Artifacts found in Texas

I've just gotten back from a two-week interview trip all around Texas.  I stayed with a lot of Shiloh people and Shiloh friends, people that I didn't know yet, but people whom I would interview or ask to help me host History Parties.  It's a quick intimacy to sleep in someone's guest room and eat their food and then ask them to talk for a few hours about a place in their lives where they were involved in something that had a particular significance for them, perhaps tilted the compass of their lives one way or the other.  And perhaps I am staying in or looking at the results of the tilt.  Seeing the decades-long marriage of two people that met at camp, understanding the job choices that were made after the political or religious change that happened in the city, hearing the stories of pain or joy or missionary zeal and feeling the heat of those stories from the voices and eyes in front of me.  In many ways I have been gathering the artifacts from the lives I've intersected in this project, artifacts different from those I could carry out in my suitcase.  Recording them, studying the pictures they took, building memories for myself out of capturing their memories.  

Here are some hold-in-the-hand artifacts they've kept, artifacts I got to see and that now I present to you:

Artifacts of Shiloh and Eastside Church of Christ: This is a place that seems to have left fewer trails than others I've followed in this project.  But it does help me to understand Shiloh's theological bent at the time, as well its camper population.  There was an English-speaking congregation and a Spanish-speaking congregation, and I hear that because the Spanish-speaking residents of the East Side were at times more systematically invested in the church life, there were years when Camp Shiloh had a significant population of children whose parents were native Spanish-speakers.

Velma, Eddie Grindley's office secretary at Eastside, told me stories about trying to get Eddie organized--a task in itself--and she let me scan some of her old pictures, too.  I drove and drove to get to her house in the country, and I listened to her stories of Eastside, then drove back the next day with a portable scanner for her pictures.  Later at the end of the trip, at Bob and Myrt's house, Bob told me about working with some of the Shiloh kids at Eastside, and about being a very young Church of Christ preacher in the big non-Church of Christ city.

Velma's picture of
Eastside Church of Christ
building, where Eddie Grindley
was preacher,
and where some Shiloh
kids in the 1950s and 1960s attended.

Eastside Church of Christ
young people's group, ca. 1958.
Some were Shiloh campers.

Artifacts from doctrinal controversies of old:  There's a spiritual legacy of the Church of Christ in the life of Shiloh, both as a positive and in tension.  As it has always been driven by the specific religious engine of the Church of Christ, Shiloh has not been a stranger to certain kinds of doctrinal controversy as it tried to reconcile its work with the Church of Christ doctrine, especially in the conservative South.  In the 1960s and 1970s using a more "conversational" translation of the Bible that may or may not have made changes to certain theological ideals: I don't know whether or not using these Bibles at camp caused Shiloh itself to be questioned, but I do know that when Johnny and Polly showed the book to me, they had been talking about the changes in the national mood around the time they were at Shiloh in 1967.  They both had a twinkle in their eyes when they talked about how they were at times Christian rebels.

Leaders Mitchell and D.L. told me about their professional responses to charges that Shiloh was interested in the "social gospel" over baptism or that there were people on the premises who talked about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  They told me about directions they tried to take camp.  Barbara, whose husband Dwain had been a preacher, told me that in the first summer in 1951, she and the other counselors had been gathered together and given the option to go elsewhere because the landowner was a premillenialist.  Some counselors did leave, Barbara did not.

Johnny and Polly's Bible, in
the Good News for Modern Man translation,
used at camp.  They met at
camp in the summer of 1967.

Pizza and dishes--little details from two different camp neighborhoods:  Early on at the first campsite, local boys from Bernardsville, NJ, came to the campsite and asked to take the female counselors out for pizza pie.  Pizza at that time had not made it to the South, so the counselors thought, Piece of pie?  Barbara counselor tried it for the first time and remembers she did not like it.
Some neighbors in upscale Bernardsville complained of the children's noise, and there were times that campers had to go on in the back yard of the big house to ensure the wealthy neighborhood's residential feel.

Then a few decades later Shiloh bought a camp in New York that it could own outright, as D.L. explained to me at his dining table.  In the new camp the site was surrounded by an orthodox Jewish community.  In the 2000s, said April at a History Party, one rabbi who led a neighboring camp came over to apologize for his camper's prank calls, but the Shiloh staff were muddy and bloody from doing repairs, and were in no great shape to receive visitors.

Dishes Nina found in the basement of the camp's main
building, ca. 1980.  Likely left over
from when the camp was a Jewish hotel or camp. 

Saved artifacts with meaning:

Year-round worker Karyn saved the
key to her East New York
apartment on Williams Avenue.
She made lasting friendships living there,
including with some
of the boys in her Shiloh class.

A page from Linda's camp scrapbook.
She told me in her brief-but-deep interview that the time at Shiloh
in the early 1970s represented a "work of the heart" for her.

Amanda's artistic photo of kids in the camp pool, 2006.
They look like synchronized swimmers, but
getting the pool in working order for them to use has
been a labor of love at times for Shiloh,
as has been teaching swimming techniques.

Cassie photocopied a thank-you note from a camper ca. 2006,
 a note that was left pinned on a wall after camp one summer.
I've scrubbed out the camper's name, but the camper says
 he can make good decisions now using "fruit of the spirit words,"
and he will always remember God has a plan and a future for him.  It impressed Cassie.

The emotional artifacts of Shiloh: Mary, a female counselor from near-current days told me at a History Party of her friends that when she got back to her home after her fun and intense summer at camp, the time felt different, more stale, and she felt sadness.  For a while she would open her suitcase that had been full of her grubby clothes.  Her mother questioned what she was doing.  She laughed and told her mother that she was smelling the smell of camp.  Telling me this, she laughed again.  This group from the History Party loves to get together and talk about Shiloh.

Lives have been changed by the events at Shiloh.  Bob and Myrt met in 1952 at Shiloh, and, after he wrote a long-distance proposal by mail, they married and moved to the East Side together.  April and Dan married a few years after being friends at camp.  People have become teachers, ministers, social workers because of Shiloh.  I don't generally blog about some of the sad things that have happened to people, but there has been pain and confusion in people's lives: religious, physical.  Cindy, who had a painful experience in New York, took a night after talking about those difficult things to then compose a statement she read in the morning, a word to the friends she knew in from the year-round programs in East New York and Brownsville:

"I would just say to you my friends that you were brave comrades, a privilege to know and to walk with, in a good, perhaps great, cause.  God be with you."  --Cindy (1972-1974), when asked in her interview what she would say to Shiloh folks today.

Dorothy says Shiloh helped her to focus and become disciplined, but in addition to this it was a joy to see her reunite with her friend Tahna from the old days at a History Party, the same day as her interview.  Steve talks about how he put everything he had into Shiloh at a time when it was vulnerable, Jon told me a bit about the spirituality of manliness and basketball and firebuilding at camp.

Again there are others I leave out and things I haven't expressed here.  But I have your artifacts gathered up, little gifts you gave me of your truth from that time in that place.  They all mean something to this story, and you have my thanks.