Camp Regis Notes from 1964

Judging by a Facebook page I just encountered (https://www.facebook.com/bestadirondackcamp/ ) Camp Regis still exists.

The only sleepaway summer camp I ever went to was Camp Regis, way up in the bucolic Adirondack portion of New York State, and only for one summer, in 1964.   On balance, I can say that I was alive when I left.  

The camp was run by Earl Hume, a German, although the camp had a Quaker ethos; meaning a lot of liberal Jewish families from New York sent their kids there.   There was a kind of oddball script forming right there. 

  

Hume had shown up at my family’s home in Somers, New York, the previous winter to sell my parents on this place.  I remember some kind of slide show he presented, revealing the beauty and nature surrounding this joint.  Surprisingly, my father, an advertising executive whose cynicism was legion, and my mother, bit Hume’s sales pitch: hook, line, and sinker.  My younger sister and I were signed up, thence to be dispatched to Camp Regis in Paul Smiths, NY, sometime in early June from the parking lot of an already forlorn shopping center in White Plains, NY, via bus to Regis, some 9 hours away. 

Keep in mind that 1964 was a weird year in the world.   JFK was dead, Vietnam was escalating, racial tensions were mounting, and The Beatles had started selling records in the U.S. big time. 

   

Just before we arrived at Camp Regis, three civil rights activists were murdered in Mississippi: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.  Either Goodman or Schwerner had been a camper at Regis.  I can’t remember which, but the place was humming with the news when we arrived.

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We were assigned to cabins, probably 10-12 kids to a cabin.  I don’t know about the other cabins, but I had one night in whatever cabin I was in when a bear or giant raccoon came through in the middle of the night and started sniffing around.   I was of course terrified but I seemed to be the only one awake.  Turned on my bed toward the wall, I didn’t move. I played dead but I was sweating and clenching my teeth.  The animal eventually left after consuming whatever candy from parental Care Packages had been left out.  Whatever this creature was, it came really close to me, and I can still remember its nasal sniffing sounds right in my ear. 

  

My cabin was interesting in that we had a record player and we had only one or two of the first Beatles albums and played them constantly.  If you want a soundtrack to my summer of 1964, there you go.  Earl Hume, Jr., was also resident and distinguished himself as something of a sadist, taunting almost anyone or anything that crossed his path.  Maybe he’s grown up by now and maybe he’s in politics.

Athletics was never big for me but anything having to do with water I could handle.  Yeah, I attempted tennis, archery, and the usual stuff, but I went for things like water skiing on Lake Regis.  The problem with Lake Regis was that even in the summertime the lake was something like 45 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface.  When a human body is immersed at that temperature for even a few minutes you’ve got hypothermia and not long after that, death.  After a couple of spills off water skis (and rescues), I became very competent on water skis.

Surprisingly, the old Flash Gordon movie star, Buster Crabbe, had a camp next door that offered SCUBA diving to campers.  

Crabbe

I was briefly jealous because I already knew how to dive, but I watched these poor bastards jumping into Lake Regis (without wetsuits, by the way!) and waved to them while zipping past on my water skis.

I also excelled at swimming and this is mainly because Lake Regis was infested with leeches.  My theory was that the faster you swim, the less likely one of these is going to attach itself to you.   We had a bunch of races between a couple of docks and I generally won.   The twin incentives of beating hypothermia and not having leeches attach themselves to me far exceeded any competitive element of a race that involved humans.   I never had a leech attach itself to me while at Camp Regis, unlike many or most other campers.

I doubt that it is still displayed, but my name was carved into a piece of wood at the end of the summer and put on the wall in the dining hall because I was anointed “Adirondack Guide” after a series of canoe, hiking and camping trips that I signed up for and actually returned from.   I liked camping and roughing it, but mainly the whole point for me was getting the hell out of Camp Regis for a few days.

I signed up for every camping/canoe excursion available.

I climbed Mt. Marcy and schlepped canoes and backpacks through mud, clouds of mosquitoes and black flies, paddled through the whole constellation of Adirondack lakes, made campfires, cooked, put up tents; all just for a bit of liberation.   At the end of the summer, someone ran the numbers and figured out I had the record for more days out of the camp and into the wilderness than anyone else.   For this I was canonized in Camp Regis history.

The other thing about these excursions is that girls signed up, too.   So we’d be a little co-ed handful for several days.  At the Camp, there was a boy section and a girl section, separated by distance and maybe barbed wire.  But out in the wilderness, it was a different story.  The problem was that any romantic intentions were consistently thwarted by things like continuous rain, bugs, or other gross things that happen when you are out in the woods.  Besides, I was 12 years old.   What was I going to do anyway other than slice more hard salami (oops, sorry, metaphor happening here) when it’s pouring rain and I can’t get a fire together?  On one of these canoe adventures it was nothing but rain and thoroughly-soaked sleeping bags, and the only things that could be produced in the way of food were hard salami, soggy potato chips, and bug juice (Kool-Aid).  We persevered for several days on this diet.

Bonnie Raitt was at Camp Regis.  Bonnie was maybe 15 and a junior counselor.  She had a really nice acoustic guitar.  I had a really crappy one which I couldn’t play worth shit.   (Later I discovered that with a really nice guitar in my hands I wasn’t too bad).   Those of us with guitars sometimes did some communal strumming.    Bonnie was pretty good.  In those days we played and sang folk things in the semi-protest category:  Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, etc.   Bonnie also starred in “The Princess and the Pea” on stage in the dining hall during an otherwise forgettable season of sporadic theatrical activity.

During the parental visitation weekend, her father, singer and Hollywood star John Raitt, cranked out “God Bless America” in the dining hall to a crowd of pretty disinterested kids.

As for food, I can’t remember much, other than a Camp Regis signature concoction called “Peanut Soup”.   While it promised something of a nutty flavor, the most I could discern out of the basic broth was a bit of chicken and a hint of Ajax, the cleaning agent.

We did manage an excursion or two by car or bus.  Montreal was nearby and for some reason we didn’t need passports to get in or out of Canada.  We saw the Beatle’s movie "A Hard Day's Night" up there (kind of my anthem while at Camp Regis) and we wandered around some kind of World’s Fair where we ate Belgian Waffles; always the highlight of any World’s Fair. 

 

To be honest, none of the counselors at Camp Regis were personally memorable, although I do remember one who chaperoned us on one of our more grueling canoe trips wearing penny loafers and no socks.   As he discovered, this is a big problem when you have to portage between lakes with a canoe on your shoulders in mud halfway up your legs.   I recall that when we arrived at the pick-up point, he grabbed a shovel, dug a hole and buried the loafers.

  

During the summer, one of the counselors managed to buy one of the first 1964 Ford Mustangs ever built.  It was white.  I will never forget seeing it parked in the midst of giant pine trees at Camp Regis with sunlight flickering on it.  Quite a commercial!  Quite a car!

Unlike films that we’ve seen over the years of summer camps where kids and counselors sneak beer and pot in and go wild, I didn’t run into any of that.  The counselors had bars in Paul Smiths that they went to at night, and sometimes they’d come back blasted, but I never saw much other than that.

It’s nice to know that Camp Regis still exists, just as it’s nice to know that I still exist.