Traditional kids summer camps activities
Summer camp provides a whole list of new things that you have done, we called them “firsts”. It is the first time to take a shower with twenty other kids or the first time to go on a night hike, first time to be away from our families. I think the one thing that I dreaded the most about summer camp was the lottery system that decided who our counselor for the week was going to be. Your whole week could end up in the crapper if you got the wrong one. Your social status could improve immensely if you only could get the right one. You also prayed that you got a “newbie”, a counselor that was here for the first time. In other words “fresh meat”.
One summer I hit the trifecta so to speak, a “cool” counselor, who also happened to be a “newbie”. This means that while all the girl counselors were trying to date this guy, he also could be trained by us kids. He ended up having a less than stellar start to his summer according to the Camp director, but we had a week to remember! It started on day one, we somehow talked him into letting us skip the opening talk by the director, you know the one where he says if you step out of line he will make your life not worth living. Well we skipped that and went swimming; it was great, because normally you had to take a stupid swimming test to see if you would drown in water over your head. Our guy found that out later when the director wanted a special meeting with our man.
We also taught him that keeping our cabins neat, was not a thing to be strived for, however sneaking out at night and rearranging the camp was. He was helpful getting the saran wrap for doing the toilets in the girl's bathrooms. He even provided some education for us, when he realized that all the cabins were wired in series. We did not know what “series” meant until he used this little thing, that at Christmas time is used to make the lights twinkle. Well he put this thing into cabin number one's light and low and behold all the boys cabins now had twinkle lights for the rest of the week. It was awesome and nauseating all at the same time.
Well I don't know if this guy ever was a camp counselor again or if he even made it all summer. I can tell you he gave us a list of “First's” we will never forget.