Camp Tall Trees Memories

Camp Tall Trees

Camp Tall Trees will always have a special place in my heart.  It was at camp that I decided that I wanted to be a history teacher because I liked being around young people and I loved being the center of attention.  Part of my job as a camp counselor was to lead the songs after lunch and dinner, telling the ghost story on Sunday or Monday night, and running the field days.  I loved to run through the woods during rest periods and to read while proctoring the upper unit on tournament days.  The counselors were like brothers to me.  We bonded over “Risk” games, hiked during the after-hours to explore “Clancy’s Cave,” and, on Saturday nights, the only time when the campers were not at Tall Trees, a group of counselors would go into town for a steak dinner at the Blue Steer restaurant and then see a movie.  More than anything, camp provided a respite for me.  A place for me to retreat to during the summers of my early years.  It gave me some space to figure out who I was and where I was going to.

My time at camp didn’t start out so great.  Chris Waggoner, David Greenwell, and I were the Blackfeet, or the kitchen help, working under the cook, Mrs. Gileson, back in 1978.  We spent endless hours washing dishes, scrubbing pans, sweeping up and then mopping the floors, and otherwise keeping the mess hall ready to feed 85 campers and 12 counselors three times a day, six days a week.  It made for long hours filled with nothing but drudgery.  To help ease the monotony of the day we listened to the radio quite a lot and to this day, whenever I hear “Baker Street” by Jerry Rafferty, “Joker” by the Steve Miller Band, or “Life’s Been Good” by Joe Walsh, my mind immediately is taken back to the mess hall and all of the chores that we were assigned to do as the kitchen help.

I was frustrated during my first year at camp because David was lazy and Chris was a perfectionist.  I was somewhere between these polar opposites and the end result was that we spent way too much time doing chores that another crew could complete in half the time.  We were over worked and under-appreciated but I knew that a lot of our problems were self-inflicted.  Also, I was immature and refused to eat Mrs. Gileson’s cooking because I was too picky for anything but hot dogs.  After a summer living on near starvation rations I was thin to the point of being unhealthy.  To make my Blackfoot year even more uncomfortable, I had the worst case of poison ivy ever and I could barely ball my hand into a fist because the welts were all of the way through most of my fingers.

In my second year at camp I was the back up to one of the most popular counselors ever hired on by Fr. Hemmerle.  His name was Mark Roth but he took on the nickname Hawkeye because he wore an old red robe like the character from the television series, “M.A.S.H.”  Hawkeye was the song leader and the head life guard and I was to help him out in both of those positions.  1979 was Fr. Hemmerle’s worst year at camp because there was a lot of discord between the counselors.  Hawkeye could have been a big help during this horrible summer with his quiet leadership and calming presence.  Instead, about half way through the season, he decided not to show up for work.  Hawkeye went to Chicago for a long weekend, which stretched out to mid-week and by the time that he finally showed up on Thursday, Father had to fire him.  That is how I became the head life guard and song leader and it didn’t go well because the other counselors thought that I was acting above my station as a first year counselor.  In addition to the personality conflicts, and the missing Hawkeye, there was one week in the middle of the season it rained every day.  Everyone was miserable.  You couldn’t keep your shoes and clothes dry and went through a week’s worth of laundry in a day.  Even today I am surprised that I went back to camp for a third season when the first two years went so poorly for me.

1979 was the nadir for Camp Tall Trees but everything started to get better in 1980.  Fr. Hemmerle was more careful in the hiring of counselors and Jeff Braden, who to this day I look upon as a big brother, began to lead the camp.  The same could be said of Fred Hutt.  The old salts like Steve Petry and Mark Clements were gone and in their place came Karl and Steve Russ, Dan and Vincent Barrett, Pat and Terry Mullaney, Tod Knight and Mike Lott, Matt Dumstorf and Tim Babrowski.  We all became close and we did things together like taking road trips to St. Louis, Atlanta, Kings Island, and Disneyworld.  During the off-season we would go to Showcase Cinemas to watch movies with Fr. Hemmerle.  Eventually, as the years drifted by, we attended each other’s weddings.

In the early years my most salient job was that of being the lifeguard.  I rang the gong to signal the end of craft period and then began the long walk from the upper unit, through the lower unit, and then down to the pool.  At first I would walk by myself but the closer that I came to the pool area the more campers would join me so that usually there would be a crowd around me as I unlocked the gate to gain entry to the deck.  Sundays were a trial because that is when we did the swim test.  The campers were not allowed in the deep end unless they passed the test so we had 85 people in the pool at the same time and it was chaotic.  The Tall Trees rule was that the campers could not dunk each other but the counselors were considered to be fair game so there were times when the counselors emerged from the water with their backs ripped to shreds and their skin under the fingernails of the campers.  By the end of the summer the counselors no longer swam with the campers because they wanted to avoid the back pain.  

Other outstanding memories of the pool are when the deck became infested with horseflies.  There were so many of them that we had a contest to see who could kill the most of these pests and the result was that there were piles of horseflies all over the deck.  Another memory was when a camper slipped and fell and bashed his head on the side of the pool.  I picked the kid up and carried him in my arms as the nasty head wound bled all over my stomach and arms.  Since I didn’t take the time to put on my shoes, I had to run across the gravel path barefooted, but I was so excited that I didn’t feel any pain.  The camper was taken to the hospital and he was fine but the image of the blood trickling down my body haunted me for years.

The job of being a lifeguard is extremely boring and we had two separate pool times at camp every day for six days a week.  I wanted some acknowledgement of having to sit up in the chair for up to four hours every day so I made the campers yell “Ooh Aah Jeff” before I blew the whistle to signify that they could get into the pool.  There was some arm motions to go with it, and the whole thing was stupid, but this was a small payback for me because no matter how cold it was there was always a few diehards who just had to go for a dip.

I was a camper from 1970-1975 and couldn’t wait for my first summer at Tall Trees.  My older brother had been there before me and I remember him coming home to sing all of these new and strange camp songs and he made new friends whom he would visit after the camp season was over and I wanted to be a part of that.  My outstanding memories of camp were hike day when I thought that we were so far back in the woods that know one could possibly find us if we got lost.  Eating hot dogs by the river seemed like an adventure.  On movie night we watched “Follow Me Boys” and “PollyAnna” on an old reel to reel projector while using a bedsheet for the screen.  We shot BB guns and, while on the archery range, I tossed the arrows at the camper who was next in line to shoot.  Mark Waggoner was my chief and he made me yell “I am stupid” in front of the rest of the tribe for throwing arrows.  We felt like we were on a WWII rescue mission while playing “The Commando Raid” and everyone wanted to know the secret identity of the Lone Eagle, or the counselor who checked our cabins every day to make sure that they were neat and clean.  The coveted title of “Tribe of the Week” was the reward for earning the most points by the Lone Eagle and winning the tournaments and creating the most artistic crafts.  When our parents picked us up we immediately showed them the ribbons that we won and we regaled them with stories of our adventures from our week at camp. 

Once I became a counselor, I had many jobs over the years from being the head lifeguard, to plaster craft, the rifle range where the campers shot 22s, and I also drove the hospital runs in case anyone became sick or was hurt.  One of my favorite jobs was leading the older campers down “Devil’s Backbone” and into Otter Creek.  The other counselors referred to my hike as “The Death March” because I took the campers on a long hike.  I liked to wear the kids out in retribution for them keeping us up all night on Sunday.  It was on this hike that I played a little joke on the other counselors by wading ahead of them in the creek then turning around and yelling, “Splash the counselors” to the campers.  The counselors would get drenched and vowed vengeance against me, which they usually got.  Yet the image that sticks with me from camp, more than any other, was when a camper sliced open his leg while crossing a log in the creek.  It wasn’t bloody, like you might see in the movies, but instead fat protruded from the wound.  I still have nightmares about that wounded camper.

The thing about working at a summer camp is that there is very little privacy so, in order to get some alone time, I used to run the trails during rest period.  The woods are silent, so I can spend some time thinking, and the views of the Ohio River were spectacular.  A second way for me to escape was by reading.  On Thursdays and Fridays, we held the horseshoe and ping pong tournaments, and finished the crafts, in the lower unit.  No one was allowed in the upper unit and it was my job to stand watch to make sure that the campers didn’t try to sneak back into their cabins to get into mischief.  I had the two craft periods to myself and it was then that I did a lot of reading.  To this day, running and reading are two of the ways that I escape from the real world for a while.

The guy who represents Tall Trees, as both a camper and counselor, was Denny Ernst because he loved the place so much.  Denny had been a camper for eight years and he should have aged out after seven but Fr. Hemmerle allowed him to come back for one more year.  Denny liked to say that he was the only camper to drive his car to camp.  We had a talent show on Thursday nights and Denny started “The Tribesmen,” or an air guitar band, and he would spend his off-hours making costumes and working on the light show for his band.  On Fridays we had field days and Denny loved to judge the “Mellow Yellow Chugging Contest.”  I shared a cabin with Denny one summer and he would drive me crazy by doing little things like suddenly bellowing out “Corn tastes better” at the top of his lungs for no other reason than he liked the commercial for butter where that jingle came from.  He had so much energy, and he had so much enthusiasm for the camp, that it was infectious. 

Of course, the heart and soul of Camp Tall Trees, was Fr. Hemmerle.  There was never any doubt that it was his camp and he ran the whole show.  He was a quiet leader who held the respect of the counselors and campers because he handled tough situations without drama or intimidation.  When he was faced with a dilemma, like should we cancel a hike because we might get hit with storm clouds, he reached out to the counselors for advice.  We felt like we were part of a team when it came to decision making.  Some of the images of Fr. Hemmerle that I remember are of him constantly checking the scanner in his cabin to see if we were in for some nasty weather.  He humbly sat on the edge of a bench, where he acted as a cashier during canteen, to check off the amount of money that the campers were spending on Coke and candy bars.  There were no displays of pretension or vanity as he wore the same old shorts, and a worn t shirt, every day.  Fr. Hemmerle whiled away the craft periods by talking to the campers as he was tying off their Gimp, and he was truly interested in what they had to say. Early in the morning, before anyone else was up, you could hear the clickety clack of his typewriter as Fr. Hemmerle typed out the agenda for the day.  All the campers bunched up around the bulletin boards as soon as the agenda was posted to see if their name appeared on it.

During mail call Fr. Hemmerle made a big show out of sniffing some of the letters as if they were perfumed.  He liked to pretend that the letters were from the campers’ girlfriend and the camper would have to say, with a tinge of embarrassment, that “It’s from my Mom!”  Finally, at night, when all the campers were told to stay in their cabins, the counselors met up at the mess hall to talk and to play games.  Fr. Hemmerle grabbed a bowl of cereal and joined us and talked briefly about the trials that he had encountered that day in running the camp.  This was as close as he ever came to complaining and, after a few minutes, he would wash out his bowl and head down to his cabin and begin the process of preparing for the next day at Camp Tall Trees.