Amy Falvey began camping at Maqua in 1970, when she was nine years old, and finished her last year in 1978 when the camp closed. Her big sister Betsy was her impetus for attending, and every year the sessions increased with her increased enjoyment of her experiences.
“The first year it was two weeks, then three weeks, then two weeks, then four weeks and then eight weeks,” she laughed, recalling that is how she remembered the years, by the amount of weeks she attended. Then their mother passed away and she skipped 1976 and 1977, returning in 1978 as a counselor.
“Both camps were struggling financially and Maqua had the better physical facility, so the two boards merged their camps, or that was my understanding. It started out badly from the minute we met at the Bay City YWCA building staging area to bus to camp. I thought this is not good. They kept changing the time we were to leave to bus up to camp and many of us had been to camp and knew the way. There must have been some internal problem, but we could see no reason why we were not on our way. It started off negatively and then when we all got to camp, we could see it hadn’t been taken care of,” said Amy.
“They hired an interesting bunch of guys and the rest were women. It was a goofy bunch. It felt like they were invading our space. It was just a weird dynamic. One director named Meg changed the colors of the staff shirts, so we were all separated in a way by our colors. Before it went co-ed all the staff wore white shirts with green trim. Now the administration wore red, the junior counselors were in navy and the counselors were in light blue. It felt splintered. There was no unity from day one. There were cliques of boys and cliques of girls and none of the girls wanted to hang out with the boys and the sense of family that we once enjoyed was lost. When I drove out of camp that last day, I was so glad to be gone and it was sad. I just thought get me out of here. The Karma was awful.”
“Nothing about it was the same. It had gone co-ed with Camp Iroquois from Sand Lake and the whole dynamic changed,” said Amy. ““I might have burned that shirt from my last year, but I still have the colored photo of all the co-ed campers and pristine copies of the “Loon” newsletters and every photo in my scrapbook.”
Karen Selby camped in 1976, then returned and spent the last three years as an arts counselor with some huge changes taking place at the camp. Unbeknownst to her, she spent the last year of her camping days in a camp that would close that last summer, as she donned her pale blue shirt to distinguish herself from the campers.
“It was a wild summer. I am surprised I survived that summer. I had just graduated from high school. There were people from Hawaii, Kentucky and all over and it was a wild mix of people. The director was game for anything. The waterfront director was one girl out of a family of all girls. On the first night of camp, the little sister got drunk and she was seventeen and was sent home that night. It was clear before the first camper ever stepped foot on the camp property that the camp director was not going to make it. She was a woman and she was on site, but to amuse ourselves, we used to just watch what was going on. I never left camp all summer because I couldn’t wait to see what happened next!”
“She was so disconnected and when the boys arrived the next year, it was not good. The dynamics changed. Here we had never had contact with the boys from Camp Mahn-go-tah-see all those years I camped there and never seemed very interested. Boys were never on my mind at camp, even though I was an adolescent. It was weird for that reason. Now there were boys in camp. They split the camp and it was odd. The young girls were at the back of the camp, which was the longest hike to the lodge. They boys and girls were never together. It was set up so the boys were only with us for campfires and meals, but no activities together.”
What do you recall of the camp during the transition?