How Do We Love Thee? Let us Count the Ways . . .

We joined the Camp Deerpark staff as co-assistant directors in late April 1975. Perhaps the most memorable staff times were living with Lowell Jantzi, Isaac Grable, Frank Freeman and Maynard Shirk.

Those were years of growth for camp, with 10-day summer camps, often with up to 80 campers, punctuated by weekend church retreats. We remember LONG days, ENDLESS WEEKS, shopping for hundreds of people at ShopRite, flipping pancakes on the griddle early in the morning with fresh cream for the coffee from the tops of the local dairy’s milk bottles. Crafts, nature, lunch, mowing and fixing, dinner, campfire, snack shop, drive the bus with sleeping kids back to the city, pick up the retreat in the morning and back to camp to do it all again with 100 adults. And again. And again.

We had great times with so many staff members and campers. Spook hikes with phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark tape that made people (and Isaac’s little dog, Jantzi) look like skeletons. Beautiful campfires. (Jerry loved that little quiet time alone going up to get the fire going in the evening.) Kevin Phillips teaching us the dance step for “Wade in the Water” and Jerry getting down on that Guild 12-string for “King Jesus is All.” Biggy (Eugene Davis) singing “Clear-view” (“Have you seen Jesus my lord? He’s here in plain—oops—clear view.”)

Jackie Buck, Jackie O, Kareem, the Pannells, Harold Davenport, Pastor Mateo, Ray and Anna Pacheco, the Newswanger family—and, of course, all of the wonderful Stoltzfi. And Gene. And Monroe. And Mim and Jesus. And Jim Baer. Singin’ in the kitchen. And Ruthie V. The Kruses (all of them!). Too many, too many dear memories. Too much beauty. The loveliest song in the world from the wood thrush. The whip-poor-will with its amazing night game of song pong. The bears. The rattlesnake the neighbor brought down and my mother cooked for the campers. All those shining eyes of the deer under the apple trees. The porcupine that traveled out from under our trailer on the hill through its groove in the snow each day to eat a little bark on the pine tree. The quills it left, twice, in our Irish setter Shawn’s nose. The maples, ash and oak in the fall. The stinking gypsy moths, clicking away in the oak trees. An eight-foot dry red oak log that would split straight and true the whole length with one swing of the axe.

There were the research and development meetings over lunch that resulted in the pool, the cabins on the hill and the handball court. And there were the dreams of taking the junkiest of the buses up to the campfire area, letting it roll down through the Annex and burying the whole mess in the old flow-through pool. (And did we mention the time the three wild horses charged the inspector? For a while we had horses with no facilities and no one specifically to care for them, and yes, they did become a threatening presence now and then.)

We had the pleasure of working with so many wonderful individuals who came to help us out in any way they could. Alfred and Dorothy Kruse, who have certainly left positive memories for many of us, came out one week to work with us. They say that calamities come in sets of three . . .One morning, Leonor went out to feed the chickens (yes, we had chickens at one time). She opened their pen, threw in the feed, then shut the gate as fast as she could as the chickens would rush to get out. In the process, she shut the door on one of the chicken’s heads. Horrified, she opened the gate again, stuffed the bobbing, limp head of the half-dead chicken into the pen, and ran off in horror. When she arrived at the camp kitchen to tell her coworkers what had just occurred, Dorothy was busily pulling a cake out of the oven which somehow flipped over and fell on the floor. A few minutes later, Alfred came into the kitchen and informed us that he had just “rearranged” the swing set while mowing. The mower had caught one of the supporting poles and significantly bent it, making it unusable until repair. We all laughed hard!

How do we love thee? Let us count the ways. Beautiful setting. Beautiful setting. And rich, rich relationships for a lifetime. When we think of heaven, we think of the Deerpark family. It was that good.

—Written by Jerry and Leonor Kennell, co-assistant directors, 1975–77 ,co-directors 1977–78, Jerry director 1979.

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