Year-Round Program

The year-round program in the late 1960s and 1970s is a fascinating piece of history.  I keep coming back to read about what New York City was like at the time.  Malcolm X in Harlem, the Black Panthers, strikes and riots, violence, blackouts, runaways in the Village, graffiti, and the creation of all kinds of new music.  Hip Hop with all of its deadly swagger was literally born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and that's also where our intrepid Shiloh staffers were making up skits about the Good Samaritan with children in their crummy apartments or playing basketball with Brooklyn boys who were better players than they were.  There was all this white idealism in the air where those workers came from, thanks to the Civil Rights movement and Bob Dylan and Vietnam protests, a questioning of establishment policies.  We want to change the world! (or at least do SOMETHING!)  A questioning of some religious values, too, although I think most Shiloh people longed to find and hold onto the essence of what Jesus was really about--God's love, they said, and they tried to teach it to the kids through the skits and the basketball and other things.  

I can't imagine all the swirling images and competing voices in the minds of these young kids: the burning buildings all around them (they would have to move on, or their best friends would have to move on).  There were many, many other children in the streets everywhere but no playgrounds; there were heroin addicts and pushers on the stoops and corners; free breakfasts given by the Panthers; endless trash; angry teachers on strike; white politicians touring the ghettos; and the resignation of a president (some of them watched it on TV at camp).  Shiloh workers were taking them on field trips on the Staten Island Ferry where they ran around inside the boat and leaned out to see the statue that promised to take care of the poor, the huddled masses.  Perhaps they heard about the group in Queens and Brooklyn called SPONGE--Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything.  Perhaps they wondered about black being beautiful.

Some of the donors to Shiloh were saying they didn't think the workers should be helping these folks but instead should be converting.  Where are the baptisms?  What is this social gospel you all are practicing?  Shiloh was almost completely unique as an urban outreach within the Churches of Christ, and so there was not much of a preexisting model for how to be in this place from the standpoint of the church as a whole.  There are complex relationships that some of these former Shiloh staffers from this time period have with the Churches of Christ, and some of it is painful.

One of things that I've been privileged to ask people about is their journeys of faith and what in direction this Shiloh experience moved them.  Some people had very scary experiences in the city that steamrolled the idealism out of them for a while or for good, or at least it might have convinced them to go back closer to home and help people there by becoming a teacher or a social worker.  Some absolutely came out of their shy shells when they got to Shiloh--so young, and there was no one else to start this food co-op, so I just did it myself!  It was an intense experience for everyone, changing things inside of them.  I think that though now most of the people I interview from this period are white and middle class, living in the suburbs and perhaps in empty nests, they each had an experience that my recent interviewee calls "radicalizing," meaning, he says, creating an empathy with the poor and oppressed.  I find that is an experience, an identity, that can still be called forward even in the warm kitchens of suburbia.  And in those kitchens they recall for me (sometimes with the longing of a lost little love) some of the kids they worked with, and they wonder about them and how they are doing, and whether anything the worker said made any kind of difference.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to completely answer that question with all its implications in this project, although I'm doing my best to do right by all their youthful idealism and their Jesus-hippie love for those kids (who are, by the way, older than I am).  And I'll try to do right by those kids, who were at the time on the edge of so many new worlds and ideas but stuck right in the ghetto heart of the old racist universe.  Perhaps I idealize, too, but it seems to me there's a lot of innocence in the relationship between those young groups.  That's one of the things I'm recording in the project, and that's what I'm hoping that you who read this will not lose.

Stories from Illinois and Indiana

I just returned from a trip to Illinois and Indiana.  Thanks to everyone there who gave of their time and their memories for this project.  In writing this blog, I am conscious that there is no way I can present to you all of the information I gathered in any one trip or interview, and I know I'm leaving some people's stories out as I go along.  But nevertheless I hope that I can pull out some strong details that continue to deepen the story.  In Illinois and Indiana I learned more about some year-round efforts and some connections beyond Shiloh.

In Indiana I did some research at Christian Theological Seminary on Clinton Davidson, the man who bought the first Shiloh campground and whose New Jersey estate bordered the camp property.  There are a lot of fascinating details about Davidson, including his autobiography:

Davidson had become quite wealthy by selling life insurance to millionaire businessmen, ultimately in the grandest of all sales venues, New York City.  He had coined the phrase "estate planning" and had helped his important clients avoid paying taxes, for which they rewarded him handsomely.  In his book he writes that he learned about hard work, good service, and salesmanship by reading Bible stories.  For example, stories like Jesus's (who told vivid stories to get his point across), the prophets (who did not sugar coat what would happen if their hearers didn't act now), and Paul (who endured obstacles but never gave up).  Those attributes are important in business, he says.  I read the book; it is an interesting take on the Bible.  In the early part of the twentieth century, Davidson was one who helped usher the Church of Christ into middle-class Americanism.  And yet some of his ideas--he was a premillenialist, at one point he attended an instrumental church, and he was strongly in favor of racial reconciliation--did not go over well with all of the people who were the Church of Christ's heavy hitters of his day.  He was tired of the constant name-calling and denunciation he found in church publications, and so he bought his own journal, the Christian Leader, to promote positive Christian reporting.  In his autobiography he says of Shiloh, "One of my deepest satisfactions is the summer camp on my New Jersey estate.  There each summer five hundred children of all classes, races, creeds, and colors discover real American living and the love of God."  I don't know yet what he meant by his words "real American living," although there's an indication in something I've read that at one point the kids were taught about the founding fathers of America along with their camp Bible study.

Whatever "real American living" meant to Davidson, in New York it was a concept that couldn't be so easily pinned down.  The fact that in the first two decades Camp Shiloh reached out to kids in Manhattan is culturally significant because of the persistent diversity there.  New York City had always been a place of ethnic neighborhoods and widely diverse populations.  There were kids at Shiloh from many different backgrounds, and the stories don't all look alike, and they aren't always simple.  There were immigrant kids, church kids, kids of different colors, kids from all kinds of backgrounds and even different religions.  The Church of Christ professed that it represented pure New Testament Christianity, so that was what kids learned at camp.  One of the things Eddie Grindley was doing was trying to convince Catholic or Jewish kids to come to camp and expose them to what the Church of Christ believed of the Bible.  There were quite a few baptisms, carefully chronicled each year.  I wonder about some of those kids who were baptized at camp--I know I can't find and interview even a small fraction of them.  I wonder if changing religious viewpoints was complicated for them as they returned to their homes.  Was it wonderful?  Difficult?  A combination?

Ray and his sister were young Jewish kids from Yorkville in Manhattan.  Ray says he loved the city and his Hebrew faith.  They lived in the area where Eddie Grindley preached at nearby Eastside church, and so, just like Eddie always did, he came along and invited all the neighborhood kids to camp.  Ray's mom sent both of her children.  It was a strange experience for Ray and his sister to attend a Christian camp, but he says even as faithful Jewish kids they liked it enough to keep coming back.  But then everything changed. When the two children suddenly found one summer that their single mother had passed away, the only thing for them to do was to stay at camp the whole summer and wait to see what would happen to them.  Eddie arranged an adoptive home for them, people from another Church of Christ congregation not too far away.  Quite obviously Ray's life changed completely.  It was hard for him to adjust to new foods, new family, and, he says, new religious and cultural identity.  But he believed in the importance of adaptation.  And although it was hard for him to give up the faith of his biological parents, he was baptized as a teenager.  He grew deeper in his new faith, married a Christian woman, and now serves on Shiloh's board.  He says he feels his choices honor both his biological and adoptive parents.

The framed words say in Hebrew and in English
"Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Your God Is One God"

It's a good story.  I wonder how many more are out there and what they sound like.

Eddie Grindley was the public face of Shiloh in its young days, although he had lots of people who worked with him.  In an interview with Frances, I learned more about Eddie's desire to reach out to Manhattanites year-round, when camp was not in session.  I have read that he truly desired to create a support system for kids who had been baptized at camp.  But I'm also gathering that this was harder to do than he'd hoped, because fundraising needs kept pulling him away and because the community he was trying to build was in flux a lot of the time.  He tried to get Shiloh counselors to stay in the city to help.  In his unique way of convincing people to do things, Eddie asked camp counselors and art teachers and canteen directors, people like Frances, to stay in the city after camp was over.  They would move to the New York City area.  The women who said yes lived in a rented house together and went to help Eddie with his church, Eastside Church of Christ.  Eastside church was in the heart of bustling, immigrant-settled Yorkville in Manhattan, the same place that Ray was from.  Frances would work as a teacher during the week and help out with the church on weekends:

She doesn't have strong memories of Shiloh kids at Eastside, but it was through her work at that church that Frances did have a significant life-changing encounter.  At Eastside she met her husband, Ernie.  Ernie had responded to the church's evangelistic tract that he found stuffed in his pocket after a rough night.  He found that tract and began to think about it.  The next day he cleaned himself up and came to Eastside.  He became a regular member, and it was there he met and married Frances.  Eddie got him a job as a groundskeeper at Camp Shiloh, and Ernie often went with Eddie to encourage people who needed it.  They'd say, "Let's go jack up So-and-So," meaning go and lift that person's spirits.  Years later Ernie and Frances's son would meet the man who stuffed that tract into Ernie's pocket, and the two would have a tearful reunion.

Frances loved her time at Camp Shiloh and Eastside, and loved living in part of the big mansion that Davidson had purchased, while Ernie took care of the camp's grounds.

Eastside Church of Christ was sometimes billed as a follow-up program for kids from Shiloh, but it also was a place for a very diverse local community to gather on Manhattan's East Side.  One person who came to the church and encountered this community was Sam.  Sam discovered Eddie and Eastside while working in the city as an architect.  He soon found that watching Eddie constantly helping other people was affecting him, and later, too, his young wife, Flo.  They helped Eddie as he cleaned apartments, fed people, and provided basic services to local people in need, whether that person belonged to Eastside or not.  With Eddie's grinning approval, Sam had been adopted by a group of young gang members in the neighborhood who liked to meet in Sam's apartment.  Sam says to think of West Side Story when you think of those boys.  When Flo, newly wed and new to the city, came into the picture and took those young men to an art museum, she wore white gloves as she had been taught to do, but those boys roamed all around the museum and touched everything they were not supposed to touch.  Sam later tried to help one of the boys when he got into legal trouble.  He doesn't now know what happened to them.

City life was hard for Flo, who was from the country, and she missed the trees she had known before.  On the other hand, I've heard that lots of kids from the city, including Ray, were uncomfortable when they left the noise and the lights of New York City for the wide open spaces of camp.

Frances, Flo, and Sam all eventually left the area, but for a good while Camp Shiloh continued to draw its camper population from the connections that Eddie had made in the poorer east neighborhoods of Manhattan.

In the 1960s Eddie and Clinton Davidon both died.  In that same decade there was another Church of Christ born in the area, this one on Long Island.  It, too, would have a supportive relationship with Shiloh.  The West Islip Church of Christ had been created in 1964 when preacher named Dwayne Evans and a group of Church of Christ Texans decided to move to the Northeast where there was very little Church of Christ presence (they didn't realize there was already a West Islip Church of Christ there, but it was an instrumental church and they were not).  The new congregation of the West Islip Church of Christ were intent upon outreach and conversion of the local community.  But soon they began to realize the needs of the people in the area were deeper.  They sent a small group of people to live in East New York, Brooklyn, in one of New York's deepest ghettos.  

I talked to Don about this.  Don was among that group, and they rented East New York apartments to live like the people in the East New York community did.  In that place, Don would soon become profoundly aware of addressing the concerns of the East New York community he saw all around him, concerns including housing, jobs, and education, which had all suffered from external neglect and abuse for decades.  Men in suits would come into the area and proclaim that they could help the residents, but would often bring little more than words.  Trying to live like the community members did, Don and his schoolteacher wife Betty would not hesitate to vocalize their support of the people they worked with in the neighborhood, even in dangerous and deeply divisive moments like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike.  This strike pitted the local community against the teachers' union in an increasingly racial divide:

Schoolteacher Betty's button supporting
community control of the local schools.

Don's firsthand photo of the contentious school strike, 1968.

Don's group in East New York would be the precursor to Shiloh's year-round program, and Don would later serve as a consultant to that Shiloh program.  When new year-round staffers came to Shiloh's orientation program, it was Don that stood up and told them difficult things to hear about what it meant to serve in the neighborhood.  He said that kids in the community didn't need their love.  Their mamas already loved them.  He said what they needed was something else: education, skills, real and practical help.

Don and Betty were in East New York when the first Shiloh workers came to the area.  When the Shiloh program moved people into East NewYork on the street near where Don lived, Jo and her husband Bryan were among the earliest to move in.  Jo says she was naive when she first moved to East New York.  Their apartment was robbed almost immediately, and later even her baby clothes for her soon-to-come baby were stolen, too.  Still, she loved being there.  Her role was to care for her children, work with teenaged girls in the building, and do lots and lots of cooking.  She also had to scrub their apartment and then contend with some of the same frustrations as the East New York residents: roaches, rats, poor sanitation services, and other problems.  Jo says she was assigned the duty of smelling for smoke in the very real eventuality that the building caught on fire, a regular occurrence in those buildings.

While Jo was in the East New York apartment with her young family, and before he entered into a leadership position at Shiloh, Bryan coached a Shiloh basketball team of young men in the community.  That team became very important to Bryan and to the players as well.  When Bryan travelled, the team members looked in on Jo and her baby daily.  Sometimes the team went on the road together.  Here's the Shiloh team in Nashville college getting ready to play the freshmen at David Lipscomb College:

Nashville Banner article about the Shiloh team, the Renegades,
playing David Lipscomb College's freshman team, the Bison.
By the way, the Shiloh basketball team had
some of their things stolen while they were on campus.

Jo said her experience at Shiloh was a significant part of her life, and one that impacted her in many ways, including as a foundational part of her spiritual journey.

In these interviews and in this research, I've tried to explore moments of change in people's lives.  I've found Shiloh often is a point of change for people: of religious impulse, of identification with one group or another, or a dramatic change of location and circumstance.  And in all of those changes, the city itself has been changing, Shiloh's mission has changed over time, the Church of Christ has evolved, and Shiloh's financial circumstances have been variable at times over its history.  So it continues to be a story with multiple viewpoints and many tellers.  Each of the people I've interviewed has had a meaningful contribution to Shiloh's story, just as Shiloh has had a meaningful contribution to their own lives.


I'll tell you as I find out more. . .

Notes from Nashville

This is a picture of Camp Shiloh kids, taken in 1964.  This cabin of boys has won the "honor flag" because their tent was the cleanest that week--the boy in the middle of the picture is holding that white honor flag.  What's so interesting to me is that three of these boys are wearing suits.  They are at summer camp, sleeping in a tent at night, and there's one boy with a suit, vest, and pocket handkerchief; and another boy is wearing a white suit coat.  From other pictures I'm guessing that they wore these suits to Sunday services in the chapel.  I wonder  if they kept those suits clean and what their mothers thought when they came home.  The camp director at the time, whose name is Buzzy, allowed me to scan this photo and some others in his collection.  I have a picture of him, too, in front of these tents, and in that photo he is also wearing a grey suit and tie.

Another set of photographs in his collection: as I mentioned in another post, the 1964 counselors went to the World's Fair.  There is a picture of the counselors waiting in line to get into the DuPont Pavilion at the World's Fair (that pavilion is where they would have seen a musical called "The Wonderful World of Chemistry").  The name DuPont also stands out to me, because Clinton Davidson, who first bought the Camp Shiloh property for the camp, knew the DuPont family.  Through this connection with the DuPonts and others, Davidson helped Harding College's president keep Harding financially afloat--Davidson taught the president of Harding College the art of fundraising among private donors like the DuPonts.  Harding College, as did other major Church of Christ colleges throughout the country, sent counselors to Camp Shiloh.

An interviewee I spoke with this past week, who was a young boy attending camp in 1964, said those counselors were so strong, clean, muscular, and good looking, that all the campers wanted to be like them.  He talks about the singing all through the camp that sort of made him stop and take notice of God.  Was the "Shiloh spirit" exportable to his world at home? he wondered.
Some of these kids were coming from very broken places in the city.  Here's a picture of East New York, Brooklyn, a ghetto that had been growing worse for decades due to unremitting racism and neglect from the government, landlords, and society in general.  As the Shiloh year-round program began in 1967, more and more kids started coming from buildings that seemed unlivable:

This past week I also interviewed Dodie, one of Eddie Grindley's daughters.  Eddie was the founding director of Camp Shiloh in the fifties, and so much of Shiloh's early spirit and vision came from him.  She told me that Eddie never thought much about what people would think about him.  He didn't care if his preaching exactly fit the church's prescription.  He didn't care if there might be danger waiting for him in the more violent places on the East Side of Manhattan where he was constantly offering to help people in need.  He was essentially foolish in these ways, but also effective and friendly and loving.  And he wanted Camp Shiloh to reach camp kids all year long.

Other people thought so, too.  And so, as I mentioned, in 1967, Shiloh moved willing counselors--soon the suits would be replaced by long hair and beards for the men--into places like East New York, Brooklyn.  Many of these people whom I interviewed said they simply felt they had to "do something" to identify with and show love to the kids who had been left alone by the larger society for so long.  As they taught reading and arts and crafts and founded food co-ops, Shiloh began to shift.  The country began to feel broken, too, by its long drawn-out war, by the public killings of heroes, by the bizarre discoveries about the country's president.  Some broken people even found their way to working at Shiloh.  The Shiloh message shifted some, too.  Although it stayed true to Eddie's vision, now Shiloh didn't so much emphasize the old Church of Christ doctrines of baptism and salvation as they did the responsibilities of the church toward the world and the love of God for each individual.  And after a while some of the traditional Church of Christ membership wasn't quite sure what to make of its youth.

In another Nashville interview, Diane talked to me about how wonderful Shiloh was for her as a dishwasher (later counselor) who first came in 1975 when she was sixteen.  Even after violence in Brooklyn profoundly affected her and her family, she nevertheless made friends, experienced things she never would have otherwise, and gained self confidence.  She went back to camp for six more summers.  When the decision was made by some on the board of Shiloh to several non Church of Christ staff to leave the program, she says it was heartbreaking for her and others around her.  Because of this decision and the changing national focus away from programs like Shiloh, it would struggle through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

I've been reading a book for this project called Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol.  He describes the recent conditions of Mott Haven, an area in the Bronx, where Shiloh is now involved.  Kozol looks at Mott Haven from the perspective of its children, whom he interviews.  These kids are talking about feeling like society doesn't want them at all, like they are pushed into these violent, dangerous, and unlovely spaces so that no one will have to look at their situation too closely.

I think whether dressed in suits or with beards, at camp or in the East Village or Brooklyn or in the work being done now in Mott Haven, I think that Shiloh has been, from Eddie Grindley on, trying to look at the people beyond itself, especially the children.

 And whether a kid wears a suit jacket or a bathing suit,

each one of them is important.

Colorado! And a difficult quiz. . .

I just got back from a trip to Colorado to interview several Shiloh folks and help host a Colorado History Party.  My thanks to everyone involved!  In Colorado I got a chance to talk to:

ca. 1951

 a camper/counselor who helped get camp ready for its first summer (1951).  He lived in the New Jersey neighborhood, and his Sunday school teacher was the man who bought the first land for Camp Shiloh;

a Long Island kid who came to Shiloh every chance she could, including as a camper, a"canteen girl," and a volunteer in the year-round program.  She was baptized at summer camp, and she and her friends celebrated with ice cream;

2012

ca. 1974

a conscientious objector whose draft board permitted him two years at Shiloh, and classified him as a minister.  He would give his two years and stay five more, and he would become the executive director of Shiloh;

1977

2012

and I met more people who came in and out of Shiloh, people who now call Colorado their home.

If you were at Shiloh then, can you identify any of these folks?

The picture above is me (seated on the floor, in the center of the frame) with most of the people who came to the Colorado History Party.  

In Colorado, I learned from one person about some frighteningly violent experiences that happened to Shiloh workers living in the inner city.  I learned from another person about how Shiloh opened up new possibilities for campers.  And I heard from another about how strange it was for an African-American who grew up in Civil Rights-era Memphis to encounter urban New York.

I heard some stories about some wild field trips.

I took a difficult quiz.

                                

Here it is.  I wasn't alone in taking this quiz.  Above is a scan of a paper that was given at Shiloh's orientation session, which happened in the fall of 1972.  A Colorado Shiloh alum kept his quiz all these years.  He only got four answers right, earning, he is not afraid to say, a score that ranked him as "idiot".

The purpose of this quiz was to get new Shiloh staffers used to the idea that, even though they were intelligent people, they suddenly might not have all of the answers, and they might even be idiots now and then.  How do you fare?  Can you figure out what these words would have meant to a kid in East New York in 1972?

1. Anklebuster     13. Johnny pump
2. Bulldogger      14. The dozens
3. Highwaters      15. Screet
4. Stomps            16. Booty
5. Tubes              17. Skelly
6. J                      18. Dukey
7. Butch              19. Biter
8. Mother's Day    20. Peasy head (?)
9. Snoppies  (?)       21. Behind
10. Gem              22. Holding
11. Snap              23. Get over
12. Greyboy        24. Get a run
                            25. Stoop

I took the test and was an idiot, too.  I looked up the answers in the Urban Dictionary, and I really felt like an idiot, to be so white.  Well, I did know at least one answer, #17, because I'd heard quite a few Shiloh people talk about it.  Skelly is a kids' game played on the New York streets and sidewalks with bottlecaps, and there's a play area in chalk.  The players try to flick their bottle caps into numbered zones.  It's a clever game.  Did you ever play it?

And it's not on the quiz, but there's double dutch.  I heard how important that was, too.  Play.  Maybe what I am learning makes a grander, deeper story, or maybe it is about little moments in time, but in Colorado I learned about some people who played together.  Two of them are below.  One of them I met in NYC and one in Colorado, and they are now separated by many years and many miles.  Well, back then they found that they weren't so far apart in their desire to have fun, and for a few months they played double dutch together on a New York City street.  In their stomps (shoes).

ca. 1974

2012

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.