60 in 60 #14 Vocation
I am reflecting on the last 60 years, and writing 60 blog posts in 60 days. 30 about people and 30 about events, places, experiences and entities.
I’ve mentioned before that sometimes what seems like an insignificant event can end up being a life changing moment. This is another example. In this instance there were two hugely significant moments. I didn’t realise that at the time but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I would not be where I am today but for the things that happened in the mid-seventies when I was a teenager.
Over the Summer of 1973 we moved from Geelong to Perth. Mum was married to Arthur and for the first year or so we lived in Bayswater, renting a house from Uncle Neil and Aunty Joan. Some time later we moved to a house on West Coast Hwy Watermans, overlooking the marine laboratory. It had sloping concrete roofs which were perfect for skateboarding on although the staff there didn’t approve so a quick leap from the roof into the sand dune beneath was our means of escape when busted.
While living at Watermans we were visited by a young bloke called Jeff who delivered a car we had left behind in Geelong for repairs. He stayed with us for a couple of months before heading back to Victoria. After he departed we received a number of letters for him from the YMCA. I had no idea what was in them but seeing as he had left months before I decided to open one and see what they were about. Inside was an invitation to attend a leadership training weekend being held at the YMCA campsite at Stoneville in the Perth hills.
It sounded like fun so I rang the number, explained that Jeff wasn’t in Perth anymore and asked if I could come instead. The person on the phone was hesitant because numbers had been finalised but I managed to talk him into it and so the next weekend I had my introduction to YMCA camping. I loved it and signed up for more leadership training and as a volunteer leader for the summer camp program at Rottnest Island. Thus I found myself a few months later looking after groups of 9-10 year old kids, camping in tents at the old YMCA tent campsite on Rotto for a week at a time. It was fantastic and I discovered I had an aptitude for leading and working with kids. Rotto is a wonderful place and I spent two great summers there, playing games, riding bikes, swimming at the Basin, singing songs, enjoying lantern stalks and bakery runs. Looking after the kids was a lot of fun but the other attraction was all the other young people there as leaders. Once the kids were settled we would hang out, play cards, listen to music around a campfire, talk and muck around.
As a 17 year old it was a perfect way to spend the summer but I did have a serious wake-up call during one camp. After a late night I was so tired the next day that I lay down in a rocky shelter overlooking the beach and fell asleep while my group were playing on the beach and swimming. Thankfully there were other leaders and groups there supervising while I was slacking off. A couple of the other leaders reported this back to the camp director and he confronted me about it. “Marcus, you need to decide whether you are here for the kids or for yourself. Do you really want to be a leader? Because if not, you’ll be on the first ferry back to the mainland”. I knew he was absolutely right, I had been irresponsible, I was remorseful and declared I definitely wanted to be a leader and that I would not do anything like it again. Thankfully he gave me a second chance and I knuckled down, took my job seriously, and became a much better leader because of it. Thank God for second chances.
Over a two year period I was a volunteer leader on about a dozen YMCA camps, at Rottnest, Stoneville and Sorrento, my skills developed along with my attitude and I received a glowing reference from the YMCA prior to heading off to London in 1982.
Whilst working at the Esso office building in Green Park I met a girl, Felicity, who told me about her experience working on a summer camp in the USA with Camp America. It sounded fantastic and I eagerly applied for a job with a similar organisation called BUNAC that recruits young men and women from Britain to work on summer camps in the States.
Thanks largely to my YMCA reference I was offered a job at Camp Schodack in upstate New York, not far from the Capital, Albany.
In fact I was not recruited as a standard camp counsellor (the entry level position) but was given a job as a Bunk Leader and put in charge of twelve boys aged 8-9 and four counsellors.
The camp ran for 8 weeks plus several days of set-up before the kids arrived and clean-up after they went home. The program was full on with a busy timetable of regular events, ranging from street hockey and soccer to horse-riding and archery plus a stack of evening programs, activities and special events culminating in Tribals or Colour War where the whole camp of about 300 kids aged from 5 to 15 and 80 leaders were split into two tribes and engaged in all manner of competition over two intensive days. The camp ran for so long that they had a visitors day in the middle where parents and families could come and visit their children. I loved the whole thing and my Osage “Oh Saggy” Boys were great fun. In fact nearly 40 years on I am still in touch with one of them, Joshua, and to my utter shock and amazement, he and his little girl flew out to Australia to surprise me for my 50th birthday! He has not only remained my friend but he and his family have been mutually adopted by my Mum who has stayed with them each time she’s been to America.
Again, one of the best things about the camp was the other leaders and on nights when we weren’t on duty we headed for the local bar to play pool, feed the jukebox and drink American beer like Budweiser and Schlitz. I had learnt my lesson though and was always fit and ready for work with the kids each day. We got one and a half days off each week and used those days to visit New York City or go and stay at people’s cabins on the lake etc.
There were many memorable moments at Camp Schodack but the one that has remained most vivid and important happened before the kids arrived. Taking a look at my list of campers, several experienced leaders said “Oh, you’ve got Andy Levy!” in a tone that suggested that was not a good thing. By tradition the kids, mostly from well-off Jewish families from NY and Long Island, came to the same camp every year and then when old enough graduated to become CITs (counsellors in training) and eventually counsellors in their own right. I had no idea who Andy was but he clearly had a reputation as a difficult kid. I decided that I would ignore all the warnings and prophets of doom. I would take Andy on face value and treat him exactly the same as every other kid in my bunk, with as much love and care as I could. Lo and behold! It worked. Andy and I got along brilliantly and he had a fantastic summer without the slightest hint of a problem.
I had such a good experience at Schodack that I signed up to come back the following year, 1984, and was put in charge of a larger group and more counsellors. Having blazed a trail as the first BUNAC to be a Bunk Leader the previous year, the camp employed several more BUNACs and made two more of them Bunk Leaders which added another level of enjoyment to the experience. The highlight for me was getting my mate Malcolm a job at the same camp. He is a very charismatic bloke and when the Americans dubbed him X after Malcolm X he quickly assumed the status of cult figure around camp.
I had Joshua and Andy in my group again, along with 22 other kids and 5 counsellors. Comprising the Seminole boys. I knew the ropes and what to expect second time around and we started to plan and run some of our own activities with the kids, during the day time and after hours.
The night time adventures started with simple things like moving the kids’ bunks while they were asleep before escalating into a daring escapade at two in the morning. Having teed it up with the night watchman we woke all the kids up with the dreadful news that someone had stolen all their shoes and we had to go and find them! Once we got all the sleepy kids dressed we sneaked out of the bunk and crept our way through the camp and headed for “Siberia” the playing area farthest away from the bunks. By then the kids were fully into it and both excited and mystified why someone would steal their shoes in the middle of the night! Then one by one they started finding their sneakers scattered around the oval, celebrating as if they had found buried treasure. Once all the shoes were retrieved we headed back to camp, only to be “discovered” by the patrolling night watchman. “Run” I yelled and 24 breathless kids charged back to the bunk ahead of the torch-bearing pursuer.
As we hurtled through the door I instructed them ”Straight into bed, pretend you’re asleep, don’t make a noise!”. A minute later, the watchman, playing his part brilliantly, came storming in looking for the culprits who were out of their bunk after lights out! “There better not be any kids outside this bunk” he threatened. The kids didn’t dare move or breathe a word and he departed, satisfied with his night’s work. For the next two days it was the only thing the kids could talk about.
One of the special events each year was the counsellor hunt. With barely a minute’s head start after lunch, all the counsellors ran and hid around the camp while eager groups of kids hunted them down and delivered them to the office to win points. Different people were worth more or less, with the ultimate insult being if the price on your head was zero or even negative points! A week or so beforehand there was an auction where each bunk could offer up a service of some kind for other groups to bid on with camp cash. Typical offerings were washing dishes, making beds, etc. I suggested we offer a “kidnapping” with all the trimmings. At the auction a group of eight year old boys successfully bid for our services then really surprised us by asking us to kidnap Warren, a very quiet and unassuming counsellor. We had expected the target to be more high profile but that’s who they wanted abducted so we set the wheels in motion. I used a session of arts and crafts to construct the traditional ransom note, letters cut out from magazines and newspapers. We stole Warren’s baseball glove and gave it to the head counsellor, asking him to announce the found glove at the lunch time assembly around the flag pole. A bemused Warren recognised it was his and walked out the front to collect it. At that moment my accomplices and I burst out of the mess hall, faces covered by masks and grabbed Warren, wrapping him up in a net and rope and bundling him into the car that had come flying through the camp gate, horn blasting. Cindy, the camp drama counsellor was the driver, so she had a flare for the dramatic. As she spun the wheels and sped out the gate the head counsellor read out the ransom note to the stunned campers. “If you want Warren back we demand ice cream for everyone”. Needless to say the atmosphere at lunchtime was pretty excited, all the more so because we had staged the kidnapping on the day of the counsellor hunt. Meanwhile, warren, who had had no idea about any of it, was secreted in the basement under the stage of the hall and provided with a meal and a request to lay low until he was found. In the final piece of the plan, I had placed the leg and buttocks of a broken store mannequin (a prop from the drama dept) in the fork of a tree in Siberia with another note saying “If you want the rest of Warren you’d better meet our demands”. The discovery of the leg was announced with great drama over the camp PA and sent the campers into a Warren-hunting frenzy! About an hour later Warren was found and led to freedom by a triumphant group of boys and girls. The whole stunt went off perfectly and became one of the stand-out memories of the summer. I had arranged for the kidnapping to be videoed and we enjoyed watching it later. Unfortunately it was filmed on a US video system and wouldn’t work on Australian video players when I returned home.
At the end of my second summer the camp owner, Paul Krouner, wrote me a glowing reference that enabled me to get a job back at the YMCA in Perth in 1985. He noted that our bunk had had the best morale of any group in camp and that I had worked so effectively with a challenging camper (Andy) that he had had his best ever summer that year.
I will tell more stories of my time in America after the camps ended in a future chapter of 60 in 60 but I need to qualify my opening claims about the life-changing nature of these events.
If I hadn’t opened Jeff’s letter I would probably never have gotten involved with the YMCA camping program.
If I hadn’t been challenged by the camp director about my behaviour and attitude I wouldn’t have knuckled down and become a good leader.
If I hadn’t become a better leader I wouldn’t have gotten the job at Camp Schodack.
If I hadn’t done all those things I wouldn’t have realised how much I liked working with kids or that I was good at it.
The end result was that when I returned home to Australia I got a job at the Y – where, as you’ve heard, I met the man who led me to Christ, and my future wife, Carolyn.
I then got a job on a project called Buster the Fun Bus in Fremantle during the America’s Cup defence, as play leader.
My next job was as a drop-in-centre coordinator with teenagers in Warwick, followed by the best and longest job I’ve had, as a school chaplain at Carine and Busselton high schools.
And finally, in a deliberate move to return to my roots and work with primary school kids, I went to uni and got a teaching degree in my mid fifties so that now I am a year 3-4 teacher at Natimuk Primary School in western Victoria.
Discovering and fulfilling my vocation has been a long and satisfying journey and it all started with opening that letter from the YMCA.
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