Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah...

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,

Here I am at Camp Grenada

Camp is very entertaining

and they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining.

Allan Sherman's hilarious ode to Summer Camp, is based on a real life letter from camp written by his young son Robbie Sherman.  The camp - Camp Champlain - was in upstate New York.  It was owned by the uncle of writer, Paul Lieberman, who remembers the kid they called, "Sherman".

"Sherman had never been to camp before he arrived at my uncle's on Lake Champlain.  He was the smallest boy in the cabin but made his presence known by reading us the letters he was sending his parents, telling them how miserable he was:  'I wish you were here and I was there'.  'The counselor plays the trumpet in the middle of the night and won't let me sleep'.  That sort of stuff."  

I went hiking with Joe Spivy

He developed poison ivy

You remember Leonard Skinner

He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner.

"But the letters didn't work.  Sherman remained at the camp, and remained miserable, right up until the lunch hour when he took matters into his own hands."

"We were at one of the long tables in the barn-like mess hall.  He was sitting on my left.  Another boy was on my right. They began arguing.  About what I can't recall.  But, as I said, I'll never forget the dull butter knife, and it may well have been the thick handle that hit the boy.  But he fell backward nonetheless and started wailing.  I grabbed Sherman in a headlock and probably started pounding on him.  Of that I'm not certain - but the headlock definitely.  And the next day he was gone. They'd kicked him out."  

By contrast, my Dad's 1939 postcard home to his parents is uplifting!  He was having a "swell time" at Summer camp. They used words like that.  On the back of the postcard, in my Grandfather's handwriting, is the place name, Whytecliffe, the beautiful West Vancouver park, my Dad would later take our family to for Summer evening picnics of cold chicken and potato salad.  

Having learned that he may have an opportunity to travel to Hawaii with the Sea Scouts, he could hardly wait to write his parents, who only lived across the water, and an Inter-urban ride away from the camp. His spelling of Honolulu makes me laugh every time. 

That Dad would have chosen this particular postcard to send home, is no surprise.  Siwash Rock, with its Douglas Fir tree, is legendary in Vancouver.  The volcanic basalt stack is a landmark in Stanley Park, which this week (a few weeks ahead of the park's 127th birthday) was named the top park in the entire world.  

Brantford, Ontario-born Canadian poet, and daughter of a Six Nations Chief, Emily Pauline Johnson's ashes are, at her request, buried under a boulder within sight of Siwash Rock.  She moved from Ontario to British Columbia, where she died of breast cancer at the age of 51. 

Siwash Rock held a strong connection with her.  She wrote about it in her book, Legends of Vancouver. The people of the Squamish First Nation say that thousands of years ago, a young Chief, named Skalsh married a Northcoast woman.  The night before the birth of their first child, they purified themselves in the Narrows of Burrard Inlet. While his wife crept back into the forest, Skalsh continued to purify himself for his family.  Gods paddling in a canoe that would lose its special powers if it touched human beings, ordered him out of the water, but he refused.  For his commitment to family, the moment Skalsh stood up on the shoreline, the Gods immortalized him in stone: a symbol of "clean fatherhood".  Just the legend that may have been passed down to generation after generation of kids at camp.

With Summer racing to an end, and those camps about to close for the year, I am reminded of Johnson's poem, The Song My Paddle Sings, and her words, "August is laughing across the sky".

The photographs of these clouds and the weathered, wind swept Muskoka Pine (at the top of the page), were taken from the deck of a Muskoka steamship returning to Gravenhurst.  The lone pine reminds me of Siwash Rock.  Two different trees, both standing tall through the violent storms of two millennia.  The tree atop Siwash Rock (actually trees, but they're so closely intertwined they appear as one) withstood hurricanes, which felled giant Cedars in Stanley Park.

Camp Champlain, the real life Camp Granada is no longer standing.  It is now a hotel, known as the Normandie Beach Resort.

Oh, and if you're wondering what ever happened to the real life boy who hated Summer camp, writer Paul Lieberman, who sat beside him that fateful lunch hour, tracked him down for an article published August 16, 2003 in the Los Angeles Times.

Robert Sherman could not remember many of the events of that Summer long ago.  "Not to look for sympathy, but just as a comment on memory - I had four just-outside-of-the-brain tumors removed, two in 1973 and two in 1983, and I have a bunch of memory gaps."  Sherman, weathered the storms. He had a boyhood interest in electronics, and started a series of entertainment websites including Quiz-land.com.  He made a nice living doing what he enjoyed.  He even sent his daughter to a day camp! 

P.S. (Summer Camp letters often end with a P.S.)  The Muskoka Pine is now available on Society6 as a phone skin or cover for your kid's iphone..."Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah..."

Muskoka Pine photograph copyright:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Inc.

Summer Clouds photograph copyright:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Inc.
Lyrics to Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp) by Allan Sherman, Wikipedia
Legends of Vancouver, E. Pauline Johnson (1911)
The Song My Paddle Sings, Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems, by E. Pauline Johnson (1912)

The Boy in Camp Granada, by Paul Lieberman, LA Times August 16, 2003