Introducing city kids to that mysterious place called nature
What are the things you learn at camp? I couldn’t tell you, not first-hand. The great divide in my childhood summers was between those who attended camp and those who didn’t. I’d watch them enviously, those who were bundled off by their parents for a few weeks of adventure in this mysterious place called nature. As a downtown kid from a blue-collar immigrant family, camp was a mirage, fantasy land, and I lacked a passport. The very idea of dispatching their children to the country for a fortnight so they could sleep in bunks and cook hot dogs over an open fire and get eaten alive by mosquitoes was incomprehensible to my folks, to say nothing of it being beyond their financial reach. They came from the backwoods and couldn’t imagine ever willingly trading in modern conveniences for rustic pleasures. Canadians were so weird. I was particularly wistful when we moved across the street from a synagogue that was the embarkation point for buses to a Jewish camp. So many of those being hugged goodbye were kids I knew from school, who were laden with duffel bags and knapsacks and care packages. I peeked at them from behind the living room curtain, the eternal outsider.
Closest I ever got to summer camp was watching Meatballs. Not quite the formative experience the real thing can be to so many who were lucky
enough to have it.
Seth Rogen, for instance, went to a Jewish summer camp, in British Columbia, where he honed his standup act for a kiddie audience.
Bob Dylan arrived at camp in Wisconsin with a guitar slung across his shoulder and riding a motorcycle. The teen was apparently given the bike as a lure by his folks, so he would agree to attend.
Larry David, the comedian-writer who co-created Seinfeld and starred in Curb Your Enthusiasm, is an alumnus of a camp in the Catskills where, his first summer, he auditioned for a role in the musical Annie Get Your Gun. Fled the stage when he got booed. “The first sign of who I am: a coward.’’
Julia Roberts spent her summers at a camp owned by an uncle. “All the coolest things I learned how to do, I learned to do at camp.”
Lady Gaga, the Coen Brothers, Denzel Washington, Ralph Lauren, Harrison Ford, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonard Nimoy, J.D. Salinger, Steve Martin — all had that summertime-andthe-living-is-cannonball-easy camp experience.
I can’t promise that youngsters escaping Toronto’s sweltering summer by way of the Star’s Fresh Air Fund will grow up to be famous. But they will definitely grow up with life skills and hands-on experience, and discovering teamwork and independence, self-confidence and friendships. And they will definitely step outside their urban narrowness, the cracked asphalt basketball courts, the mall.
They’ll overcome fears, come out the other side of homesickness, venture into the splendour of a natural environment.
They’ll lift their eyes from their damn smartphones.
What I didn’t learn as an inner city kid: How to swim, how to tie knots, how to paddle a canoe, how to toast a marshmallow on a stick, how to recognize poison ivy, how to use a compass, how to skim a pebble, how to hike a trail, how to appreciate quiet.
True, I did figure out some of that stuff in later years. As a now-and-then war correspondent, I was required to take survival courses and obtain first aid certification … although, the usefulness of rendering dirty water potable or attending to a sucking chest wound or withstanding a chemical attack has limited applicability in domestic life.
Thing is, whatever skills I did finally winkle were mostly self-taught and I started way behind the pack. Cannot tell you the humiliations of adult swim class. And while I learned early how to slaughter a pig and stuff a sausage — the carcass draining blood in the cellar — I still haven’t mastered a decent roast wienie. Or a s’more that doesn’t fall apart.
Competencies learned in formative days of childhood stay with a person forever. So do the qualities of camaraderie and the thrill of discovery.
No kid should be denied that just because the household can’t afford it. For 119 years, Star readers have made sure that underprivileged and special needs children get their summer camp fill.
This is the part where I provide a bit of Fresh Air Fund history. In 1901, Star publisher Joseph Atkinson, who’d known impoverishment, raised as he was in a large family by a widowed mother, wrote an editorial about the various fresh air funds operating in Toronto.
Later that summer, the Star began raising money for the Toronto Fresh Air Fund run by Rev. H.C. Dixon, among others.
By 1902, the Star had its own Fresh Air Fund. The Star Fresh Air Fund was the reincarnation of a fund created in 1888 by John J. Kelso, a Toronto reporter and friend of the Star’s first publisher Joseph Atkinson, formed with the support of all the city’s newspapers to provide vacations and excursions to impoverished children.
Atkinson’s move was in keeping with the man’s principles of community and social justice, a legacy that continues to steer this newspaper.
We ask of readers in the wintertime and we ask of readers in the summertime, to brighten a kid’s existence. Always you have responded with generosity, enabling hundreds of thousands of youngsters from the GTA over the decades to have their slice of joy, whether in the form of gift boxes under the Christmas tree or clean air in their lungs.
The Fresh Air Fund works with 104 summer camps, 52 residential and 42 of the day variety. This year, the goal is $650,000 to ensure the tradition is sustained, with 25,000 children benefitting.
Please help us get there by giving what you can.
From you to them: An armful of the outdoors and a lifetime of memories.