The Council Room

[Steve Hood]

Hi, Wyanokers !!

If you were at camp between 1957--1964, you heard me. I woke you in the morning and I put you to bed at night. I was the bugler. Actually, I was a Midget in 1951 and a Junior in 1952-53. From 57-64 I was a JA, JC and councillor. I was mainly a waterfront person, so maybe I hel;ped teach you to sail or swim. Or maybe had you for Junior or Senior life saving.

I've sent some pictures to Mike, and they will be posted soon.
I think this Wyanoke site is terrific, or as they say back wast, "wicked awesome."

I'm looking forward to participating.

Steve Hood (Loyal Blue.)

[Jim Culleton]

Steve . . . . . . great to see you! I am glad that you found us! Of course I member you. Among other things you were my JC in J-4 (Web Dan) '58. I'm wondering if you remember our "overnight" on Marriott's beach when we slept under canoes? Or was it the beach on the former Chang Kai Shek property? Anyway it was a fun time. Come to think of it you may not have done that overnight with us as your bugling responsibilities may have kept you on the Wyanoke property.

Do you ever hear from Web? Does he still own his cabin just off of Forest Road? That was many a moon ago.

One indelible memory I have of your bugling tenure was when you would start each call with a short "bleep" to wet the mouth piece . . . . . . . particularly noticeable during Reveille when things were quiet. Of course we J-4'ers were always wakened a half hour before Reveille as you had to get up, get dressed and out the door for the first call of the day! I must say that you were pretty quiet though !

I do remember the Reveille, jazz version, that you played at the end of one or more seasons. Weren't you threatened with expulsion for that ? Fond memories for sure!

Hope things are well with you and your family. Welcome aboard!

Jim
_________________
'56 - J-9 J. Moulton
'57 - J-11 J. Moulton
'58 - J-4 E. Web Dann, S. Hood
'59 - S-6 P. Leavitt
'60 - S-2 F. Avantaggio
'61 - JA-1 RK Irons
'62 - C-9 JC with P. Freeland
'63 - C-1 JC with S. Borger
'64 - C-6 Councilor

[Steve Hood]

Glad to read your reply, Jim, and glad to keep the chat going.

Yes !! I do remember the J-4 (ad)venture, and I do remember sleeping under the canoes. It was damp night following a rain storm. But I do not remember where we were. Yes, being bugler did keep me close to the camp property because Mr. Bentley wanted the bugle calls to be on time, etc. I do recall going on a Sacco trip, and some one day mountain trips, and some overnights, but these were a bit limited.

Mr. Bentley tried to be fair, and I respect him for this. Of course, my relationship with him was different from most other people because David was one of my very best friends, and BMB was his dad. So He was the "camp boss" during the summer and ,y friend's dad during the winter.

WOW !! You remember the jazzed up reveille. You have a good ,emory. BMB had explicitly told me NOT do do a jazzy reveille, but Pete Sawin had other ideas and Pete talked me into a jazzy duet. I think he played the saxaphone. At any rate, we jazzed it up, and BMB was waiting outside the midget dining room when we arrived. To put it mildly, he was not pleased,and told us so in no uncertain terms.

For the most part, I seldom challenged the system.... But the time Dave Bentley and I capsized one of the big,wind-about sailboats and got the definite ire of Dick Rothmund was a different story, and may deserve comment art another time. (DAVID -- if you are reading this, feel free to chime in.

More later,

Steve Hood

[Jim Culleton]

Steve

Among all the great posts in the Council Room you might get a kick out of the thread . . . . . . "Scary Or Intimidating Councilors"! It's about half to 3/4 of the way down the first page of posts. It is great that Mike found photos of Norm Risser et. al which are found in that thread.

Ah yes, Pete Sawin. I believe that he was my brother Larry's councilor in J-16 (one of 3 cabins in the Jr. Camp) one summer. I'll have to check the rosters . . . . . . maybe it was '58 when we were in J-4.

Jim
_________________
'56 - J-9 J. Moulton
'57 - J-11 J. Moulton
'58 - J-4 E. Web Dann, S. Hood
'59 - S-6 P. Leavitt
'60 - S-2 F. Avantaggio
'61 - JA-1 RK Irons
'62 - C-9 JC with P. Freeland
'63 - C-1 JC with S. Borger
'64 - C-6 Councilor

[Steve Hood]

Hello again, Jim

I must say that I never really thought that there were very many intimidating councilors. In all my years at Wyanoke, I really had only one "major run-in" with a councilor, and this involved Everett Slocum.

I was a "waterfront person" and felt out of place on the track. Sloc was a track-baseball person, and I am not even sure if he knew how to swim.

BMB was concerned that too many people were wearing baseball caps in the dining room and wanted to put a stop to it. At one of the councilor's meetings, be made a big deal out of this and wanted all the councilors to help enforce it. I think he was referring to campers, but Sloc was a major offender, and consistently wore his Fessenen School cap in the dining room. BMB asked me, as bugler, to help enforce this because I usually hung out in the midget dining room before it was time to blow "soupy-soupy" to quiet things down for announcements and the blessing/prayer for the meal.

Soon there afternoon, at breakfast, I was waiting to get started and there was Sloc, wearing his Fessended cap. I politely asked him to take it off, and reminded him of what BMB had said. Well, "the shit hit the fan." Sloc musts have been in a bad mood to begin with, but he verbally let me have a piece of his mind, and physically put his hands on my ears, squeezed them again my head, and shook me pretty hard. It hurt, both physically and emotionally. I was actually crying when BMB came over and told me to blow soupy-soupy. BMB realized my distress and asked what happened. I told him. After breakfast, I noticed that BMB and Sloc were sitting on the porch of the guest house, and I'm sure I know why.

[DavidAyars]

Funny how standards change with time, or "evolve." A councilor boxing the ears of a camper would be On The Afternoon Bus Home from Wyanoke or just about any summer camp today. In those days, at least it was addressed. Sloc didn't get carte blanche.

Not that I'm complaining about evolution of standards.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

You know how the eldest sibling (raises hand) in most families pees and moans (hand is still up) to the parent that the younger sibling gets away with an offense for which Big Brother would have been "creamed."

So it was at Wyanoke.

I was never the official Camp Bugler and was never listed as such on the dining room rosters, as much because I wasn't from Winchester as any other reason, but I often filled in for camp buglers away on trips or intercamp sports matches, etc. By the time I was at camp, camp policy on jazz-Reveille loosened up one day only: the last morning before Final Assembly. I don't remember being Spoken To but BMB still held the military standard that bugle calls Served A Specific Purpose and Were Not For Play, but he would look or listen the other way the last day of camp. And that was despite his longstanding standard we may all remember from late-summer councilor meetings that everything was to go by the book until the very end of camp, because one has to Nip It In The Bud. So you broke the ice, Steve. You didn't get away with it. I was the younger brother who did.

I got away with it again in another way later circa 1974/1975. I wrote and performed in a campfire skit which used a line that was questionable. I knew going in that if it didn't cross the line of what one could get away with at campfire, it certainly approached it. I do not recall what the joke was now, but I could imagine BMB objecting. Of course, it could have run on prime-time TV many years ago. It wasn't anything obscene. But anyway, I did it in campfire, and I got away with it.

Later that same summer, I was browsing Logs Of The Day from the previous summer and I read a Log written by Chase Rozelle, a friend of mine, from Winchester, and something I had forgotten came back to me in a white-hot OMG flash. That questionable joke of mine came out word-for word from a joke Chase wrote and used in a Log Of The Day. Not intentionally. It was kind of like George Harrison in My Sweet Lord using the chord sequence from The Chiffons' He's So Fine. Unintended plagarism. I heard it, it imprinted, and I used it again thinking it was my own. But what shook me to the core was not so much that I stole a joke, because that's a campfire tradition, but remembering in horror as I re-read that Log that Chase got ripped a new one by BMB for using that same line/joke in the Log that I got away with a year later in the skit. If I'd remembered what happened to Chase, I never would have risked this joke in campfire. BMB never said a word about it to me.

Maybe BMB was just harder on kids from Winchester. But I think that to an extent, the ice was broken by the Richard Pryors/Redd Foxxes, you and Chase, who went before me. At camp, I lived the Lucky Dog life of the younger sibling. Thanks, Redd!
_________________
Camper: J-8 1965 (Kevin Ryan), J-8 1966 (Mike Freeland), S-6 1967 (Russ Hatch), S-3 1968 (Jeremy Cripps), and JA-2 1969 (Dan Mannis).
JC: J-2 1970 (Bill Bettison) and J-3 1971 (Gene Comella). Councilor 1972, J-5 1973, and JA-1 1974 & 1975

[Pat Donovan]

Hello Steve,
You did indeed wake me up and put me to bed many of the years I was at Wyanoke -- 53-60 -- and the reveilles I remember best were the ones the morning of Cabintown Fair. It wasn't only the Midgets who waited for the rush up the road.
Wish I'd known you were in Mobile a few years ago. My Dad and my brother Bill, both Wyanokers too, and I spent a couple of days there so Dad could tour the USS Alabama, upon which he served for 2 1/2 years in WW II. We stayed at the Admiral Semmes downtown, had donuts at the first Krispy Kreme we'd ever been to, and enjoyed the early Springtime weather. Dad showed us around the ship, and it was wonderful that he could show us his bunk, looking, he said, exactly as it had those many years ago. (Actually, it reminded me of a time when I was in the Infirmary at Wyanoke, rolled over to look out the window, and found his name written in pencil on one of the wall studs right in front of my nose - as this website proves, the past is always with us.)
On another note, 13 years ago my wife, daughters and I visited Hawaii on vacation, and I woke up the second morning knowing I wanted to live there. What with considerations about the kids and high school and college, and my and Fran's putting in enough time at work to leave with something in our pockets, it took what sometimes seemed like forever before we could achieve our dream. Last May we bought the one-way tickets, and we're now happy residents of Keaau, about 20 miles SE of Hilo on the Big Island. I have finally found the place "where the weather suits my clothes," what few of them I now own. I won't ever see the ice go out on Winnipesaukee (and boy!, do I hope I spelled that right), but you know what? Dave's descriptions will do just fine. After over 60 years without ever spending the winter in a warm place, I'm not looking back.
Jim Culleton:: I will get to Pelham in 2013 if someone organizes a get-together for our 50th HS reunion. See you then?
All the best for a warm and Happy Christmas to everyone.
Pat Donovan
1953-56 Midget
1957-59 Junior
1960 Senior
Gold Honor Camper