History Parties!

For the readers of this blog who have a Shiloh connection, I wonder what you remember about your time at Shiloh.  I wonder if Shiloh changed you any.  Was there someone there who taught you something unexpected?  Did Shiloh itself change when you were there?

Would you like to reminisce for an afternoon or an evening about Shiloh?  Would you like to see Shiloh folks that you may not have seen for a while?  Would you like to help me preserve the history of this place: the bus, the camp, the city, the relationships, the people?  

What you see above is the homemade cover of a notebook.  In the notebook is a list of Shiloh counselors, kids, and staff, year by year.  I want to gather as many Shiloh names as I can as I undertake this project, and you might be able to help.  I'll be bringing this notebook around with me to various cities when I go on interview trips.  When I make these trips, I'll bring the notebook and my recording equipment to gatherings called History Parties.  In addition to interviewing some folks one-on-one, I am also asking people to tell their stories in groups; I'm gathering scans of their photos; and I'm hoping they'll help fill in the lists of names for posterity.  We're calling these particular gatherings History Parties!

It's time spent reminiscing, but also there are a few technical details it might help you to know in advance.  Some preparation for a History Party: if you come to a History Party, you can bring Shiloh photos and documents for me to scan (and donate the scans to an archives).  In addition to the photos themselves, you can bring a list of written descriptions of those photos, a list that you've created in advance (that will help!).  An example of the descriptions of the photos might be "1. Eddie Grindley serving biscuits in the Camp Shiloh mess hall, ca. 1956; 2. Jimmy Johnson's East New York apartment on Williams Street, ca. 1973."   

At the History Parties, I'll have reminiscing questions for you to answer about Shiloh on an audio recording.  I'll ask you questions like the ones I posed at the beginning of this blog post, and as a group folks can get together and talk about Shiloh experiences from as many different generations as are present.  And I will bring along the year-by-year list of names you see above and a list of Shiloh addresses that you can also help with.  I'm hoping we can gather lots of history, reminisce, see old Shiloh friends, and have fun together at these parties.  

Right now I'm in Colorado, and I'm getting ready to interview several folks here.  In addition, I'll have a History Party in Boulder next week.  The host of the party, Preston, promised me there would be hula-hoop contests and trampolines in addition to all of the gathering of history. . . Hmm, thanks, Preston!  Seriously, though, I've been continuing to do a lot of research in between trips and I've done two New York City History Parties so far.  I've heard some wonderful, some funny, and some difficult stories about how Shiloh impacted people's lives.  I've seen some great photos and have made progress in gathering names.  I hope I can hear your story and learn from what you know as well.

At left, Shiloh participant Elaine sits at a table with
recording equipment (and donuts!) at History Party in New York City

New York

It has been a long time between blog posts, but the reason for that is that I have been on an intensive research-and-interview trip to New York City these past few weeks.  Now that I'm back home, I can write a blog post with some highlights of my trip, and yet those weeks were packed with all kinds of experiences I'd like to share with you here, so the word "highlights" seems like a challenge.   There were sights and sounds of New York, there was research into photographs and old onion-skin files.  I attended churches that Shiloh folks had attended decades ago, I interviewed former and current board members of Shiloh, I heard stories about conversion experiences and also about traumatic events in people's lives.  Many people I talked to spoke about relationships they had through Shiloh.  I met people of all kinds of colors and ages and backgrounds, all associated with Shiloh in some way.  I did one-on-one recorded interviews and held small "History Parties" to gather together current and former Shiloh staff and alums so that I could record their stories as a group.  I learned a lot of historical information, but in this post I'm going to tell you about some of the moments of connection I saw because of Shiloh.

Below is a picture of Elaine and Nita.  Elaine lived in the city as a kid in the 1970s, and Nita was her counselor in Shiloh's year-round program in Brooklyn when Elaine was about eight.  That meant that Nita lived in apartment building in Elaine's neighborhood, and Elaine and about seven other girls her age were in Nita's Shiloh class after school.  They went on field trips to the city and beyond, chugging along in the Staten Island Ferry or even piling on a bus to go to Nita's parents house for a weekend.  They learned Bible stories, did art, read together, made things, sang songs.  By 2012 Elaine and Nita hadn't seen each other in over thirty years, and they were reunited at a History Party we held at an old church building in Manhattan.  And by the way, Elaine and her brothers and sisters still all get together to sing the songs they learned as Shiloh kids.

Another reunion I witnessed from its near edge was between Clyde and Robert.  Clyde had been involved in Shiloh in various ways, but in this part of the Shiloh story, he was involved as a church member decades ago.  When Shiloh staff asked local church members to host city kids on weekends, Clyde and his wife decided that they wanted to develop a relationship with the particular set of kids they hosted instead of hosting different kids each time.  So they began to get to know some of the kids in Robert's family, especially Robert and his brother.  In the interview I did with Clyde, he said he and his wife had really felt connected to those little guys.  But they had lost track of them about twenty years ago.  When former Shiloh staffer Kay heard this story, she said, "I'll find Robert."  And within a few days, she did.  I was in Kay's car on my way upstate to see Shiloh's campsite when Robert happened to call Kay back.  His voice was coming through her speaker phone, and he was in tears; he said Clyde and his wife had been so important to them as kids and had shaped what Robert knew of God.  Later I found out that Robert and Clyde had indeed spoken by phone right afterwards and were both excited to meet again after all this time.  Here is a picture Clyde after I interviewed him--he didn't know yet that this scheming was going to take place:

Then I went up to camp and saw how the little kids literally hung on the camp counselors.  Many of those counselors had been Shiloh kids at camp when they were small, and they are from the same neighborhoods as the young kids of 2012.  Some of the counselors had been at camp for nine or even eleven years and have been able to be mentors for the little ones.  Here is James, the counselor, and it's his second year as a counselor.  He's painting rocks with his buddy who is about nine:

And at camp I saw tough guys be good to each other.  I tried to sneak a picture of the guy below, but he caught me taking his picture, so I gestured that I wanted to photograph him and would that be all right?  I thought he might keep his tough-guy exterior in the photo, but instead he broke into a smile.  Then the other tough guy sitting next to him looked over and said, "You have a wonderful smile."  He did.  And here it is:

Here's another tough-guy picture I liked, taken while the group was singing a slow song about God during Celebration time:

Lest these seem like wishful assertions of meaningful experiences, let me say that I think throughout its existence Shiloh has deliberately been about building relationships with underserved youth, even in all the messiness of what "relationship" means.  That hasn't always been easy on a big scale or a small one, and I've learned about some times when the camp and the year-round program have struggled or even been undone.  I've learned just the smallest amount about some very hard experiences in the lives of some of the people at Shiloh.  But as an outsider trying to look in with a critical eye, I have also heard a lot of stories about times when this program has dramatically impacted kids and counselors alike.  For example, at a practical level, the summer camp roster now is purposefully small so that every kid feels special attention, and I've heard from one camper-turned-counselor how this is the one place where she could just be herself.  Some former Shiloh kids talk about learning to read (Elaine still loves Charlotte's Web for this reason), and some talk about feeling safe at Shiloh, and there seems to be a definite recognition of healing amidst sometimes debilitating pain.  At successful times in Shiloh's history, people are provided a specific opportunity to talk through their story and their doubts if they need to.  I don't want to over-idealize it, but I think Shiloh does have some powerful echoes.  I'll be exploring them as I learn more about Shiloh's history.  More to come as the project moves on. . .

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.

Learning from the Unisphere

Picture of Unisphere thanks to mercedesdayanara and New York Pictures

Here's a picture of a biker going past what's called the unisphere.

The unisphere was created for the 1964 World's Fair held in New York City.  The staff at Shiloh went to the World's Fair that year.  On opening day of the fair, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) attempted a demonstration to raise awareness about racial issues that were plaguing the country.  Shiloh would wrestle with these issues, too.  The Church of Christ, Shiloh's sponsoring organization, had an exhibit at the fair in the Protestant Pavillion, even though they were uncomfortable being labeled as Protestant.  The fair was managed by Robert Moses, a city planner whose constant revision of New York displaced many inhabitants and put many others in monstrous and drab public housing.  It was a time when the city was stirring, the country was stirring, religion was stirring.  Shiloh would be one of the local intersections of many big forces.

This month has been full of wonderful research for me.  Shiloh's history goes back to 1950.  I'm getting a chance to think about things like the World's Fair, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike, Shiloh's leadership changes in the 1970s, and how each of these things might have reverberated in the heart of a kid or a volunteer at camp.  Or of a year-round staff member living in a tenement house in East New York.  Who were these kids and these staff members, and what did this place Shiloh mean to the people who were there?  Was it a Place of Peace, as the meaning of its name suggests?  I'll get to meet them and ask them myself.  More to come.

Beginning at the Beginning

Let me start by giving you a sense of what this blog is going to be about.  I'm going to be doing oral history interviews about the nonprofit organization called Shiloh, NYC (http://www.shilohnyc.org/).  I have family roots at Shiloh, and from some of the pictures on this blog you can see that I spent time there as a very tiny person.  You can also see that there was what I'll lovingly call a bit of a hippie-influenced look on some of the staff during the group photo taken in the 1970s, but Shiloh goes back even before that to the 1950s, and it still exists today.  Since Shiloh's beginnings, people from all over the country have come to New York City to work with at-risk kids, and on the other side of the coin kids and families in parts of New York City have been generous to Shiloh staff and volunteers.  

Now that I'm not that very tiny person anymore, I have the extraordinary opportunity to be working as a full-time oral historian and looking, both from an academic and a personal point of view, at all of the interesting topics that have played out in Shiloh's history--like race, religion, culture--topics that can have profound meaning in the lives of these people as the strands intersect again and again.  Oral history is a very useful and powerful tool for viewing threads like this.  Here's a dictionary definition:

oral history (noun)

information of historical or sociological importance obtained usually by tape-recorded interviews with persons whose experiences and memories are representative or whose lives have been of special significance.

I'll be interviewing both staff and participant alums.  These interviews will take me all over the country, back in time, and to the roots of my own nuclear family.  I hope to post sound and photos on this blog that help to tell Shiloh's compelling story.  I also hope you'll find the journey relevant to your own journey.  I'll keep you posted. . .