By John Toth
The Bulletin
Welcome back, students. How was your vacation? Please sit down and open your textbooks to chapter one.
At the end of my childhood summer vacations, this was one of the nightmares I had as the lazy days of summer were winding down, and the real world replaced my care-free camp life.
Sure, we had duties there, work responsibilities, but most of the time we had no idea what day it was and didn’t really care. I drew a paycheck that carried me through part of the school year. Even before I worked in a camp, I went to camps as a child in three different countries. It was the best time of my childhood, pre-teen and teenage life - except once.
“I remember hating summer camp there when I was eight or nine years old,” I recently messaged my cousin in Budapest, Hungary. “I was on Lake Balaton for two weeks and couldn’t wait to leave and go back to the city.”
She went to the same camp and hated it also. “They weighed me at the beginning and at the end to see if I gained any weight,” she said
That was because most of us back in those days were undernourished. It was the post-WWII and post-revolution era in Hungary at the time, and the whole country was poor under Soviet occupation and oppression.
I can’t remember most of what happened at the camp, but I do recall sitting around a lot and doing nothing. The food wasn’t anything worth writing home about - nothing really was. I didn’t gain any weight. I left camp as the same skinny kid who rode into camp on the train two weeks earlier with a bunch of other kids who didn’t want to be there, either.
After our great escape to Austria and the West in 1966, summer camp took on a different meaning. Instead of dreading it, I didn’t want to leave. I had a great time, even though on the first go-around, I really didn’t understand much of what was said.
We stayed just outside Salzburg, surrounded by mountains, with a lake right in front of the campsite.
The next year, I went to a more primitive camp, which was also a lot of fun. In the United States, going to camp in the summer was incredible. I even learned how to swim there in 1968, because I wanted to go out to the deep-water raft with the rest of the kids. They rooted for me all the way as I passed the swimming test - barely.
I even got my first kiss in that camp from a girl who promised that she’d write and that she was going to come back to the same camp the next year. I agreed also, but neither of us followed through, and we didn’t go back that next year.
When I started working in summer camps (if you could call it work), I continued to practice what I learned during my earlier years - pretending that it was always the weekend. I called it the never-ending weekend within the never-ending summer.
I heard only two news reports all those years, which I still remember. The first one was in 1968, when the camp director listened to the news on a transistor radio and told me that the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. They did the same thing to Hungary in 1955. I was rooting that the Czechs would have better luck than we did. They did not.
When we were driving back to camp in 1974, listening to the junky little car’s AM radio, the news announcer broke in to say that President Richard Nixon had resigned because of Watergate and would leave the White House the next morning.
A cheer went up among the four of us, then we went back to trying to figure out what day it was. When we lost total knowledge of what day it was, that meant that we were having a good day.
Sadly, each endless summer had to end. It was once again time to rejoin the rest of the real world and resume my education. The last few days were the saddest because we were all in the same boat. We all liked it there and really didn’t want to return to our responsibilities and to signing up for the fall semester of high school or college.
Each year when I returned home (sad face), it didn’t take long to get back in the groove of real life. And, after watching a 9-inch, black-and-white TV for more than two months in the staff lounge, our 25-inch color console at home was a nice change. It looked gigantic at first.
So, welcome back to the real world, kids, and good luck in school. The summer was a chance to tune out and recharge. Do it as much as you can, because as a grownup, you’ll miss it a lot.
I still do.
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