News from Camp Granada

Posted on August 16, 2003 in Adolescence Culture Pointers

It’s the fortieth anniversary of the song that Alan Sherman made famous: “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”. Los Angeles Times writer Paul Lieberman remembers the summer he spent with Robert Sherman, the son who inspired Sherman to write the outrageous lyric written to the melody of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours”.

Was life at Camp Champlain so terrible?:

“I really don’t remember much,” [Robert] Sherman said, “other than it wasn’t a lot of fun and I wanted to get out.”

Lieberman himself remembers a terrible incident involving the frustrated young Sherman:

We were at one of the long tables in the barn-like mess hall. He was sitting on my left. Another boy was on my right. They began arguing. About what I can’t recall. But, as I said, I’ll never forget the knife. Sherman picked his up and threw it. It hit the other boy square in the chest — OK, it was a dull butter knife, and it may well have been the thick handle that hit the boy. But he fell backward nonetheless and started wailing. I grabbed Sherman in a headlock and probably started pounding on him. Of that I’m not certain — but the headlock definitely. And the next day he was gone. They’d kicked him out.

For the full story about what happened to Allan Sherman and what his son Robert is doing these days, click here.

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I spent a week of each of my summers as a teen at a place called Camp Helendade in the San Bernardino Mountains, accompanied by an ambiguously homophobic gaggle of service brats known formally as Troop 38.

The older boys tormented the younger boys, engaging in behaviors which ranged from the mentally abusive to the homoerotic. We slept in open tents on bunk beds that entire week. Mosquitos swarmed up from the tiny lake and at night we went to bed shivering after hearing the tale of Clubfoot, a crazed Chinese cook reputed to be still wandering the woods with his cleaver eighty to a hundred years after the amputation of his leg in a kitchen debate. The last night of my first year, someone took an ax to the tree next to my head. The other boys in my tent screamed in terror and we all hid under the cover. The next morning an Eagle scout was charged with the attack on the youngish Coulter Pine and had his Tote-Em Chip confiscated for the last two days of camp.

That was the year when a group of juvenile deliquents who smoked out near a mass of stinging nettles pantsed every last Tenderfoot and Second Class scout in the troop. I was one of the last. They stripped me down to nothing and threw my clothes about. I ran after my underwear first which they left hanging in a long leaf pine tree. While they gawked and sneered at me holding my balls, I picked the needles from my Jockey shorts. This kind of behavior went unregulated that year. I never participated in the blood sport myself. Were not Scouts bound to be “clean”?

That was the other problem I had with the place. When most of us think of the mountains, we envision grassy meadows that sweep under the trees, keeping everything tidy for the walker. The natural dryness of the San Bernardino mountains and the stomping feet of hundreds of boys each week during the summer ensured that deserts of fine brown powder filled the spaces between the widowmaker and sugar pines. You ate dust with every meal. When you took off your regulation Boy Scout uniform, you discovered that you were speckled: the powder insinuated itself through the pocks of the weave and stained you.

I won’t mention the poison oak (which I avoided), the stinging nettles (which I blundered into), the imaginary rattlesnakes (all had fled the vicinity out of a sense of self preservation), or the aborted plans to raid the adjacent Girl Scout camp. The elements of the food they served us were minimal and hardly worthy of California Cuisine. I remember too many dinners of boiled potato, carrot, and hamburger about which my hungry companions raved. I ate, but never completely happily. Even my mother — who served frozen vegetables boiled in ten times more water than called for on the package — made better meals than those.

Camp Helendade is still there, perversely inviting sexually frustrated young boys to acquaint themselves with nature’s knotholes under the watchful eyes of their Scoutmasters.

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While you are off following these links, I’ll be reading bits of something called Ulysses.

Tell us your camp stories if you dare.