Margot Homburger (1946-50) signed up for two weeks and asked for more. “At that time, I ended up moving into a different cabin with different girls and then I was just a little homesick, so maybe I was there just a little too long. But, every year I waited for that flyer to come and my friends and I would try to get into the same cabin, but we always made new friends. We used to leave camp in tears and cry all the way to Standish and couldn’t wait to get back the next year.”

Gretchen Jacques (1955) could not relate to the homesick girls and loved the woods and sleeping outside. Although her mother did not like to camp, the family used to rent places on Mullet Lake and continued with two of her sisters buying on the same lake. “As a kid, I hated to leave those places, too. My whole family felt like that. I loved it and hated to leave, just like camp. I called it reverse homesick.”

Pam Hartz (1966-75) loved camp and could not wait to go back each summer. “After eight weeks, I just did not want to leave at all, and I loved being a counselor. I liked that I could be a shoulder to cry on for the girls who were homesick, or had to have braces or whatever.”

“When we left, we would cry all the way home. My Mom called it camp sickness instead of homesickness,” said Betsy Falvey (1968-75). “I was never homesick. Instead I would sit in my room and write letters to my friends and counselors from camp. Honestly, I was more homesick when I went off to college!”

One summer Marsha Immerman (1947-53) took friend and fellow camper Molly Olson home with her when they left camp. Her Mom had spent all week baking in anticipation of their homecoming, but recalled when they stepped off the bus they just wanted to go back to camp. “It wasn’t personal. We just never wanted to leave. All year round we would get ready for camp. The flyers would come and we would already be packing or shopping for clothes.”

Dawn Sohigan’s mother was a single Mom and could not understand why she did not want to leave camp. For Dawn, leaving camp was traumatic, as she said goodbye to her friends in the sixties.

Jennifer McLogan would “cry, weep and wail” when her parents arrived, as did Kathy Carney, who were both at camp in 1971 together. Neither was ever homesick, but when Kathy left she would call her camp friends and ask how long they cried. “Till Flint, or Saginaw, or wherever,” she laughed.

“We cried all the way home on the bus until we got to Bay City, then we opened the windows and sang ‘We Are The Girls From Camp Maqua’ all through the town,” said Judy Alcorn (1946).

“You can see how I loved it. In 1929 I went for just one week—to take and pass the tests for my American Red Cross Life Saving badge. I was a big girl then, of course, and then the next summer when I could not go at all, I thought the world had come to an end. Other girls seemed to be able to take it or leave it, but from the first I was hooked and in some form have enjoyed camping ever since,” wrote twenties’ camper Harriet Crumb in a letter to me in 1988.

“In subsequent years I moved to different cabin and met different girls and counselors. Each summer was very special. The bus back to the YWCA in Bay City was filled with crying girls waving frantically to their beloved counselors,” wrote Kay Alcorn from the forties. “When it was over, it was over. I never aspired to be a counselor.”

Did you beg to stay for extra sessions? Were your wishes granted by your family? Why or why not?