“Camp Goers Too Busy To Worry About Weather” read the headline from a local Bay City newspaper pasted into the archival scrapbook. “Grade School Registered At Maqua Today: 25 Travel By Bus” was the second headline.
“Too agog about going to camp to care about the gray weather, and too busy lugging crowded bags to bother about rain coats, twenty-five youngsters of grade school age were at the YWCA this morning to board the bus that took them to Loon Lake. Munching candy, and starting to sing before they were even out of town, the crowd made a merry invasion of Camp Maqua for the first camping period of the season”, read the piece from June 26, 1935.
“The girls usually arrived on a bus that left from the YWCA in Bay City”, wrote 1920’s camper Margaret Dahlem in a letter in 1988, “but one rich girl arrived on a white motorcycle.”
There were more ways to arrive in style, as her friend Harriet Crumb could attest to one summer as she stood on the lawn of the lodge. She also rode the bus through Pinconning, Standish, Twining, Turner and Whittemore and into Hale, singing camp songs the entire time and loved the attention she received from the locals as they arrived in town.
“Initially, we were all loaded onto a bus, which belonged to the Y,” recalled Beverly Schlatter (1944-1949), “in front of the old “Y” building. We would meet all our friends there, with our footlockers or trunks packed with clothes or bedding for two weeks. My Dad unloaded the footlocker from the car to the bus and all the parents waved to us. As the bus pulled away, the older girls who had been to camp before, started singing the Maqua camp songs and that’s how we learned them.”
As early as 1934, the camp committee wanted the price of the bus trip to camp lowered. Ledgers from 1935 indicated the price of a trip through Balcer Brothers Bus Co. was $27. “Billie” (Wilma) Smith recalled she was ten years old when she boarded (1933-34) with her friends Pam McCauley and Margie Knepp.
In the late forties and early fifties, Sharon Wilcox had bigger than life memories of her camping experience, but it began in Bay City with the bus that transported the girls to camp. “It was such an exciting adventure riding on that bus and ironically now I am in the bus business!”
Minette Immerman (1938-1944) took the bus to camp, and although her Mom did not own a car, she would borrow one to visit her at camp,
“There was a vigorous discussion,” stated the minutes in November 1955, concerning transportation to camp. Proposals included charging the girls for using the bus, which would develop a fund and the second was to require all girls to go by bus. The final determination was never listed and one is left wondering if the bus was ever included in the camp fees.
How many of you hopped on the bus from the Bay City YWCA? What are your memories?