Remember Camp Sussex, Camp Aheka, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca or Kamp Kiamesha? Then you don't want to miss this story.
One summer night decades ago, Joe Smith left Camp Sussex and snuck over to its longtime rival Camp Louemma, about three miles away in the lake-studded hills of Sussex County, and, in a move that would surely be sanctioned by "Meatballs," let the air out of the tires of all the staff cars.
Apparently there were no hard feelings. This year, Smith took a job at Camp Louemma and now proudly wears its signature red. But he confesses that he still bleeds blue and white -- the colors of Camp Sussex -- even though his old camp has been closed for more than a decade.
The Camp Sussex buildings are still there, although ravaged by time and vandals, and photos of the ruins often pop up on one of the three separate Camp Sussex alumni pages on Facebook. Last month, Joe Smith helped organize a Camp Sussex reunion of more than 100 former campers and staffers -- at, yes, Camp Louemma.
Founded as a free camp for underprivileged Jews, Camp Sussex was never limited by religion, and later became "a melting pot," with at-risk youth of all races and ethnicities. "That's why it means so much to so many people," Smith says. "It was so not the way the rest of the world was. Or is."
Summer camp is a world apart, a cloister with its own secret language, music, traditions, even terrors. (Remember that Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, the nearly 90-year-old Boy Scout camp in Blairstown, was the setting for "Friday the 13th.") Sleepaway camp may be the first place children can claim as their own, and the last place they are allowed to be children. In many cases, they form lifelong attachments there -- to fellow campers and to the camp itself, and for adults, that nostalgia only becomes thicker when that world disappears for good.
"It was like utopia for a boy," says Chris Holt of Freehold, reminiscing about Camp Columbus, the Knights of Columbus camp on Bamber Lake in Ocean County, which closed in the 1970s. "Once a year, I make a pilgrimage. I jump in the lake every year, just for tradition."
News that a camp may shutter sends shock waves through its alumni group -- and a sense of mission. In 2000, when the newly-merged Boy Scout Council of Northern New Jersey announced plans to sell off Camp Glen Gray in the Ramapo Mountains, alumni and scout volunteers organized Friends of Glen Gray, which worked with the national Trust for Public Land and Bergen County to preserve the tract. Today it is still used for Boy Scout camping even though it is run by the county.
(The flood-prone Treasure Island, in the Delaware River near Frenchtown, was shut down in 2008. One of the oldest Boy Scout camps in America, its alumni tried for years to reopen the camp but finally gave up the ship last year.)
Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, a leftist summer camp with strong ties to singer and activist Paul Robeson and staffers that included lights of the Harlem Renaissance, including the painter Jacob Lawrence and dancer Pearl Primus, inspired camper June Levine and her husband to collect stories for their book "Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca." In many ways, it was a traditional summer camp, even if the campfire dramas hinged on runaway slaves and the daily newspaper published editorials demanding integration in baseball.
"Everyone who went there said it was the most important thing that ever happened in their life," Levine says. "We talked about peace and freedom and equality long before that was current." A reunion in 2000 -- fifty years after the camp in New Jersey closed -- attracted 500 people. "Everybody was walking around with tears, crying because it was such a tremendous experience."
About 15 years ago, Dave Fucio, who attended the Boy Scouts' Camp Aheka on Surprise Lake in Morris County in the 1960s and early 1970s, visited his old stomping grounds off Route 23. He followed, he says, "some vestigial memory of the approach to camp," surprised by how close it was compared to his memories of his father's hulking station wagon making what seemed like an hours-long trek from Passaic.
At Camp Aheka, he learned how to cook over a fire, paddle a canoe, identify constellations, and first aid. "It curls my toes now to think about what they taught the boys, stuff you'd now be calling EMS for, getting bit by a rattlesnake or splinting a compound fracture," he says. But this simple memory is just as powerful: a breeze blowing through the open-sided tents at night as he and his fellow scouts listened to Jean Shepherd spin his stories over the AM radio on Friday nights.
"Do I want to be 13 years old now? No. But you think back on it, it's a very nice, gauzy memory. Everything was green ... There's trees all around, and good friends."
From a radical leftist outpost in Hunterdon County to a Boy Scout reservation in the middle of the Delaware River to a military-style camp founded by a Philadelphia merchant for his teenaged workers, we've gathered vintage photos of now-shuttered summer camps in New Jersey. This is by no means a definitive list, so please share your memories and photos in the comments.
Vicki Hyman may be reached at vhyman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickihy or like her on Facebook. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook, and check out TV Hangover, the podcast from Vicki Hyman and co-host Erin Medley on iTunes, Stitcher or listen here.