Summer Camp Memories 1970 (ii)

Happy to be hired and looking forward to a summer in the country, I returned to my cheap, slum apartment in the Bronx and began to look for someone to whom to sublet the rent-controlled apartment. Like most people in New York City who lived in cheap rent-controlled apartments prior to the 1971 law which introduced vacancy de-control in NYC (which the then-billionaire GOP Governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed through the state legislature near the end of the 1971 legislative session), I did not bother to inform my landlord or the building super that I was subletting the apartment for the summer. When slum apartments were located in slum neighborhoods that weren't considered that desirable prior to 1971, landlords usually weren't that interested in who lived in the apartments as long as the rents were paid on time.

Yet technically, even under the pre-1971 rent-control law, a sublet wasn't a legal one unless it had the approval of the landlord. But because it was costly and time-consuming for a landlord to evict a tenant for "illegally" subletting a rent-controlled apartment for a few months, the people living in the subletted apartment were generally never bothered. And if the primary tenant decided he did not want the apartment back from the people to whom he had sublet the apartment, the sublet tenants now in possession of the apartment would often be able to inherit the apartment and get the landlord to accept them as new rent-controlled tenants with new leases at only a slightly higher rent-control rent.

After describing the proposed sublet apartment on an index card, I took the subway down from the Bronx to 14th Street in Manhattan and posted the index card on a bulletin board at the Alternate University. The Alternate University was an anti-war Movement counter-university which offered, for free, courses related to Revolution, from a New Left perspective, that were not offered by the U.S. Establishment’s corporate/bourgeois university system. The Alternate University was also a place where you could meet others who were supporting groups like the Black Panther Party, the Gay Liberation Front, women's liberation groups and revolutionary movements throughout Latin America.

A few days after I posted my sublet ad/index card at the Alternate University, I received a telephone call from Eric and we arranged for him to look at the apartment. Eric was born the same day as I was and had been active in the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Black Panther Party. He and his womanfriend Michelle had just moved to New York City, where he was working at some clerical job at the phone company and she at some clerical job for some other corporation. Eric and Michelle had also been having difficulty finding a landlord who was willing to rent them an affordable apartment, because they were African-American.

After examining the slum apartment, Eric and Michelle expressed an interest in subletting the apartment. Without asking for any deposit, I told them the apartment was theirs until September, once they paid me June's rent.

By late May, Eric, Michelle, their dog, their clothes and Eric's guitar were in the Bronx apartment and I was crashing in my parents' living room in Queens, in an apartment on the first floor of a Fresh Meadows apartment complex building, for a few weeks, until it was time to report for my counselor job in the country. I remember nothing of what I did in June 1970, prior to meeting the bus by Bryant Park in Manhattan, which took me and most of the other camp counselors and camp staff up to the camp in the Poconos. I probably spent as much time as I could outside of my parents' apartment walking around the deserted streets of Queens or hanging out in nearby Cunningham Park relaxing.

Arriving by subway for the bus at Bryant Park in Manhattan near 6th Avenue and 42nd Street on a Monday morning in late June, carrying my small trunk and guitar, I waited around with some of the other counselors for a few hours, until everyone who was scheduled to be on the bus reported for work. The counselors who had worked at the camp the previous summer greeted each other with laughter and hugs, like friends who hadn't seen each other for awhile and assured those of us who were first-time counselors at the camp that we would find the campers easy to "manage." A few of the counselors and senior counselors were coming back to the camp for the third or 4th year in a row and one senior counselor was returning for his 6th summer at the camp.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that a number of the male counselors looked like hippies, with long-hair, mustaches and/or beards. So I quickly saw that it would be o.k. for me to start letting my hair grow and stop shaving my beard, once I was up at the camp. Although none of the women counselors seemed to be a feminist or a political activist, I was also pleasantly surprised to see that a number of the women counselors and dining room staff servers I noticed looked like hippie women or seemed very attractive physically. Most of the counselors were under 21 and college undergraduates. But a few counselors were perpetual grad school psychology students in their mid-twenties and a few of the serving staff were high school juniors or seniors.

I don't recall much of what was talked about by the counselors on the long bus ride from New York City to Pennsylvania, except that it became clear that at least some of the counselors were also into psychedelic drugs and pot. The only woman counselor I can recall noticing at this time on the bus up to the camp was a 19-year-old or 20-year-old beauty named Stacey. She was from Queens, had been hired as the Arts & Crafts Counselor and had a younger brother who was one of the slow-learning kids at the camp.

Finally arriving at the camp in the evening, I noticed that the camp looked like a softer place to spend the summer than Boy Scout camp had been. Each group of campers and their counselors lived in its own cabin with a bathroom and shower. The head counselor, a hip guy in his mid-twenties with a mustache and a mod-haircut named Barry, lived in a separate cabin and both Mayer and his wife and the head of the waterfront staff lived in well-furnished trailers. The campsite also included a canteen, a parking lot, a dining room and kitchen, an Arts & Crafts cabin, an educational building and a theatre/auditorium. The cabins were arranged in a semi-circle; and in front of the cabins, between the path to the nearby lake waterfront and the cabins, was a large sloped field of grass.

The week before the campers arrived on the first of July was one of orientation for the counselors and camp staff, in which camp procedures were explained to us. Mayer had not yet decided for which group of boys I was to be counselor, but when one of his counselors for the 13 and 14 year old boys group failed to show up at the camp, Mayer assigned me to that job. My co-counselor was a tall, heavy guy from Nassau County named Paul, who had never worked with children much before.

Paul had not come up to the camp on the bus with most of the rest of us. Instead, he had been one of the counselors who had driven themselves in their own cars up to the camp, in order to have access to their cars in the country during the summer. Driving up to the camp with Paul, as his passengers, were two other counselors from Nassau County, Paul's friend Charlie and a woman counselor named Sandy.

Charlie was a counselor for the 5 and 6-year-old boys. He had been a counselor the previous summer, was soft-spoken and intellectual and, like many of us, did not know what he wanted to do with his life.

Sandy was entering her last year at Nassau Community College and was preparing to be a special ed teacher. Her previous three summers had been spent at the camp and she was in charge of both the teenage girls' division and producing all the theatrical events. Her father had died before 1970 and she lived with her mother in Nassau County, while commuting to college. Although she was not considered a physical beauty, Sandy had a charismatic personality that made her the most popular counselor at the camp with the campers. She considered herself a hippy and felt that radiating love was the best way to relate to the campers.

During orientation week, Mayer rode around on his motor scooter and introduced each orientation session speaker. He still seemed very qualified to run the special ed camp, well-organized and experienced, and primarily concerned about the welfare of the campers who were scheduled to arrive at the camp the following week. I was also impressed by the fact that Mayer did not seem reluctant to hire a mod-haired hippy like Barry, who smoked pot, as his head counselor or hire division heads like Sandy, who also smoked pot, although Mayer, himself seemed too personally straight and too much "the professional" to smoke pot himself.

At the initial orientation session before the camp staff in the camp dining room, Mayer also gave a fairly impressive introductory speech in which he warned us about letting the "labels" that had been placed on the campers in our group create negative self-fulfilling prophecies about what kind of behavior should be expected from our group members during the summer. But we were told that we would be given copies of the file records of the campers in our groups to examine before the campers arrived the following week.

The initial orientation meeting represented the first gathering of all the camp staff at once, which included waterfront staff and dining room staff, as well as the camp group counselors. After the initial orientation meeting, I noticed that besides mostly hippy college student undergraduate men, the staff of men's counselors also included a few long-haired, bearded men--who looked like hippies and smoked pot, but were actually right-wing returning Vietnam War Vets, looking to find some "hippie chicks" to give them some "easy pussy." The male counselor staff also included a few college frat students like mod-haired, beardless Chuck, who were looking for some "good-looking chicks" at the camp to have one-night stands with and who seemed to be more into a sexual conquest trip than a male hippy love-trip.

"Some of the chicks here look pretty good, don't they?" Chuck commented to a few other men and me as soon as the initial orientation meeting broke up, before heading up to the camp canteen to buy some refreshments and compete with some of the other male counselors for the women camp lifeguards and women counselors he considered most physically attractive, as the women and men counselors quickly began to pair off, in order to avoid being alone on their days off and when off-duty after 9 p.m.

The following day, after a separate meeting of the counselors of the teenage and older boy and girl groups, I mentioned to Sandy that I was surprised to see that the men counselors seemed to be more interested in evaluating the women counselors on the basis of their physical appearance than into discussing some of the special ed issues related to the camp that Mayer had raised at the initial orientation meeting.

Sandy laughed and said, "You shouldn't be surprised. You can bet the women counselors also were mainly discussing which men were best-looking physically. Most of the women counselors at camps like these are usually more interested in quickly finding a good-looking boyfriend for the summer than in anything else when they first arrive up here. And not many of them are really hippies, except in the way they dress." Then she walked back towards her teen-age girls’ group cabin.

The other counselor for the teenage girls' group, Debbie, worked well with Sandy and was liked, not feared, by the campers in her group. Debbie was also from Nassau County and was considered one of the most physically beautiful women counselors in the camp. She was still only 18 years-old, having just graduated from high school that June, but with her large breasts, beautiful face and curly hair already looked like a college cheerleader or some young movie starlet. Like Sandy, she was some kind of a hippy and quickly became the summer womanfriend of one of the good-looking, long-haired, college undergraduate male counselors who had a new car and a good supply of grass, named Mark.

Debbie was planning to attend Kent State University in Ohio in the fall, but appeared to have no long-range plans, except having a good time and living for the moment. And she still seemed very happy with life, personally, although--like other hippies--she was against the war and the Death Culture System, in these months immediately following the Kent State Massacre.

The head of the waterfront staff, Wells, was a macho, muscular guy in his late 30s, who seemed to be heavily into developing his physique and making sure that the undergraduate college women lifeguards on his staff were physically attractive enough for him to want to make it with them, before the end of the summer. Wells was the kind of older man who did not yet realize that the Playboy consciousness of the 1950s was not considered hip consciousness in 1970 by most hip people.

Initially, a guy named Ellis was the head of the teenage and older boys division of the camp. But less than two weeks after the campers arrived at the camp in July, Ellis was quietly given the axe by Mayer because he seemed to be responding to the daily pressure and demands of his position at the camp by rambling on incoherently at upper-level staff meetings, as if he were starting to have some kind of nervous breakdown. One of the more straight counselors who worked as a special ed teacher at Mayer's special ed school during the school year was assigned Ellis' position and a New York Times ad brought a foreign student from Scandinavia up from NYC to be a replacement counselor.

My group's cabin was next to the cabin of Mark's group. Because each cabin had a porch with a bench in front of it, where counselors could sit on guard duty after the campers were put to sleep by 9 p.m. or sit without being on duty after lights were out, I would sometimes notice Mark and Debbie sitting on the bench in front of the cabin of Mark's group, throughout the summer.

Mark's friend, Chad, was the counselor in the cabin on the other side of the cabin of Mark's group. Chad was also a long-haired hippie with a good supply of grass and a new car, who, unlike Mark, also had a mustache. Both Mark and Chad attended Indiana University during the school year, were from Long Island and had been either campers or camp counselors at other camps in the country during the previous four years. They acted almost like they were each other's brother. Like Mark, Chad quickly formed a summer couple with one of the most physically attractive women camp staff members, a 16-year-old, blond-haired high school beauty named Susan, who was spending the summer working as a waitress in the camp dining room.

Another camp staff member also lived in the teenage boys' group cabin with Mark and the special ed teacher who had replaced Ellis as head of the teenage boys division sub-group. He was a non-college guy from Long Island who was one of the male lifeguards on the waterfront staff.

Although Wells would have probably preferred to have surrounded himself with a harem of physically attractive women lifeguards for the summer, Mayer was too much of a male chauvinist to trust the safety of his campers at the waterfront to only women lifeguards. So the third staff member in Mark's cabin, plus two other guys, had also been hired by Mayer to be lifeguards during the summer.

As the day of the July 1, 1970 arrival of the campers approached, Mayer distributed to us all his files of the campers in our group, for us to study, and he seemed to become more nervous and controlling, making sure that every little detail was being taken care of. Although Barry was a laid-back head counselor who had everything under control without having to micro-manage the staff of counselors, Mayer began to reveal that he was an interventionist camp director who would bypass his head counselor in order to micro-manage every detail of camp life. A loudspeaker system had been set up at the camp that could be heard in every cabin, and Mayer's voice was constantly heard throughout the day barking out orders and new instructions over the loudspeaker, constantly. But until the campers arrived, I still interpreted Mayer's micro-managing as not being anything more abnormal than just a reflection of his zeal in insuring that his campers were well-taken care of.

By the night before the campers were to arrive, most of the counselors and waterfront staff had paired-off in couples; and had formed sub-groups of people they drove into town with to drink at the local bar or with whom they smoked grass on the campgrounds at night. Initially, none of the women counselors who attracted me appeared interested in getting to know me; and, because I did not have a car and wasn't at the camp the previous summer, I was not included in the evening trips to town or to the camp areas where people turned on by the hippy-type staff people whose sub-groups most interested me.

The waterfront person who lived in Mark's cabin also was not paired with any of the women counselors or part of any sub-group. But, unlike me, he had brought to the camp his own supply of hashish and grass, and he invited me to smoke some with him the night before the campers arrived. After smoking, we both walked up the hill to the camp canteen, to hang out for a few hours there while still stoned.

A few minutes after we sat down to relax and listen to a Beatles album that included songs like "The Long and Winding Road", Mayer suddenly appeared in the canteen and excitedly walked up to the table at which me and the waterfront staff person were sitting, both of us beginning to feel more strongly the high, stoned sensation from the hash, we had been smoking less than fifteen minutes before.

"Bob. I've just found additional records on one of the campers in your group, which it's really important that you study before he arrives tomorrow," Mayer said. He then shoved a big folder that contained a picture of the camper, which indicated that in addition to his academic problems, he had severe psychological problems and was hunchbacked.

At first, I nervously thought that Mayer would be able to quickly detect that I was too high from the hashish to comprehend the information he was now shoving at me and that I would now lose the summer job, even before the campers had even arrived. But I managed to calm myself down and pull myself back down enough to be able to mask my stoned state enough from Mayer, so that he quickly rushed away from me to bother another off-duty counselor that he had some last-minute instructions to give. After Mayer had left the canteen, the waterfront staff person laughed and said, "Imagine him walking-in just when we were getting off on the hash?"

"Yeah. But I'm glad he seemed to be too much in a rush to notice," I replied.

The following day, most of the campers arrived on buses from Manhattan and there was much first day confusion at the camp, as each group of campers settled-into their respective cabins and became acquainted with their new counselors and each other. Most of the campers were either children of rich white parents who were embarrassing their high-achievement-oriented parents by either failing in wealthy white suburban schools or acting out in class, because of their emotional problems.

Some of the campers had physical disabilities or were emotionally disturbed in some ways. The 13 and 14-year old boys in my groups were among the higher-functioning campers and were nearly all among the campers who were just in the underachieving category. One camper in my group was a big behavioral problem in school and had apparently been a discipline problem for his group counselor at the camp during the previous summer. By treating him with respect and friendliness in a non-authoritarian way, I was able to encourage him to reduce dramatically his disruptive behavior during the summer and, at first, Mayer seemed impressed with my ability to prevent the camper from becoming a nuisance for the rest of the camp, as he had been the previous summer.

The camper whose file Mayer had shoved at me in the canteen when I was stoned on hash did not arrive on the bus. Instead, he arrived, individually, with his father, mother and sister in a Cadillac car. He was from Toronto, and the family had driven down with him to the Poconos to drop him off at the camp. His father was some kind of wealthy movie distribution company executive in Canada and his mother was a heavy-set woman who seemed to be in her late 40s or early 50s.

Initially, his mother seemed to be both domineering in relationship to her son and the kind of mother who encouraged her son to believe all the other cruel boys who teased him because of his hunched back were his social inferiors; and that in any group situation he was always entitled to favored treatment.

The camper's sister, Harriet, was a year older than me, was dressed conservatively in a summer dress that made her look like a straight, dutiful daughter; and, initially, she seemed shy. She also seemed fond of her younger brother. Although I noticed that Harriet quickly looked me over when Mayer introduced me to her brother, her parents and her, initially, I did not feel any special attraction to Harriet when we first met. Although most men probably would have considered her more than average-looking, even when she was dressed in a straight way, I, therefore, did not take much notice when Harriet and her parents drove away from the camp to return to Toronto.

After the campers arrived, the camp settled into an overly-structured daily routine in which each group would spend a 45-minute period at a different camp activity site, before rotating to the next site, in-between the three camp meals and lunch periods. A portion of each day was spent down at the waterfront, where the counselors would stand next to each other on the dock with poles, in order to assist the waterfront staff lifeguards in making sure none of the campers drowned, was hurt, or started to play in a dangerous way.

An hour of token time each day was spent in the camp's "education center." But the campers in my group showed little inclination to do any school work during the summer and Mayer also did not press campers to do much academic work. His "education center", within a converted storage shed, appeared to have been established to create the false impression with parents that in his "special ed camp" some academic progress would be made by their kids during the summer.

Within my group, much of my time was spent mediating arguments and disputes between the campers, having playful wrestling matches with a few of the boys who wished to test their strength against a bigger and stronger male counselor, and talking with them through the day and night, as we rushed through each day's activities, meals and camp events. Mayer seemed, initially, satisfied with me, as long as I was able to insure that I kept all my group's members safe, and controlled them enough so they did not disrupt the camp routine or camp events or get into fights with each other or with campers in other groups.

During the first few weeks of the camp, I enjoyed going down to the waterfront with the rest of the staff and the campers on July 4th to watch the fireworks display that the camp for spoiled upper middle-class "normal" campers was putting on from their side of the lake. Aside from one night during summer when our camp's staff drove to the other side of the lake to watch or participate in a basketball game between a team of male counselors from each camp, we had no contact with the camp across the lake. Its staff was composed mainly of jocks and conventionally straight women and seemed much less hip than was our camp's staff. To protect the campers at our camp from being subject to likely teasing from the "normal" campers across the lake, Mayer also seemed to encourage his people at his camp to ignore the camp across the lake.

Nearly all the men counselors at our camp had, like me, brought guitars up to the camp. And male counselors were frequently seen playing guitar in front of their cabins during the waiting time before or after meals or during their daily free period or days off in the daytime. I also would sometimes spend my free period or a part of my day off alone with my guitar, and during the summer I actually found a little time in-between the long work day to write a few songs.

Initially, I thought I was going to like my summer at the camp, because I, especially, enjoyed swimming in the lake; and, because I did not have to spend any money on my meals. For the first time since I went away to college, I was able to eat well and regularly, without having to worry about spending too much money on food. And I actually gained about 10 pounds during the summer, as a result of being able to eat three square meals a day.

But by the end of the second week of camp, Mayer's micro-managing, constant presence on the camp's loudspeaker, to bark orders at us or yet another set of instructions, plus my realization (after seeing how Mayer spent each day riding his motor scooter around the camp to monitor each group) that Mayer was, primarily (as one of the more experienced counselors noted) a "total control freak," soured me on the camp. Even some of the campers in my group quickly picked up on how dictatorial Mayer was, and began voicing criticism that the camp failed to provide them with enough freedom.

By the middle of the summer, campers in other groups were voicing the same complaint about the camp's excessive authoritarianism as my campers, and Mayer somehow concluded that the main cause of the resistance to his dictatorial tendencies was because I had encouraged my group's campers to stir up the rest of the camp by my excessively "laissez-faire" style of counseling.

During the first week of the camp, the majority of the camp staff would spend the evening sharing joints within the various sub-groups, in a not very secretive way. Whenever Sandy smoked grass, she would apparently become even less sexually inhibited than she usually was. Sitting alone in the dark on the lawn in front of the cabins one night after 9 p.m., I suddenly felt someone sneak up behind me and jump on me from behind. The next thing I knew, a laughing Sandy was sitting on top of me in a sexually teasing way. But when I finally realized who the woman counselor in jeans that was straddling me was, Sandy quickly stood up and, still laughing, ran over to where another male counselor was sitting alone and teased him sexually in the same way.

The following day, however, when she wasn't still high, Sandy seemed to barely recall her teasing of the night before. And, as usual, never paused much to converse with any counselors during the day, but, instead, focused all her attention on conversing or performing with the teenage girl campers in her group. So I quickly concluded that Sandy's affectionate horsing around after smoking pot did not mean she was especially interested in getting involved with any of the men she would tease when stoned. But I had to admit to myself that, despite her not being a great beauty, Sandy's hippie spirit and hippie woman's body did turn me on sexually, when she playfully straddled me.

During the initial few weeks of camp, it became evident that my group co-counselor, Paul, was too impatient and too quick-tempered to be as loved by the campers in our group as was I. A few times he demonstrated his impatience by slapping a few campers in the group whom he felt were not obeying him quickly enough, when Mayer wasn't watching.

Not wanting to get him into trouble with Mayer--who would have realized that if word ever got back to the upper-middle-class white parents of his campers that they were getting slapped by counselors, his camp's reputation as providing a "therapeutic environment" would be damaged--I did not let Mayer know about Paul's action. But I hinted to Paul that hitting the campers, except in a real emergency situation, was not a good approach for him to follow. And as the summer went by, Paul's use of a slapping hand seemed to end.

Paul's friend, Charlie, however, was quite good at relating to the younger boys in his group by relying on love and treating them with respect, in the same way that Sandy and I did with the campers in our group. One afternoon, Charlie and I also got into a good discussion during one of our free periods. We both agreed that the technology of the U.S. should now be used to both free us all from having to toil and to create a leisure-oriented society where we could have a lot of time to develop multiple love relationships. He also was the only male counselor at the camp who seemed to both be questioning traditional sexual role differences and open to the new wave of feminism's radical cultural critique.

In addition, Charlie also articulated a coherent critique, based on his experience of the previous summer, about what was wrong in the way Mayer ran the camp and why Mayer was actually professionally unqualified to be micromanaging the camp.

"He's really just a businessman, despite his special ed lingo rhetoric, who spends much of the school year going to the homes of the campers' parents, like a traveling salesman, giving them a completely false picture of what the camp will do for their kids. Although being at the camp does protect the campers from the cruelty of their higher-achieving, non-labeled peers for the summer, Mayer's `educational program" here is a total joke and the day-to-day recreational program is not really constructed to fulfill the grandiose camper achievement progress Mayer claims his camp will produce. The parents who have been sending their kids back year-after-year to Mayer's camp, despite realizing that Mayer deceived them about the camp, are usually just looking for a place to dump their kids for the summer, when they take summer traveling vacations," Charlie explained.

Ironically, in the afternoon a few hours later, Charlie was involved in a boating accident with a waterfront staff person and two campers that cost both him and the waterfront staff person their jobs at the summer camp. After drinking a bottle of wine together, Charlie and the waterfront staff person took two campers out with them in a rowboat in the middle of the lake, where Charlie and the waterfront staff person started to share another bottle of wine while in the rowboat.

After some horseplay in the rowboat, however, the boat tipped and one of the campers fell into the lake. Luckily for the camper, the head of the waterfront staff, Wells, noticed what was happening and quickly swam out to save the camper from drowning.

Once the rowboat, the two campers, the waterfront director, the waterfront staff person and Charlie were back onshore, Mayer was informed of what had happened. Mayer became enraged and immediately fired Charlie and the waterfront staff person who had been in the rowboat with the two campers. By dinnertime, both Charlie and the waterfront staff person were gone from the camp. Mayer then scheduled an emergency meeting of all camp counselors and camp staff in the camp dining room for 9 p.m. that night, after the campers had been put to sleep in their cabins.

When we all arrived at the emergency staff meeting in the dining room hall, Mayer was standing in front of the hall, looking very solemn. Not knowing what to expect Mayer to be saying, the counselors and other camp staff members were quieter than they had been before the orientation meetings. Then Mayer started to speak:

"Most of you have probably heard what happened this afternoon. We almost lost two campers in a boating accident.

“Now if a camper drowns in a summer camp, the camp goes out of business," said Mayer in an angry voice. Then he yelled, "And I don't intend to stand by and let some accident like that happen again that would put me out of business! Just because any counselor or staff people want to spend the summer here smoking pot or getting drunk, instead of focusing all their attention on their campers!

"Now, before this happened today, I thought I could treat you as adults and not regulate what you do during your break periods, evenings or days off. And I even allowed you to smoke pot as long as no smoking pot was being done around the camp cabins.

"But I realize now that you can't be trusted if you're treated as adults. And that it was a mistake to risk destroying the reputation I've built up in this field by running a loose ship so that accidents like what happened today can continue to happen.

"So from now on, if I catch any counselor or camp staff person either smoking pot or drinking alcohol on the camp premises, that person will be immediately fired and escorted from the camp premises. Immediately! Does everyone understand me?"

The counselors and staff people--75 percent of whom had been spending their off-work evening hours during the first few weeks of camp smoking pot--responded to Mayer's new order in hushed silence. Then Mayer asked, "Are there any questions?"

Nobody raised their hands to ask a question, except me.

"Yes, Bob," Mayer said, in a puzzled tone.

"It doesn't seem fair to take away the right of everybody on the staff who wasn't responsible for the accident to smoke pot on their time off, just because of what happened today. Isn't it a bit of an overreaction to punish everybody who wasn't involved for what happened?" I said.

"It may not be fair to some of you, Bob. But that's the way it has to be from now on. I've allowed you all to smoke pot here and look what almost happened," Mayer answered in a calm manner.

Surprisingly, none of the other hippie counselors or camp staff people was willing to follow-up my objection to Mayer's new prohibition policy at the camp with objections or questions of their own. So the emergency meeting was then adjourned and the camp counselors and staff people walked glumly out of the camp dining room.

As I walked back to my cabin, however, the 16-year-old dining room staff serving person, Susan (who had been smoking pot with either her new boyfriend Chad or in one of the most hip sub-groups of staff people in the camp during the previous weeks) came up to me and whispered, "You were the only one who was willing to speak up. And I was glad you did."

Before I could reply to Susan, however, she had run off to catch up with Chad. But next time I noticed her in a bathing suit on the waterfront dock, it struck me that, in addition to her long blonde hair, blue eyes and beautiful face, and her rebellious spirit, Susan also had a beautiful pair of developed, womanly legs, for a high school women of 16.

No one else on the camps staff expressed to me any support for my challenge to Mayer's new prohibitionist policy and most seemed to think it was eccentric for me to not just sit there and "play it cool" after the camp boss spoke. One shouldn't challenge the boss so openly if one wants to keep his or her job, seemed to be their philosophy. But, in part, because my hair was growing longer and my new beard was emerging, and, in part, because I was seen as weird for challenging Mayer, some of the other hippie counselors then began to refer to me as "freaky Bob," as the summer progressed.

Although Mayer had responded to my question in a respectful, non-emotional way, at the emergency meeting, for the rest of the summer he seemed to regard me with more suspicion. Perhaps it also provided Mayer with an additional reason to, by the end of the summer, appear to be blaming me for the increase in the number of campers who were openly voicing their discontent with the excessively authoritarian way he ran the camp.

Within my older boys' group, the camper from Toronto with the hunchback and the emotional problems was being constantly teased and picked-on by the other campers in the group. I did my best, initially, to try to reduce the cruel teasing and encourage his acceptance by the other boys. And during the first few weeks of camp it looked like the camper from Toronto was going to be able to fit into my group of higher-functioning, slow-learning older boys. Although the other campers in the group were better athletes, the camper from Toronto was more intellectual and, when he ignored the teasing of the other boys in the camp, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

To the degree that I could encourage him to "just ignore the teasing," to that degree would the other boys in the group eventually tire of trying to get his goat. Every day or two, during the first two weeks of camp, however, the teasers in the group would be successful in finally finding a way to get his goat again that caused him to throw a tantrum; forcing me to then penalize the group in some way, until they agreed to stop trying to provoke the camper from Toronto.

Near the end of the second week, Mayer required the counselors to write up progress reports for each camper in their groups, which were then mailed to parents of the campers, indicating how the campers had adjusted to the camp. Because I was more experienced working with children and a more experienced writer than the other camp counselors, Mayer was impressed with the quality of my progress reports, despite his growing distrust of me.

"You seem to have gotten into the heads of your campers better than the other counselors. But there's one paragraph I'd like you to delete, because the parents might take it the wrong way," Mayer said to me before he had the counselor progress reports mailed out to the parents of the campers.

My next memory of the summer is when Harriet, the sister of the camper from Toronto, arrived from Toronto to replace a counselor for one of the younger girls' groups who had decided to quit her job early. Not being involved with any of the women counselors or being particularly close friends with any of the other male counselors, who mostly seemed to just dismiss me as "freaky Bob" and a weird guy, I decided to walk up to the canteen; and hang out there over a coke one night after 9 p.m., during the third week of camp.

In the canteen, I noticed that Harriet was sitting alone at one of the tables. So after buying my coke, I walked over towards her and said, "How do you like being at the camp so far?"

"I love it so far," Harriet replied with a smile.

"Mind if I sit down?" I asked.

"That's O.K." Harriet answered in a friendly tone.

After I sat down, I asked, "What made you decide to return to the camp as a counselor this summer?"

"I was bored spending the summer in Toronto. So when Mayer called my father to ask him if I was interested in being a replacement counselor, I decided to try it," said Harriet.

We continued talking with each other for awhile and I began to realize that now that Harriet was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and dressing less straight, I was more attracted to her physically. Seeing me as a counselor who was kind to her brother, Harriet also continued to seem friendlier towards me than the other women counselors at the camp had been, the more we talked.

Harriet seemed like a devoted older sister. But she was fairly vague about what she had been into before that summer. She apparently had graduated from college, but neither she nor I mentioned what we both had majored in. After college, she had spent some time being a tourist in Europe, where she had hung around with the Living Theater group, when it was on tour, and had had some kind of brief sexual involvement with one of the Living Theater actors.

Living in Canada, she had been pretty much unaffected by the war in Vietnam or the U.S. draft, unlike most people our age in the United States had been. A few times when I shared some complaints about U.S. society with her, she responded by saying, "Why don't you just move to Toronto if you don't like it here? Canada's a better country to live in than the USA, anyway."

At first, the possibility of moving to Toronto seemed both economically impossible and, now that I had beaten the draft, a shirking of my moral, political and internationalist responsibility to stay in the USA and work for revolutionary change in the country of my birth. But after hanging out with Harriet on our days off and each evening over the next few weeks, the idea of immigrating to Toronto no longer seemed that farfetched an idea to me, especially if Harriet and I continued to get closer to each other as the summer progressed.

The wealth of Harriet's father, derived from his executive position in the Canadian film distribution subsidiary of a major Hollywood film distributor, pretty much insulated Harriet from having to worry about either earning a living or finding a rich husband to marry. But she had to be wary about male gold diggers; and, initially, one of the reasons I probably attracted her was that (in addition to my then-fashionable long-haired, bearded-hippie musician-type looks and her appreciation for the sympathetic way I related to her younger brother)I, obviously, was a man who cared little for material things or money.

Unlike nearly all the other women counselors, Harriet also had her own car, which she had driven to the camp from Toronto. So my lack of car ownership was not a factor in whether or not Harriet decided to become closer to me on a permanent basis.

On the waterfront, Harriet also attracted attention from the frat guy counselor, Chuck, a few days after her arrival, when she brought her group of younger girls down to the lake for their swim period and he first noticed how Harriet looked in a bathing suit.

"Boy! Did you see the size of those boobs on that new counselor," Chuck commented as he led his younger boys' group from the waterfront and up the hill toward their cabin.

When she wasn't wearing a bathing suit, Harriet tended to wear clothes that didn't reveal how attractively buxom she was. So it was only after I had become attracted to her by her friendly personality and attractive facial features and long hair that I actually noticed, myself, that, yes, Harriet possessed large breasts which most men were conditioned to find quite arousing sexually; especially if they were the type of men who were still reading Playboy magazine.

After a few nights of sitting with Harriet in front of my group's cabin or her group's cabin, when we were either on guard duty until 11 p.m., or just hanging out after the campers had been put to sleep, I began to feel that I was falling in love with Harriet. In retrospect, I can't now recall much of what we talked about, except that I remember telling her that perhaps it was cosmic that she decided to come to the camp as a counselor, because her arrival was like a gift for me since I was not close to any of the other counselors.

In retrospect, another additional reason Harriet may have been initially attracted to me so rapidly was because she hadn't previously met a feminist man who was questioning male chauvinist and sexual stereotyped sexual role differentiation so deeply before, in this summer before the new wave of feminism had yet made the big mass impact on male consciousness that it would later make by the end of the 1970s. So, initially, she was probably intrigued by the novel, non-sexist way I came on to her, which made her quickly feel comfortable with me.

The more we put our arms around each other or touched each other's back affectionately with our hands, the more I realized how turned on I was by Harriet. To my expressions of affection, she was quick to respond affectionately.

From sitting close to each other in an affectionate way while we talked about our lives in front of the camp cabins while our campers slept, we soon progressed to driving into Honesdale in her car one evening and on our days off during the rest of July.

Harriet was a cautious driver and did not make any dangerous moves or speed when she drove. One night she drove us to a small shopping plaza outside Honesdale where we spent a few hours alone in the laundromat, doing laundry, talking intimately to each other and making-out heavily, like the two young lovers we were.

She used powder and perfume more than the women I had previously loved did, but I soon grew to associate the smell of her powder and perfume with the sexual excitement and love that Harriet was able to inspire in me. Being in love with Harriet tended to make me more oblivious to most of the other staff members. But I did notice that Wells, the waterfront staff head, began to look at me with more respect after seeing that I seemed able to attract a woman whose body looked as good in a bathing suit as did Harriet's and who had such large breasts, as my apparent summer girlfriend. Being seen for awhile as Harriet's boyfriend also appeared to raise my social status with the other camp staff members, although Harriet and I pretty much ignored everyone else during our non-working hours, except for one occasion.

The one time we did hang out with some other camp staff people was memorable, however, because we did not arrive back at the camp before 2 a.m. in the morning on a weekday. Harriet had driven a group of us to an evening downtown street fair in some small Pennsylvania mountain town. But driving back from the small town, we got lost and spent about two extra hours driving without a map around the Pennsylvania mountain country roads in the dark, before we finally found the road that led through Honesdale and back to the camp.

The days off alone with Harriet were, of course, memorable because of the intensity of our love affair. One day off we spent alone in some state forest exchanging love sensations under the trees. Another day off we spent walking around Honesdale, where, after eating lunch at a local diner, we found ourselves alone on the grass in the city park, making out heavily, oblivious to the world, embracing in a particularly passionate way, before Harriet said, "We probably should get going before I get arrested by the town police for indecent exposure."

In those days, I still just lived for the moment, worried little about the future, expected the System to crumble soon and tended to ignore the rest of the world around me, when I felt sexually aroused by a woman I loved. But Harriet's warning reminded me that, inside a town like Honesdale, we probably should abandon ourselves to our love flow less totally.

Harriet was right. If we continued to make love in the Honesdale city part, an elderly conservative town resident in one of the houses around the park would likely complain to one of the town cops. And we would both likely get hauled into jail, because my hair and beard were long by now. And then we'd both lose our camp jobs.

For a few weeks, Harriet and I were like one person. But near the end of the second week, we had our first disagreement. Mayer had decided to transfer Harriet's brother to another camp group of less higher-functioning boys, in the cabin next to my group's cabin. I was against the transfer because I felt that unless Harriet's brother could learn how to ignore the provocative teasing of the higher functioning boys in our group so that they couldn't provoke him so easily into a tantrum, he would continue to be easily victimized by his "normal" peers after the summer was over. Mayer, however, felt that Harriet's brother was less likely to be teased and provoked into more tantrums if he was transferred into the group of lower-functioning boys.

In the group of lower-functioning boys, however, Harriet's brother was still teased and he, himself, began to tease some of the lower-functioning boys in cruel ways. When I mentioned to Harriet that her brother wasn't only the innocent victim of other boys' teasing of him, but also sometimes was the instigator of the fights he still kept getting into, even in his new lower-functioning group, Harriet gave me a disapproving look.

Yet even before our first disagreement, Harriet had begun to suddenly pull back emotionally from me. It began after the night we made love to each other in the back seat of her car in the camp parking lot.

She had suggested that I join her in the back seat. And, once there, she suddenly closed her eyes and started to bombard me with erotic kisses, wrap her arms and legs around me and excite me quickly, especially by the rapid ways she was moving her hips in a variety of circular motions. In our previous lovemaking, I was the one taking the initiative, while she responded in a tender way. But in the back seat of her car, Harriet had suddenly now become the more sexually aggressive one; and the wild way she let go produced vibrations and static electricity sounding and feeling waves, with each series of rapid and deep rotations of her hips.

Afterwards, as we walked back to our cabins, I was ready to follow Harriet anywhere on the globe and felt that my only ambition in life now was to just be Harriet's lover.

But by the next night, Harriet began to retreat emotionally from me and seemed to be having second thoughts about how close she wanted to be with me. When I mentioned that now that I had met her, I would have to start reconsidering my original plans for the Fall, she seemed to pull back even more, as if her intention had only been to have a summer affair with me. And after we walked further into the forest and had our disagreement about whether or not her brother was always the innocent victim of the teasing of others, Harriet no longer wanted to get together after work or on our day off.

"I'm busy tomorrow. And I have other plans for my day off. I'll let you know when I want to get together with you again," she said quietly after I kissed her goodnight.

"Oh," I replied with disappointment in my voice, before we walked out of the forest and back towards our respective cabins.

After Harriet suddenly pulled back from me emotionally and stopped spending her evenings and days off at the camp with me, I began to spend some time in the evening after hours on the porch in front of my group's cabin, talking with a co-counselor in the cabin to my right. He was a pre-med science student who seemed to be planning to go into medicine primarily because being a physician paid well. When I asked him why he thought Harriet had pulled away from me so suddenly, he answered: "She probably became scared about how close you became so quickly and was afraid she would become emotionally vulnerable, if she didn't step back from you quickly."

I wasn't sure whether his explanation for Harriet's sudden distancing of herself from me was a totally accurate explanation. But I did feel that it contained some truth in it.

After the romance with Harriet was over in early August, I began to find myself again being attracted more and more to Sandy during the rest of the summer. She had a gift for motivating campers to act in the summer camp's play, which was a production of the musical Oliver!. So whenever I hear the song from the show called “I'd Do Anything” sung, an image of Sandy at the summer camp always appears in my mind, even so many years later.

When she wasn't rehearsing the Oliver! Show, Sandy would continue to be leading the campers in song, accompanying herself with a few basic guitar chords on the after-dinner evening events. One of her theme songs for the summer seemed to be “I'd Do Anything.” She also would sing a spirited version of “If I Had A Hammer” that was nearly as good as Mary Travers' version. Another song Sandy sang which the campers loved to hear was her comical version of “The Cat Came Back.”

By August, the physically beautiful Arts & Crafts counselor, Stacey, had been fired by Mayer. I had only talked to Stacey once in the Arts Camp; Crafts cabin. A few days before Mayer fired her, while the campers in my group were working with paint, Stacey had suddenly confided in me in a worried tone: "Mayer's been complaining to me that I haven't gotten the campers to produce enough things to show their parents on Visiting Day. But why should the campers have to be pressured during their Arts Camp; Crafts period just so Mayer can show off their projects to their parents? I think Mayer is going to fire me."

The reason Stacey probably suddenly confided in me was because, like some of the other counselors, she probably assumed that I also was a candidate for getting the axe from Mayer--because of the way Mayer apparently seemed to be scapegoating me for the spread of camper bad mouthing of the dictatorial way he ran the camp, as the summer progressed.

"You're right about not pressuring the kids just so Mayer can show off their Arts Camp; Crafts projects to his customers," I had replied.

But I could not offer her any ideas on how to prevent Mayer from firing her before Visiting Day so that he could tell the parents of campers that "the reason" for the lack of Arts Camp; Crafts projects was because of "an incompetent Arts Camp; Craft counselor" who he "had to fire," instead of because of the dictatorial, over-structured, micro-managed way he ran the camp.

Sandy was immune from being fired because the majority of the campers would have written to their parents and complained in a major way, if Mayer ever tried firing her. But even the camp's most popular counselor and key person in providing live evening entertainment in the camp auditorium each night after dinner found herself being reprimanded in August 1970.

It was a year after the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival in which thousands of people had taken off their clothes together. In the summer of 1970, the movie of the Woodstock Festival was being shown at movie houses in the Poconos and the Catskills. So, naturally, an anti-war hippy like Sandy felt it made sense to take her teenage girl campers skinny-dipping on one of their hikes in August 1970.

When I went to Boy Scout camp in the early 1960s, our counselors allowed us to cool ourselves off during a long hike by going skinny-dipping in a pond along the way. And no one in the Boy Scout camp administration made any fuss about it.

But when word got back to Mayer in August 1970 that Sandy and her co-counselor Debbie had allowed their teen-aged girl campers to go skinny-dipping on a hike, Mayer became paranoid again. He apparently called Sandy into his office and warned her not to allow the campers in her group to skinny-dip again, since "their parents might get upset about it."

Sandy still saw nothing wrong about letting the campers in her group go skinny-dipping. But she didn't see any point in arguing with Mayer about it and thus giving him an excuse for blocking her from returning the next summer to the camp and continuing to do the special ed camp work that she loved in the country for yet another summer.

It was in early August one evening that, speaking over the camp loudspeaker system, Mayer summoned me to his trailer. Before leaving my group's cabin and walking over to Mayer's trailer, I assumed that Mayer was summoning me in order to fire me.

But when I arrived in Mayer's modernly-furnished trailer, he and his wife seemed to be looking at me in a more sympathetic way than usual. Mayer's wife was a plastic-looking woman in her late twenties or early thirties who, although she wore a lot of makeup and lipstick, would be considered physically attractive by most non-hippy men. But being a hippy man, I did not find her particularly appealing. She spent most of her time during the summer around her trailer and caring for Mayer's young child. Unlike Mayer, she was rarely seen by camp staff people or campers during the day or in the evening. Most likely she spent her evenings during the summer watching television in her modern trailer, while Mayer was outside micromanaging the camp after dinner.

"Our office received a call for you. You should call your family because your mother's been hospitalized," Mayer said quietly.

Stunned for a second, I replied, "I'll go call them now."

"You can use our phone," Mayer's wife then said.

I then made a collect call to my parents' apartment. I can't recall whether my father or my sister answered the telephone. But the next thing I remember is getting Mayer's permission to take a day off the next day in order to catch a bus from Monticello to NYC the following morning.

Arriving in New York City in late morning on a weekday, I took a subway from the Port Authority in Manhattan out to the Flushing Main Street stop and then caught a bus from there that drove along Northern Blvd. Toward North Shore Hospital.

By early afternoon I was visiting my mother in her hospital room. Although she had been seeing doctors regularly and taking prescription drugs like cortisone for her lung condition, which they had diagnosed as sarcoidosis, since I was a boy, she had never been hospitalized before. Seeing her, at the age of 49, with IV tubes in her arm, being fed intravenously, made me uneasy. But she still looked younger than her age, seemed cheerful, glad to see me and interested in hearing how I was enjoying my work at the summer camp.

So I was not surprised to hear that, although she had been hospitalized suddenly because of the negative results of a blood test, as a precautionary measure, the doctors were saying she would soon be released from the hospital and sent home, following completion of a blood transfusion. Later, I would be told by my sister that my mother had actually been close to death in the Summer of 1970. But at the time, I still mistakenly assumed that my mother was destined to live many more years.

Reassured, after visiting my mother in her hospital room, that, despite her sudden hospitalization, she was not in danger health-wise anymore, I took the bus and subway back to Manhattan's Port Authority bus terminal and hopped on an evening bus back up to Monticello. Then I spent the hours after midnight walking for six hours on the deserted country road that led from Monticello and across the NY-Pennsylvania state line to the summer camp. I arrived there in time to take the campers in my group to breakfast.

I can recall two other significant uses of the telephone at camp during the summer of 1970. Feeling isolated one weekday afternoon during my free period, I telephoned Scott on the Upper West Side.

After Wendy, Stephanie, Scott and I had abandoned our apartment on Staten Island in May 1969, Scott had moved to the Upper West Side to live with his womanfriend Carol on West End Avenue during the 1969-1970 academic year. I hadn't spoken or seen Scott since the week before Weatherman's Days of Rage action in Chicago; and I wanted to invite him and Carol to drive up to the Poconos and visit me in Honesdale on one of my days' off.

Carol answered the phone and was friendly. But Scott wasn't in. Scott, Carol and I had had some good times and good discussion turning on together at Carol's apartment during the Spring of 1969. So I told Carol that I missed her and Scott and was wondering if they would like to visit me in the Poconos.

In an uncomfortable tone, Carol replied: "We're moving West in a few days."

I wished Carol luck, but was sad because there was something in her voice's tone which made me feel I never was going to see the witty and friendly red diaper baby Carol again.

A second significant long-distance call I made was one to my subletted Bronx apartment to make sure that all was going smoothly there for my sublets, Eric and Michele. They said all was going well. But when I mentioned that I thought I might want to move west to California after the summer, they apparently then assumed that I was definitely going to not move back into my subletted apartment on September 1st, when the agreed-upon June 1 to August 31, 1970 sublet officially ended.

Eric and Michelle had originally seen the 3-month sublet of a $57/month, no down payment, rent-controlled apartment as just a good opportunity to save money, while they looked for a NYC apartment of their own to move into in September, 1970. But they apparently did not spend much time apartment-hunting during the summer because after my telephone call they began assuming they would be able to just inherit my cheap apartment in September 1970.

Yet in August 1970, the Belmont-Fordham Road neighborhood of the Bronx where my apartment was located seemed like a world away from the mountain country of eastern Pennsylvania; although the totalitarian nature of life at Mayer's camp made me eager to see the days of August roll by as fast as possible.

On the AM radio, "Band of Gold," and "Ride, Captain, Ride," and the Carpenters' "Close To You” played often. The hourly news reports only indicated, however, that the number of ghetto rebellions during the Summer of 1970 had diminished greatly in comparison with previous summers. The campers in my group and I were bored with our daily camp routine, fed up with Mayer's micro-management of the camp, and, like prisoners, counted the days for the camp season to end.

Susan, the 16-year-old waitress, however, seemed to be still enjoying herself at the camp, despite the prohibition on grass use. Her youthful enthusiasm, good nature and looks still attracted different hip male counselors; and she enjoyed the sensation of going horseback riding on her days off.

One morning she was in a particularly happy mood, and I was surprised that, after we walked alone towards each other on the grass lawn in front of the cabins--she going to the dining room, me returning to my group's cabin--Susan stopped suddenly. After saying hello to me, she next smiled, gave me a hug, and turned me on a bit by putting her right arm around my waist and touching the skin of my back tenderly.

But before I could respond to her sudden show of tender affection or talk to her about whether she was interested in getting to know me better, Susan started walking again at a quick pace towards the dining room. I still felt attracted to Susan, but realized I was probably too world-weary and too old for her in the Summer of 1970. So, despite this sudden show of affection by Susan, I did not start competing with the other hip male staff people whom she was seeing in August 1970.

Nancy--a physically beautiful, blonde 19-year-old local woman community college student who was employed during the summer cleaning each cabin every few days--also put her arm around my waist one day and touched the skin of my back in a tender way that turned me on. I had spent about ten minutes talking with her about her life and how it was like living around Honesdale, after I bumped into her during one of my daytime free periods, while she was cleaning my group's cabin.

Nancy, however, was not around the camp often enough to give me a chance to talk further with her during the rest of the summer. So, despite her show of affection, we got to know each other no further.

Like Susan, Nancy was not as world-weary or politically conscious as I was, despite being three years older than Susan. So, despite our intense conversation and mutual physical attraction, Nancy probably would have lost interest in me, anyway, once she realized I was no longer a student like her, was more political activist than hippy, and had poor future career prospects.

The other reason, however, for not attempting to get to know Nancy better, was that by this time in early August, I realized that I had fallen in love with Sandy. A song I had written by then for Sandy, for instance, included the following lyrics:

"You know how to love
And you're so much fun
Sandy, Sandy.

"Nothing new has happened
And nothing special am I
But I wish you would love me
Before we both all die."
By the last few weeks of the camp, most of the camp staff people had gotten to know each other as well as they were going to, having lived nearly 24 hours a day with each other for over 8 weeks. Sandy still radiated warmth and love towards me whenever we spoke or bumped into each other around the camp. But because Sandy also radiated warmth and love towards many campers and many other staff people at the same time, the possibility that she might ever consider dating me still seemed remote.

But during the last week of camp, I joined some other counselors one evening after work in getting into a few cars and all driving into Honesdale for some drinks at the local bar. Once there, we all had a few drinks and then discovered that the local townspeople in the bar were holding some kind of square dancing event on the bar's dance floor.

After the music started playing and the locals started dancing, Sandy--being the laughing hippie that she was--immediately wanted to join in the dancing. So she dragged a few of us unto the dance floor where the locals were dancing their set steps. None of us hippie camp counselors knew the set steps. So we formed couples and began to dance to the music in an improvised way, according to how we felt.

Somehow, Sandy and I ended up being a dancing couple and for about half an hour we danced to the music, as a couple, in a physically close and affectionate way. And when we sat in the back seat together in one of the cars which was driving us back to the camp, Sandy seemed even more affectionate towards me than she had ever been before.

Very soon after my evening of dancing in the bar with Sandy finally gave me a chance to hold her in my arms for awhile, the last day of summer camp arrived. Buses appeared in the camp parking lot to take back to a Midtown Manhattan hotel both the campers and the camp staff people who had not driven their own cars up to the camp at the start of the summer. Because Harriet and her brother lived in Toronto, which was in the opposite direction from the New York City area, they did not leave the camp on the buses. Instead, Harriet drove her brother back to Canada in her own car.

After Harriet had made sure all the girl campers in her group were safe on the buses going back to New York City, and was about to walk back towards her car to join her brother, who was impatiently waiting to leave the camp, we simultaneously noticed each other, about 10 yards apart. Although we started at each other for an instance, neither of us felt comfortable about saying farewell, by either kissing each other goodbye or hugging each other. Instead, we both just nodded "farewell."

By this time I had come to feel that Sandy was more like me in spirit than was Harriet and Harriet seemed to have become involved for a few days with one of the few less hippie-looking, conventionally straight male counselors. But when we nodded farewell to each other, Harriet now looked a little sad and I felt sad. So, although I was now more in love with Sandy than with Harriet, I still hoped that I would someday be able to meet Harriet again. And, philosophically, being a believer in free love and multiple relationships and against monogamy, I also had hopes that in the future I might even eventually get together with Harriet in Canada on occasion.

Once the buses arrived in Midtown Manhattan from the Poconos and dumped the campers and camp staff people at the hotel, we all went into the hotel. In one of the large hotel reception rooms, the parents then gathered up their kids, most of whom were glad to be back with their parents. Camp staff people were then each given a mimeographed paper with the names, telephone numbers and addresses of all the other camp staff people, to make it easier for us to keep in touch with each other until the next summer. Mayer also told the camp staff people that we should be expecting our paychecks for the summer to be arriving in the mail within the next two weeks. All the camp staff people then went on their separate ways.

By early September, I was back in my cheap Bronx slum apartment. But Eric and Michelle were still living there. Wishfully thinking that I was going to move to California in September, they apparently had only halfheartedly searched for another cheap apartment elsewhere in New York City.

They continued to crash in the apartment for another seven weeks, however, and finally decided to move back down to Washington, DC in late October 1970. Finding a cheap apartment in New York City had proven to be impossible for them, and the experience of apartment hunting in New York City had soured them on the Big Apple.

Within a few days of moving back into my Bronx apartment, I telephoned Sandy, who was living back in Nassau County in her mother's apartment. I told her that I missed her and asked her if she felt like getting together again, now that we were back from the country.

Sandy seemed glad that I had telephoned her. But she apparently felt uncomfortable about meeting me in Manhattan or in the Bronx. So it was arranged that we would meet each other in Cunningham Park, a few blocks from the Fresh Meadows apartment where my parents then lived, in the afternoon a few days later.

I still felt myself in love with Sandy. Although I would have preferred to walk around Central Park or the Bronx Botanical Gardens with her to walking around Cunningham Park in Queens, I was happy that Sandy was willing to get together with me so soon after returning from the country.

At the time we had agreed upon, Sandy and I both met on the big playing field in Cunningham Park, embraced, and kissed each other. It was a hot humid day in September and, as we walked towards the more deserted and sheltered forest area, I noticed that Sandy, who was wearing shorts, still had firm-looking legs that also turned me on physically.

In the forest area, we found a picnic table, which we both sat on. Then Sandy said: "I brought with me a joint."

After sharing the joint with me for a few minutes on the picnic table in the forest, Sandy suddenly said: "You know, I really become a different person once I return from the country and the summer camp. People are so uptight in the City and in the suburbs and they make me feel like I'm dead, once I'm back her."

"It doesn't have to be that way. We can both still live like hippies in New York City, in the same way we did at the camp, in the country," I replied.

Sandy laughed. "How are you going to support yourself? Are you going to become a doctor or a special ed teacher like most of those other hippies at the camp are probably all going to end up doing in a few years?"

I shook my head. "Of course, not. I'm not just a summer time hippie. I'm a hippie-radical. And I'm going to try to earn a living as a musician."

Sandy laughed again. "You saw me at the camp. I love to entertain, I love children, and that's why I go back to the camp every year. But I have to be realistic. So instead of trying to be into theater or musical comedy, I'm just going to finish my last year of college and be a special ed teacher. You can always find a job if you're a special ed teacher. That's what you should do, Bobby. You're good with children like I am and you'd also be a good special ed teacher. You have to be practical."

I shook my head. "We're still too young to be practical, I think. And why should we have to be practical, when the Revolution is going to happen in a few years anyway?' I said.

Sandy laughed yet another time. "And if there's no Revolution, you don't mind living in a slum apartment in the Bronx for the rest of your life, trying to earn a living as a hippie musician? Just like me, you're going to have to have some solid job to fall back on, eventually. We can't be hippies forever."

I still felt a love for Sandy. But as we continued to talk, I realized that, once she left the country and summer camp, Sandy suddenly became a more economic security-oriented and future-oriented person than was I.

Her father had died without leaving behind much money, her mother had a low-paying white collar job, and Sandy was realistic enough to be cautious about becoming involved in a love relationship with a hippie guy like me, whose economic prospects seemed too vague for her. Unless I dropped the musician ambition and indicated that I was getting into some practical career track, like being a special ed teacher, (and also moved from the Bronx to Queens or Nassau County) it seemed unlikely that Sandy would still be interested in me as a possible boyfriend for very long, now that we were back in the real world of the New York City area.

After the high from the pot we had smoked began to wear off, Sandy and I said goodbye to each other in an affectionate way. But as I took the bus back towards the subway that would bring me back to the Bronx, while Sandy took a bus back towards her mother's apartment in Nassau County, I realized I would not be calling her again soon. I did not realize, however, that I never would see Sandy again, as our lives apparently went in completely different directions.

I never saw Harriet again either. Near the end of 1970, I wrote her a love letter. But she did not bother replying. Susan, however, did reply to a letter I wrote her in 1971, when I was considering applying to the University of Tennessee (where the tuition for out-of-state students was still very low in 1971) to study agricultural economics (Many Movement people were into "going back to the land" by that time and into living in agricultural communes).

Susan was still friendly, but planning to spend the summer of 1971 at Mayer's summer camp again as a staff person. Because she was now still only 17, I again reminded myself that I was probably too world weary for her to want to see me again outside of a summer camp work situation. But because I wanted to encourage Susan's willingness to be friendly to an anti-war activist, rebel spirit like myself, I bought a pair of tickets to a Joan Baez concert at Carnegie Hall. Then I mailed the two tickets to Susan for her and one of her current boyfriends in New Jersey to use.

In early September 1970 I went to Coney Island one day with the pre-med guy who had been the counselor in the cabin next to door to mine that I spent evenings talking to a lot after Harriet suddenly pulled back emotionally from me. But he was too into being a money-oriented pre-med student for me to feel we had enough in common for us to stay in contact. The only guy from the camp, ironically, with whom I developed an after-summer friendship turned out to be the young boys' group counselor who had been fired after the drinking/rowboat capsizing incident, Charlie.

I bumped into Charlie while changing subway trains in 1973 during the evening rush hour. He was now trapped in some meaningless 9 to 5 job in the business world. But since the summer of 1970, Charlie had come to feel that, he preferred men sexually and now considered himself bisexual.

By 1974, Charlie couldn't take the straight 9 to 5 corporate world job anymore and was now a grad student in psychology at Harvard who lived in the Boston area. I took a bus up from New York City to visit him one weekend and we spent a Saturday night drinking in one of the Cambridge bars near Harvard Square. But because he had gotten more back into the academic track while I was still on the musician/activist cultural dropout track, we soon lost touch and I never saw him again. By the mid-1980s, I began to fear that Charlie had become one of the casualties of the U.S. government's inaction in response to the AIDS epidemic.

Mayer, predictably, ended up only paying me $500 of the $1,000 he had previously promised to pay me for my counseling work when he hired me. After I telephoned him in the Fall of 1970 to complain about him not paying me the $1,000 he originally agreed to pay me, Mayer denied that I was ever promised more than $500. So I ended up going to small claims court in the Bronx to get a summons for Mayer to appear there, which I delivered to his office at the Special Ed school in Queens where he had hired me the previous May.

But by the date the trial was scheduled, my 1970 summer camp experience seemed like ancient history and I did not think I possessed sufficient written evidence to get a small claims court judge, who would probably prefer Mayer's straight appearance to my hippie appearance, to rule in my favor. So I did not bother to show up in court and I let the matter drop. Yet I did find some satisfaction in seeing Mayer's reaction when I handed him the summons to appear in small claims court, and in knowing that I at least had been able to inconvenience him for a day by compelling him to go to small claims court to make sure the case against him was dismissed by the judge.

So these are my memories of being at Summer Camp in 1970. In an historical period when it still looked to me like a free love-oriented, leisure-oriented, culturally hip society would be created within the United States by the end of the 1970s. But the future would confirm that Sandy, after all, ended up having a more realistic picture of how economically viable being a hippie drop-out would be as the 1970s progressed--within the real world of 9 to 5 slavery, not the fantasy world of a country summer camp in the Poconos.

--bob f. (written in 2004 – 2005)