Summer Camp 1968

Midway through the summer of 1968, just after the Little League season ended in my New Jersey hometown, I climbed into our family’s station wagon for the trip to sleepaway camp. While my parents were headed to Europe for the first time, I was going to spend two weeks in a rolling, wooded corner of the state. A few months shy of 13, I thought of camp as my own kind of respite.

I had never been much of a camping kid growing up—more of a vacation homebody—but the preceding summer I had surmounted my characteristic caution to have my folks sign me up for a week at YMCA camp, mostly because my best friend Brandon always went there. That summer, 1967, was the season of Haight-Ashbury hippies and riots across the country, including in Newark, not so far away from camp. Yet, to my relief, nothing intruded on my heady sensation of being all—well, at least partly—grown-up. 

From my prosperous classmates in Highland Park, I knew there were summer camps way up in New England with water-skiing and well-equipped theaters. The Central Jersey Y camp outside Blairstown was not such a place. It had a humble lake clogged with lily pads, a wooden-plank dining hall, and three distinct clusters of bunkhouses—Algonquin for the little kids on the flats near the flagpole, and Iroquois and Sioux for the tweens and teens on opposite sides of a gravel road that