Going to Camp

The most consistent enterprise in Shiloh's history is camp.  Here's a 1972 picture of swimmers in the lake--it makes me want to put on some sunscreen and find an innertube.  I wonder what the little girl in the foreground is communicating with her arm gesture.  Somehow she has the most to say to me in this picture, as if she might be the person getting ready to officiate at the baptism of her adult friend.

For about two and a half decades, Camp Shiloh was located where you see it in this picture, in Mendham, New Jersey.  But the camp kids came primarily from New York: for a while they were first-and second-generation immigrants from Manhattan's Upper East Side: Polish, Irish, Italian, German, African-American, Puerto-Rican.  There were language and cultural barriers in and among them.  Religious differences, too: the camp was decidedly Church of Christ, and there were for example a lot of Roman Catholic kids trying to decide whether to hold onto the religious ways of their parents' "old country" or explore the religion they found at camp, or jump into some other way to be "American" they found in their part of New York City.  One young black kid who came to camp in the 1950s decided he loved what he heard at Shiloh about everyone being brothers and sisters, and he was going to go to a Church of Christ school in the South.  But that school wouldn't accept him because he was black and they weren't integrated.  A Catholic priest came out to camp and reported back to the mothers that the worst thing they could do was to send their kids to Shiloh.  And the director of Shiloh, himself a naturalized Irishman, did a significant portion of his fundraising in Southern Churches of Christ who were hoping to do good in the impenetrable Northeast.

Throughout the twentieth century, the Great Migration brought a lot of Southern African-Americans, weary of sharecropping and ready to join the American Dream, to the Promised Land of New York City.  Many of them moved to places like East New York, Brownsville, and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.  But the new city wasn't the Promised Land after all: they met with new waves of unemployment and all-too-familiar prejudice that found tangible form in overcrowded tenement houses, violence, and white flight.  These kids would increasingly be the camp kids in the 1970s.

When Shiloh started its official year-round program in 1967 to live among and try to help the kids that were coming to camp, the program would work on both the Upper East Side and in East New York, among other places.  The year-round Shiloh staff would choose a welfare-equivalent salary and live in tenement houses, too.  They would staff day-care centers, help runaway teens, conduct reading classes, teach Bible. In essence, that little girl did symbolically baptize her adult friend and all of America who was paying attention at that time: she was the face of America's conscience.

The Shiloh people I know best were there at that time, and some of those I am getting to know better, so it's this part of Shiloh's legacy that seems very vibrant to me: the Shiloh of my parents' generation, the civil rights-era young Christians, the dramatic inner city, the year-round program in the heart of urban New York.

And I'm also drawn to camp, Shiloh's first enterprise and one that endures today.  I hear that some of the camp songs have been around for generations.  I think there are reasons it has stayed constant, some of them deeper than fun in the sun.  What was it like to sing about brother- and sisterhood on a clear day on the lake?

I'm going to be making my first official trip to New York in a few weeks and visit some of these places.  I'll bring an audio recorder and a camera, and I'll take a lot of notes.  I know Shiloh is going to be gearing up for this year's summer camp.  And I will get to visit, talk to people about history, take pictures, learn more.  I'll get to see for myself.  I'll keep you posted.