Chapter 4: CAMP LEGIONTOWN (1956)

Walt Disney was to blame, make no mistake about that. In 1955 The Mickey Mouse Club was one of my favorite television programs – not that there were many to choose from – and that year they introduced a new series consisting of twenty-five ten minute episodes, titled Spin and Marty. I was enthralled. Its setting was the bucolic Triple R Ranch, a boys’ summer camp. It followed the adventures of Marty Markham, an unloved rich boy from the city, and Spin Evans, a poor boy from the wrong side of town, and their unlikely friendship.

Despite having spent all of my summers at our house right on the beach, and having my own boat for which I had just received a new three horsepower Evinrude outboard motor that Christmas, I wanted to go to camp that summer of 1956. Camp hell, I wanted to find myself a Spin Evans, and figured that camp was the best place to start looking. At the time I was only ten, but I was infatuated and I was on a mission.

One of my mother’s cousins was active in the American Legion, and on the board of directors for their summer camp, Camp Legiontown. It was located in a decommissioned World War II army base on the shores of the lovely Watchaug Pond, in Rhode Island’s idyllic Burlingame State Park, thirteen miles from our summer home. If my goal was to befriend a poor boy from the wrong side of town, the timing couldn’t have been better. My arrival at the camp that Saturday coincided with two busloads of boys from Fox Point, the absolutely worst part of Providence, all sponsored by the American Legion‘s charity program. Alas, they were poor and from the wrong side of town, but there wasn’t a Spin Evans in the lot.

Our accommodations were not cozy rustic log cabins in the woods, like the Triple R Ranch on television, or even the Boy Scouts’ Camp Yawgoo that my brother had attended . . . this was a former army camp, and we were herded into abandoned army barracks! On each of the thirty cots was a long cloth sack, which we were instructed to take to the barn and fill with hay – that was the mattress. Too bad about my hay fever.

The “facilities” were big old army latrines with rows of sinks along one wall, an open shower area, long troughs for urinals, and an endless row of stalls with toilets but no doors! Now I was so pee-shy that I needed absolute privacy just to take a leak, there was no way that I would be able to take care of other business in that venue. True to form, I couldn’t. Without sharing the messy details, there are times when being anal retentive comes in handy . . . but even that is not 100% reliable.

The counselors were a sadistic lot, no doubt graduates of The Marquis de Sade School of Camp Counseling, and on our second night, Sunday, their cruelty peaked. Some of my fellow inmates were acting up after lights out, so the counselors dragged all thirty of us outside, made us strip naked, then pick up big rocks – ones painted white and typically used to line the paths of an army camp – and hold them over our heads while the mosquitoes had a feast.

Well, I’d always been called a “sissy” and a “fairy”, etc., and was never good at or interested in sports, but I was a feisty little bugger, obstinate and fearless when it came to standing up for my rights, and not tolerating inanity or injustice. I didn’t take crap from anyone. In less than two minutes I’d had enough of this torture, threw my rock to the ground and went storming back inside to my cot. They tried to get me to toe the line, but I was finished with that abuse. They could do anything they liked to me, once I shut down I was impenetrable. I didn‘t budge.

My mother had given me a half dozen pre-addressed, stamped penny postcards, extracting a promise that I would send messages home every other day (I was supposed to be there for two weeks). Monday morning I sent my first, and the message simply demanded, “Get me out of this God damn place!” A similar sentiment followed every day, although things looked up when we went to the pond later on Monday for swimming and boating.

Much of the activity was devoted to preparing for a water competition to be held that Saturday, Parent‘s Day, which would mark the end of our first week. For the first time in my life teams were actually competing for me, not leaving me till last and taking me by default. Having been a beach boy since an infant of nine months, and having spent the previous summer rowing my pram around the salt marsh every day, I could swim like a fish and I could handle a boat like a seasoned sailor . . . I was a champion!

Yet even the good experiences at Camp Legiontown, which were few and far between, were not enough. And then things got worse. Tuesday I had managed to sneak away for some alone time in the latrine, trying my best, when one of the Fox Point boys – a fledgling gang banger, although we didn’t have that term then – comes in and pulls a knife on me. This wasn’t a little pocket knife, it was a serious Crocodile Dundee whopper. He held it to my throat, and threatened me, “If you tell anyone about this, next time I’ll cut you.” Even to my ten year old mind that made no sense. It was not as though I had witnessed him doing something wrong. If he had refrained from pulling the knife on me to begin with, there would have been nothing for me to tell. Despite the trauma of the past three days, now I knew my life was in danger . . . but I had a plan.

The next day, Wednesday, a group was selected to go blueberry picking, and I was at the head of the line because this was my opportunity. More than twenty of us were supervised by two of the sadists, and once in the thick of the woods I gradually wandered farther and farther from the group. When I knew I was out of sight I made a run for it. Once missed they started searching for me, and I was ultimately apprehended by the camp station wagon as I strutted along the road at a determined pace in a southerly direction away from the camp.

Everyone was laughing, thinking it was such a joke that I was so lost I was going the wrong way. The joke was on them, I wasn’t lost. Thanks to having grown up on the ocean and on boats, I could tell by the sun which direction was which. As soon as I had made my stealthy escape in the woods, I sprinted west because I knew sooner or later I would hit Klondike Road, at which time I’d go south towards Route 1, the old Boston Post Road, and then east. Far from lost, I knew exactly where I was going . . . HOME!!!

The best laid plans. Somehow I managed to survive three more days. On Saturday my parents arrived for visiting day, and I told them I was ready to go home. The counselors had set up a carnival of sorts in the assembly hall, with the usual things like knock over the bottles with a ball; break the balloons with a dart, etc.

A sign on one of the two doors at the back of the raised platform that hinted at being a stage said, “see the fat lady”! My curiosity got the best of me, so I paid my dime. As I walked through the door I could see one of the sadists sitting on a chair in a smock with a pillow underneath, wearing a ratty yellow mop as a wig with red gloss smeared around his lips. Before I knew what hit me two more grabbed me from behind, pulled down my pants, dragged me over to the “fat lady” and stretched me over his lap butt prone. There they held me while the “fat” sadist brutally beat my buttocks with a large unyielding wooden paddle.

It was all over but the screaming. My father came bursting through the door, and the sadists immediately let me go. Although Dad didn’t have any qualms about beating his wife or kids, in his defense usually only when he was drunk, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let anyone else do it. So he pushed the two out of the way, then picked me up and pulled up my pants. He took the paddle from the “fat” sadist, threatened him with it, and dragged me along in pursuit of the camp dictator director.

Once located, he pulled down my pants and showed him my butt. It was covered with deep red welts. He read that fellow the riot act, and threatened to give him a few whacks with the paddle. In the meantime a couple of the saner counselors tried to convince me to stay for the boating and swimming exhibition that afternoon; after all, I was their star … but no, I was done. Once I’m done, I’m done. Get out of my way . . . I was going home.

That’s the story of my first experience away from home. For a week I had been clicking my heels, but I guess you really do need the ruby red slippers. Nonetheless, ruby slippers or not, I was on my way home. There really is no place like home, even when it could be menacing at times. And no matter where you find it, even when it’s in places you never ever imagined.