March 5, 2005

• Scout Camp
  1953-’54?

  To the best of my recollection, these two events occurred in the
  summers between fourth and fifth and between fifth and sixth
  grades.  That would make it ’53 and ’54.  In the summer of
  1953, my father had been dead for a year and a half.  My mother
  had been contacted by her childhood sweetheart, Jim Henry, during the
  winter after Daddy died.  He flew from Arkansas to San Jose and
  they wed that spring.  We drove Route 66 as far as Oklahoma City,
  then turned off for Little Rock, Arkansas.

  After a few weeks in Little Rock while Jim set about selling his
  business in Pine Bluff, he accompanied my mother and me to my cousin
  Red Conners’s home in Halstead, Kansas and then returned to close the
  sale on his tire shop and tie up his loose ends.  That was the
  last we heard of him.  He seemed to vanish off the face of the
  earth.  His ex-wife and grown children in Arkansas said he had
  packed up and left for Kansas.  Her plans thus forcibly altered,
  my mother arranged to buy Halstead Sundries from my cousin, and we
  moved into the storeroom loft at the back of the store.

  It seems incredible to me that all this could have happened in a year,
  but I remember spending Christmas at my cousins’ house the year I was
  in fourth grade, and that was 1952, just a year after my father’s
  death.  I had missed the start of school that year, enrolling late
  in Halstead.  I had few friends.  My mother urged me to join
  Girl Scouts.  Mrs. Santee, a widow who ran the town’s hardware
  store, was one of the Scout leaders, and she helped Mama persuade me to
  get involved in scouting.  I wasn’t eager at first. 

  When I think of myself at that time, I see me hanging around the store
  helping my mother, dropping red nickels in the juke box, reading
  magazines and paperbacks off the racks in the store, or lying sick in
  bed on that loft.  I can hear myself calling from my bunk,
  “Maamaa,” and then her annoyance at yet another interruption and a trip
  up those stairs.  One time, she called back, “I’m sick of hearing
  that word, ‘mama.’  Call me Mabel!”  Her name was
  Dorris.  After that, whenever I wanted to get a laugh, I’d call
  her Mabel.

  By the end of the school term, I had a few friends in the scout troop
  and they were looking forward to summer camp.  Our troop was going
  to Camp Bide-a-Wee outside Wichita.  I wanted to go.  It was
  expensive.  That was always a consideration.  Money was a
  grave concern for Mama and me throughout my childhood.  She
  scraped up the money for summer camp, though, and I got to go.

  I don’t remember how long I stayed there.  It was more than a day,
  I guess.  I remember the cabins scattered among the trees — ours
  had bunks for eight girls; and I remember seeing the swimming pool, but
  I don’t think I was ever in the pool.  In the big main building,
  after lunch, tables were pushed back and chairs set up before the stage
  at one side of the large room.  There were tryouts and rehearsals
  for a talent show that was to be held on the weekend when our parents
  came to pick us up.

  I was involved in two skits.  In one of them, a series of kids
  were to run one by one, agitated and screaming, across the stage,
  shouting, “beware the viper,” “It’s the viper!”  or “Here come’s
  the viper!”  Then one would saunter onto the stage in a man’s coat
  and hat, carrying a bucket and squeegee, and say slowly in a deep
  voice, “I am the viper, the vindow viper.”  Ha ha.

  For the other skit, I was to do a sort of Perils of Pauline act. 
  I had one prop:  a piece of paper, fan-folded and gathered in the
  center, in a sort of bowtie shape.  Holding it on my upper lip as
  a mustache, I’d growl, “You must pay the rent.”  Then moving the
  prop to my head as a hair ribbon, I’d whine, “I can’t pay the
  rent.”  Back to the mustache and, “But you MUST pay the rent!”
  …and the hair ribbon:  “BUT I CAN’T pay the rent!”  Then it
  goes to my throat as a bowtie and in a bright Dudley Do-right voice, I
  say, “I’ll pay the rent!”  Finally, it’s a hair ribbon again, “My
  hero!”  Ha ha.

  I don’t remember when things went sour or what triggered my
  breakdown.  I recall a sunny day when I was crying and couldn’t
  stop.  I wanted to talk to my mother.  I was scared, afraid
  I’d never see her again.  It was against the rules, but the
  counselor finally took me to the director’s office and I was allowed to
  call home.   I sobbed and blubbered and told Mama I wanted to
  go home.   She was working in the store.  She got Red’s
  wife Blondie to pick me up, and I blubbered and sobbed all the way home
  with Blondie and her daughter, my second-cousin Elizabeth.

  Mama showed some consternation at my panic and distress.  She and
  Granny (her sister Alice) and Blondie told me I was just
  homesick.  Red made fun of me as a crybaby.  There was
  nothing to worry about.  It was dismissed.  The following
  summer, when I wanted to go to Girl Scout Camp again, I had to wheedle
  and cajole.  Mama was reluctant.  She was about as close as
  she ever got to adamant.  She had spent a lot of money for nothing
  the previous summer.  I had to assure her that I was well and
  truly over my homesickness, and I suppose I was.

  The camp we went to that year wasn’t Bide-a-Wee.  I don’t recall
  its name.  It was something with a Native American flavor, and
  that’s all I remember about the name.  I remember a lot about the
  place, however.  It was northwest of Halstead, somewhere near
  Burrton.  There was no swimming pool.  There was a
  lake.  There were canoes, and a rickety old wooden pier extending
  out into the lake.  On the sunny day that we arrived, we were
  assembled on the dock, welcomed, and lectured on the rules,
  regulations, and procedures.

  Each of us was assigned to a tent.  They were OD green army
  surplus tents.  Each tent held four army cots.  We stowed our
  bags of gear and clothing on the bare ground under the cots, and went
  to dinner.  The dining hall was the only building I remember being
  there.  Offices and the counselors’ dormitory were in the
  back.   The dining hall’s windows were screened, no
  glass.  It was an extremely open-air place, and the dining room
  was only marginally warmer or drier than the tents.  Most of the
  time in the Kansas summer, that wouldn’t be a problem, but…

  The day we arrived was the only sunny day for the whole two
  weeks.  We never did get to go swimming or canoeing on the
  lake.  Mornings and evenings, we would run through the rain from
  our tents to the dining room, wolf down our food, then run back through
  the rain to the tents.  Before and after lunch, we’d gather in the
  dining room for activities.  The paths and the entire hillside
  became a slippery mire.  One evening, the rain stopped long enough
  for us to gather around a campfire and make s’mores.

  The rest of the time, we huddled in our tents, or worked on crafts
  projects in the dining hall or listened to and told stories.  I
  wrote a letter home each day.  After about the third day, the
  tents were all leaking, and all our letters home were spotted and
  smudged.  Clothing and sleeping bags were wet.  The towels we
  had packed to take with us were wet and we were mercifully not required
  to shower every day.  Most of us and our counselors had
  colds.  Through it all, morale was high.  Everyone just
  assumed that the rain would pass and we would swim and canoe and frolic
  in the sun.

  One group of parents had done the carpooling to take us to camp. 
  Two weeks later, a different group of parents came to pick us up. 
  My mother was in the second group.  Three of my closest friends,
  Barbara, Nancy, and Sharron, piled into our car.  We were all damp
  and not too clean, and both sad that camp was over, and happy to be
  going home.  With the heater on and the windows fogged, we started
  out toward Halstead in the rain.   It was a heavy rain, a
  downpour.  The windows gradually cleared, and the wipers were
  doing a passable job of clearing the windshield. 

  The road ran south, with woods and a creek along the right side and
  wheatfields on the left.  Mama was concentrating on the road and
  we girls were chattering in the back seat.  One of the others
  spotted something out the window in the wheatfield and squealed,
  “Look!”  It was a funnel cloud.  Mama glanced that way and
  kept on driving.  We watched a tornado dip down several times and
  pull back up again as our path and the funnel’s converged.  Then
  the world outside the windows turned gray, everyone screamed and the
  car spun around.  When the tornado had passed, the car was still
  on the road and rolling, but it was headed north.  Mama pulled to
  a stop at the next driveway, turned around and took us home.
  

  • 4:15 pm
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