleepaway camp—and I remember feeling nervous about going.

The feeling didn’t last long. The McMullen family members and other coaches couldn’t have been more welcoming. They also kept you busy. The toughest football coaches are famous for “twoadays,” or practicing twice a day. At the Ken McMullen Baseball Camp, we practiced three times a day—morning, afternoon, and early evening, when we took batting practice until it was too dark to see the ball. During the breaks, kids would play games of whiffle ball so intense that we broke school windows.

Never, not even during four years at Harvard, have I been instructed as thoroughly as I was at the Ken McMullen Baseball Camp. They taught all the small but vital details, from how to grip the baseball to where to touch each base with your foot. And while all coaches preach teamwork, the camp taught the mechanics of actually practicing it—the myriad ways you back teammates up, and communicate on the field and on the bases. At each week’s end, campers were sent home with written report cards, listing all the things they needed to work on.

Ken McMullen (wearing his No. 5 Dodger uniform) photographed with camp coaches. Courtesy of Scott Young.

My report cards pointed out that I was a smart aleck, on the path to becoming a wise-ass, who challenged other players and even coaches. But the camp’s coaches said my personality could be a good thing, if used in service of the team. They encouraged me to put my critical energy into watching the game intently, and showed me how to identify pitches before they were thrown, and how to read bats to anticipate where the ball would be hit. When I was 12, I won the camp’s award for Best Attitude. I asked if it was a joke, but Ken told me I had the best “bad attitude” he’d seen in a long time. It may be the finest compliment I’ve ever received.

In essence, the camp wasn’t just teaching us baseball; it was teaching us how to teach others. Brendan and I started coaching a Little League team together as eighth graders, using drills we learned at the camp, and never stopped; we’re still coaching our own kids today. A few campers played professionally, but many more became coaches and educators.

“The philosophy behind the camp was fun but not just that: We’re also going to teach you a lot, and hopefully you’ll take some of this home,” says Scott Young, who started as a camper, became a counselor, and went on to be a coach, teacher, and principal in Orange County.

I moved on and the program eventually ended, but Ken McMullen Baseball Camp has never left my brain. In one dream this summer, I watched Ken hit line drives out to the eucalyptus trees in left field. Then I was playing in the campers-versus-coaches game—which Ken often seemed to win with a pinch-hit—and flying out to right-center field. In another dream, I’m running the bases endlessly on the camp’s smaller diamond, trying to make sure I hit each base on the inside corner.

Then I woke up, still stuck at home. I’d rather be on base, playing ball in the summer sun.

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“Swim, Black boy, or die!” his assailants shouted as he floated away.

Twenty years later, in the summer of 1943, Parks was at a summer camp in upstate New York, taking photographs of white and Black children at play in a lake. His near-drowning must have been on his mind as he captured scenes still rare in America at that time: Kids of various races swimming, boating, laughing, eating, and working together.

Some might wonder why Parks, who would go on to become a celebrated photographer and a civil rights hero, chose to record these mundane scenes of docks and dining halls when experiences like his own in the Marmaton River—not to mention lynchings—still occurred in 1940s America. Seen another way, however, Parks’s camp images are sharp and subversive, stark statements from a man who later described his camera as “a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs.” By presenting an idyllic vision of America as he hoped it could be, but knew it wasn’t, Parks created photos that resisted the country’s segregation, in nature and beyond.

Parks had gone to the summer camps on assignment for the Office of Wartime Information to document scenes of everyday life. But Black children enjoying integrated natural spaces was not, actually, a part of everyday life at the time. By the 1940s, American culture had been systematically excluding people of color from outdoor recreational spaces, both physically and ideologically, for decades. As the U.S. urbanized at the end of the 19th century, many white people regarded (and cordoned off) wild and natural spaces as places for white people to go for a reprieve from metropolitan life. Summer camps, in particular, emerged as segregated spaces for white boys to cultivate masculinity through outdoor recreation.

But a small number of organizations used what historian Marcia Chatelain calls “camping activism” to counteract this ideology, including administrators at the New York camps Parks visited. Typically run by local charities or churches, these Northeastern organizations offered outdoor activities for children of color during the first half of the 20th century (though they never came close to offering the same number of camping activities available to white children nationwide). These progressive camp leaders believed that refashioning summer camps into microcosms of integration would advance equity in the outdoors—and elsewhere.

Parks’s images reflect that ideal. They champion camaraderie over exclusion. At the summer camps, his eye was drawn to Black and white kids sharing tents, swimming together, and eating together—intimacy that was taboo elsewhere at the time. He documented a Black boy helping a white boy bandage a cut, and climb up on a dock; he captured moments when Black girls set out happily on long hikes, or pulled bowstrings to take aim at archery targets. Through his lens, the campers are able to be themselves: joyful kids who indulge in comic books and relish juicy secrets.

Visually and symbolically, too, these photographs shift the American narrative. Unlike canonical paintings of the American frontier that showcased sublime wilderness scenery devoid of Native peoples—an act of human erasure that contributed to an assumption of white possession—Parks centered people in his nature narratives, depicting nature as a space of meaningful equality.

Parks’s photographs of Black children setting out on hikes also asserted their command of the outdoors, foreshadowing a more inclusive era. His portrait of the archer Loretta Gyles, which hearkens to statues of Greek goddesses, depicts a young Black woman for whom nature is her comfortable domain—a place where she can defend herself with poise and will not be victimized. Scenes in Parks’s summer camp photos mirror many of the most contentious segregated venues that later became sites of national protest: restaurants, restrooms, and outdoor recreation areas. The photos are harbingers of the 1960s civil rights movement.

“Whiteness,” W.E.B. Du Bois asserted in 1920, “is ownership of the earth.” Gordon Parks’s idyllic summer camp imagery directly challenged the grip whiteness held on the wilderness, providing a hopeful, even defiant vision of U.S. racial landscapes. Decades later, some white people still regard these places, as geographer Carolyn Finney wrote, as a “white space.” The recent Central Park incident where a white woman named Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, is one example of the way white people continue to deliberately exclude people of color from natural spaces.

Yet the historical presence of these summer camps, as interpreted by Parks, speaks to the alternative possibilities inherent in the outdoors.

This essay is adapted from Amanda Martin-Hardin’s 2018 article in Environmental History, “Nature in Black and White: Summer Camps and Racialized Landscapes in the Photography of Gordon Parks.”

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During those hot and humid Northern Virginia summers, I headed each weekday to the summer camp held in my elementary school’s nearly-abandoned cafeteria. It was a low-key affair—ping pong and table hockey on the cafeteria lunch tables, kickball and football on the playground, key chains and macramé in arts and crafts—while mix tapes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in heavy rotation played over the school’s PA system. And in what must have been one of the greatest bargains of the 1970s, camp tuition was $20 for the entire summer.

Today, such an easy-going camp would be trashed on Yelp!, despite its unbeatable price, for failing to deliver any quasi-academic or super-creative purpose. Imagine my camp competing with today’s Computer Camp, Robotics Camp, Animation camp, and (my personal favorite) New York Film Academy Camp, which is in, of all places, Burbank.

Kids’ summer camps in Los Angeles enter parents’ collective consciousness around January 15, just after the three-week-long Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) winter break, which was the dream of the teachers’ union (which also negotiated an entire week off for Thanksgiving) and the owners of, yes, winter camps. The most popular summer camps are said to fill up by mid-February, so the camp arms race begins before one even has a chance to plan a basic family vacation.

Our daughter, now eight, is already enrolled in four camps (with a fifth still possible) so that we, her two professional working parents, can earn a living and thus afford said camps. We’re signed up for a week-long, overnight, all-girls sleepaway camp at Griffith Park, an arts camp at a synagogue three blocks away, a swimming/all-around recreation camp at Valley College, and Beach Camp, which, for our fair-skinned daughter, requires bulk purchases of SPF 50 sunscreen.

There’s also the matter that plenty of LAUSD families simply can’t afford private summer camp at all, since absolutely none of them can be found at the bargain, 1970s price of $20. Half of all LAUSD families qualify for free lunch programs, meaning their household income is just over or below the federal poverty line. Some summer camps offer scholarships on a very limited basis, but that just means families in need must compete for these coveted slots and complete additional administrative paperwork.

Mind you, this is on top of the dizzying registration process that often involves web sites crashing after anxious parents overwhelm the system immediately after the online enrollment period opens.

For lower-income families, the availability of formal and informal municipal resources–public swimming pools, kids’ day camps at city parks, and air-conditioned public libraries–is critical. For tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area kids, poverty doesn’t take a summer vacation.

The LAUSD academic calendar also plays a role in making summer a tough sprint for families. The long winter break is offset by making the summer break short, just over two months long, with school ending June 9 and starting up again August 15. So while the fabled and possibly archaic family summer vacation is possible for those with means, it’s the hottest, priciest, and most crowded time of year for travelling.

It’s taken our family three years of practice to finally figure out how to make this unconventional school schedule work for us. We did this by giving up on a conventional week of summer vacation; we might get a long weekend or two if we’re lucky. Instead, we opt for vacation during the tail end of winter break, after the holidays, when most other school districts are back in session and airfares and hotel prices drop significantly.

But our coping strategy is under fire. The LAUSD Board, in their infinite wisdom, has considered changing the academic calendar as the solution to several of their administrative woes. You see, other school districts start at a far more conventional time: after Labor Day. Not only do some board members observe other school districts with a jealous eye, but they are also under the impression that a later start will result in lower air conditioning usage and, hence, lower energy costs district-wide. This past fall, it looked like a move towards a more traditional start, one week later in 2017 and an additional week later in 2018, was going to pass.

In December, however, forces far greater than Computer Camp took hold, shocking the school board into reversing their position—and reverting (for now) to the calendar with the two-month summer break and the three-week winter break. Why? For two big reasons. First, the teacher’s union likes the status quo. Second, changing to a calendar with a shorter winter break would result in more student absences, since a considerable number of parents would still yank their kids out of school for a few days for holiday-time visits to relatives and winter vacation destinations. These additional absences would result in LAUSD losing some of its funding from the State of California, which allocates resources based on average daily attendance.

But the scheduling issue remains white-hot. The board’s decision on the calendar was so divisive that the board President abstained—yes, abstained—when the academic calendar issue came before them. So while the calendar is set for the school year beginning this coming August, the board has yet to decide on the calendars for the 2018-19 school year and beyond.

I wonder if this lack of leadership, leading to unnecessary uncertainty for parents, would even matter if we had the informal, cheap, carefree, drop-in nature of the summer camp I remember. But I recognize that in our current era of instant access and gratification, kids like our daughter might not know what to do with the unstructured fun I had when I was a kid. None of today’s summer camp options offer any time for being lazy or hazy—there’s only a short break before your next camp activity starts at 10:10 a.m.

What memories will she have? What sport will she remember playing that didn’t come with rules or equipment? And with her day’s activities lined up on a scheduling grid, will she even have the time to reflect on her summer music soundtrack?

As for me, Gerry Rafferty’s sax solo will always remind me of those slow and easy summers, with the click-clack of a table hockey puck adding some percussion. Just don’t tell the Beach Boys.

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Not that it happened to me, or anything.

From the age of eight to 13, I attended Camp Taconic, a posh Jewish sleep-away in the Berkshires. My parents sent me to Taconic because it had everything I should want: tennis courts, canoes, horseback rides, swim lessons, ceramics–the works. The other campers were exactly the sort of kids my parents wanted me to meet. My years there made me a champion of Jewish Geography, a game that’s based on linking, with as few degrees of separation as possible, one Jew to any other. Years after learning how to shoot a bow and arrow and how to make a bed, I sometimes think the real lesson of camp is that it’s a small world for well-heeled New York Jews.

I should have fit in. My dad took the train into Manhattan, my mom had a good dermatologist, and my family went to synagogue three times a year. But even on first contact with my fellow campers, I could tell I was a little off. As an eight-year-old at Shea Stadium boarding the bus for my first summer at camp, I had on sweatpants; everyone else wore matching outfits. The night we arrived, my camp mates each ate a serving of spaghetti with meat sauce. I ate three.

I was a year younger than the rest of the girls in my cabin, and the nine-year-olds were naturally cooler. It didn’t help my status when I asked Julia Jaffe how to spell the word “if.” (It was for a letter I was writing my parents. Relevant sentence: “If you don’t let me get a puppy, I won’t come home.”)

Everything at camp revolved around the bell–the wake-up bell, the breakfast bell, the activity bell, the break bell. At breakfast, I ate three bowls of prepackaged cereal before laying into pancakes or eggs. Cleanup followed. (Most campers, including me, had limited experience with dust, so sweeping was a fun new game.) Another bell led us to Morning Sing at the Playhouse, where we belted out John Denver songs. Then there were announcements, usually about auditions or sports meets. Bells rang in morning activities, lunch, the end of rest hour (during which we were made to write letters home twice a week) and the start of milk and cookies, three more activity blocks, dinner, an evening activity, and then bed. Back at our cabins, we received a piece of fruit, brushed our teeth, and went to sleep.

There was a lot to do at Camp Taconic. When I was eight, I loved hiking, so I got to hike. When I was 10, I was into softball, so I got to play softball. By 13, I loved roller hockey, and I got to play it every day. What more could a girl want–except other girls to love these things as well? Instead, an almost 1950s-like segregation of the sexes reigned over camp activities. Boys played sports, and girls did crafts. I came to camp with rollerblades while the rest of the girls brought accessories, like a spray bottle with a fan attached to the top, personalized in bubble letters. I would have, too, but I didn’t even know where this stuff came from.

At 13, I returned to camp to find that all my bunkmates had grown breasts. I remained flat as a boy from navel to neck–and continued to dress as if the sole purpose of clothing were to shield my body from mustard. My cabin mates liked their new breasts, and, concerned about my lack of them, became amateur endocrinologists. One of the Laurens in my cabin checked in throughout the summer on my pubic hair situation. She was buxom and dark–mad with her newfound power. She had two boyfriends, one at home and one at camp, and reveled in her adult-sized bras and need to shave her legs daily. Today I remember that Lauren was buxom and dark at 11 and that she changed clothes in the bathroom every morning and every night. Perhaps she’d been as jealous of my shapelessness at 11 as I was of her shapeliness at 13. But there’s no sense of universality at 13.

At the end of every summer, everyone got maudlin. I never cried, because I was never sad to be going home. Still, I kept returning to Camp Taconic, because it was the easy thing to do. It was only after my summer as a flat-chested 13 year-old that I finally admitted I didn’t fit in.

Before my friend’s wedding, we had to fill out questionnaires about our favorite candy, favorite summer activity, and nickname. I never had a nickname at Camp Taconic, though not for lack of trying. When I was 13, I dreamed up a series of events based around a counselor’s late arrival that would result in my becoming Rebecca “In the Shower” Aronauer. Needless to say, this nickname did not catch on.

In the questionnaire I saw my chance to be Rebecca “In the Shower” Aronauer at last. As I anticipated, none of my fellow wedding guests understood why I wanted my nickname to be about hygiene. But they accepted it was something I found funny, and that was enough.

I suppose I might be softening on camp after all these years. And it’s true that I don’t think sleep-away camp is a bad thing. But camp doesn’t like outliers; it doesn’t give you a place to be different. So I wouldn’t choose to send my kids to Camp Taconic. Besides, I could never afford it.

Rebecca Aronauer is a writer living in Denver. Her website is rebeccaaronauer.com.

*Photo courtesy of Peter Blanchard.

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