“There was one dessert with cherries on it that we would do anything for a second helping. Usually, if you worked in the kitchen, you could get that second piece,” said Pam Wintermute (1955-56), who also recalled she had to bring a folding drinking cup to camp.
Cynthia Gregory (1960-65) also brought her collapsible cup for snack time. “We would have milk and cookies in the lodge, but we didn’t wash the cups very well. Maybe we would bring them back to the Brownie and rinse them out. I guess I didn’t wash mine for a few days and the smell of soured milk had gone inbetween.”
Two of the campers remembered the best homemade ice cream they had ever tasted at camp, and for Elaine Levinsohn (1927-30), apple butter was her favorite new taste.
Business manager Rhonda Thayer (1974-77) said, “The girls loved the pizza burgers, which were hot dog and hamburger buns with a can of pizza sauce spread on them and ground beef with a handful of cheese. It took so much work though, making hundreds of them to be then toasted in the oven, bevause they wanted three or four of them! But, we did it anyway.”
Shelley Harris (1965-75) had fond memories of the taffy pulls. “Every session had a cabin night and we could choose what we wanted to do. I’m not sure how we made the taffy, but I remember the butter on my hands and we would pull this candy mess and mush and pull it with a partner. Then we would bake it in pans. My hands were always burnt, but it was good. I also recall trying to do the same thing with oozing, gooey marshmallows.”
“Everyone had a good appetite for meals,” said Caryl Sue Abendroth, “ and the food was generous and fragrant. We sang grace and the harmony of the voices was beautiful.” (She proceeded to sing, “Noon time is here. The board is spread. Thanks be to God, who gives us bread. Praise God for bread.)
Diane Dudley (1957-63) had memories of director Alice Bishop on Friday nights yelling before the meal. “All the Catholics and Jews at the first two tables!”, and the rest of us would sit wherever. The Catholics had fish, the Jews had hamburgers and everyone else got hot dogs,” she said. “One time I looked at my friend in the kitchen and said, let’s be Jewish tonight—I like hamburgers.”
She described the camp food as scrumptious and lots of it, with three good meals a day and desserts and snacks. “You could buy Faygo Rock and Rye, or Black Cherry after meals, plus candy bars. All my life I didn’t care about starving children in China that my Mom talked about. Box it up and send it to them, I would tell her,” laughed Diane.
Food jokes were also not off the table. One evening Mary Obey and her friends made a dog food sandwich and promptly served it to one of the counselors. “She ate it! And I still remember her name—Kathy French,” said Mary, whose camping years spanned the late fifties’ and into the sixties’.
What do you recall of your food experiences at camp?