Last week, Gretchen and I got invited to a lunch organized by the YMCA’s Team Up bridge building team. They were in Washington to meet with their colleagues from around the country and prepare them to meet with members of Congress.
Since I knew that Mike van Haelewyn would ask me to introduce myself, I used the event as an opportunity to think through the impact that the Y had had on me over the years and then how it might continue to do so in the years to come—however many I have left.
Starting at the New London YMCA
I actually don’t remember when my family first sent me to the Y or why they did so. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. I suspect they chose the YMCA because it had the only indoor gym and pool in New London. I also know that my father wanted me to meet kids who weren’t as privileged as we were while my mother wanted me to swim year round which you couldn’t do outdoors on the Connecticut coast.
I only have three memories of the New London Y which was torn down as part of urban renewal in the late 1960s.
We kids entered through the door on the side with the pillars and walked upstairs to the pingpong room that had vending machines and access to the locker rooms.
We swam naked which I’m sure wouldn’t be true any more in any Y.
I also had one of my first introductions to race relations there which, unlike the other two, had a lasting impact on me.
I grew up in a dysfunctional family and one of the few things my mother did well was knit sweaters of which I had dozens. One day at the Y when I was eight or nine, I discovered that a young black kid was wearing the sweater I wore to the Y that afternoon. I don’t remember how I told the staff about the situation or even how much race entered my thinking. I do remember the fact that I knew I would incur my mother’s wrath if I came home without the sweater, let alone that it had been taken by a black kid since her racism was already obvious to my sister and me.
Somehow, the staff person (of whom I have no memory) sorted it all out. Dave and I talked about it. I learned that he was my father’s patient. We became friends and stayed so through high school.
Camp Hazen
The Y’s biggest impact on me came when my parents shipped me off to YMCA Camp Hazen when I was ten. I didn’t want to go. We lived three blocks from the beach. Why go away to camp?????
I went for one two-week period and loved it so much that I teared up one night a week in, asked Howard Bunting (the seemingly austere camp director—see below) if I could call home and ask me parents if I could stay, and ended up doing a second two week period. That turned into a month a summer through high school while my entire family went for a week’s family camp over Labor Day where we became good friends with Nick Kraczyna who ran the arts and crafts program. (I was particularly bad at arts and crafts myself having only made one cutting board of a pig which, of course, was an odd thing for a Jewish kid to decide to make which my not very pleasant mother kept and brought out to show people who came to visit any time I was in her home until she died at age 102 a year ago). My mother also supported Kraczyna who had already moved to Florence to start his budding—and now highly successful—career as an artist.
I then three years as a counselor while I was at Oberlin and ended my camping career by running its leadership training program the summer after I graduated (thereby missing Woodstock). That summer I was also its religious emphasis director, quite an accomplishment for a not very religious but still very Jewish kid.
The years on the staff changed my life.
It helped me see that I was cut out to be a teacher and shaped how I defined what it meant to be an activist in the classroom.
Howard and the rest of the staff must have seen it, too, because they let me teach some weird classes. Guitar? Playing bridge? My cousins both remember those classes better than I do. Although tone deaf, I started by leading the singing after meals.
Howard and the assistant director, George Wigton (also see below) saw some leadership potential that I didn’t see in myself.
Then, as Howard (who had been a conscientious objector during World War II) realized that I was preparing to file an application of my own and that I would be drawing on my interest in Quaker and mainline Protestant based thinking, he gently encouraged me to try out some of my ideas with him. George—who had grown up in Oberlin before he went off to Ohio State as a big time athlete—disagreed with me on all of this. But, it was clear that he liked arguing about Vietnam and telling us what his family back in Oberlin thought about what we students were up to—I also brought a couple of my fellow Obies to work at the camp, so we were hard to avoid.
Perhaps my best memory of camp came in the summer after my sophomore year at Oberlin when the dining hall burned down. Everyone was sent home. Somehow, Howad (Mr B to us all) arranged to have an army mess tent brought in and we only missed a week of camp. With some of my more musical friends on the staff, we decided to write an opera for the show we put on at the last night of camp (I know, an opera? At summer camp? Well, I did go to Oberlin and one of the other counselors had season tickets to the Met). We decided to entitle it after the then hit play Marat/Sade, something like the “Inflagration and Destruction of the Dining Hall as Portrayed by the Imates at the Asylum at Camp Hazen.” I co-wrote a (mercifully) brief libretto and score which culminated in “Goody Goody Camper” singing “One Fine Day I’ll Come Back” to the tune of Verdi’s aria “Un Bel Di” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Humanity is eternally grateful that no recordings were made.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving
The Y keeps coming back.
After my first class at Colby, a student came up to me and asked if I had been his camp counselor when he was ten. Sure enough. Mark Howard had been at Hazen where he set the record for long distance swimming while holding a candle out of the water. He had been a delight as a camper. Now he was my student and advisee and a very preppy (and I wrongfully assumed conservative). Mark soon disabused of the conservative label, but simply knowing him from the old days made me think about how I should approach my students and helped me transition the skills I had developed at camp into the classroom for teaching about political science not bridge or guitar or canoeing or sailing. Mark and I last talked in the fall when I learned that he was still on the left and had retired to Florida. He still remembered me and camp and the impact both had had on his life. He will, of course, get a copy of this as we plan the next stage of our political evolution, at least to some degree together.
Then, it turned out that George Wigton was the basketball coach at our arch rival Bates and we reconnected. I had gotten very involved on the faculty side of athletics at Colby and its coach, Dick Whitmore, was one of my best friends. George and I spent the sixteen years I was at Colby seeing each other a lot and he definitely helped me figure out how to be a faculty member who taught the “whole student,” too. Another lifelong friendship that ended only when he died a few years ago.
Finally, my mother kept up with Nick Kraczyna who was already a successful artist in Florence and would use his summer camp salary to subsidize his vist to the States where he sold his paintings and woodcuts at summer art sales (and to my mother). After she died a little over a year ago, we inherited four of his woodcuts. Not knowing what do with them, I reached out to Nick, since I knew that we were going to be at Rondine which is only a few miles away from Florence. I knew that he had done extremely well as an artist because I ran into a political scientist who knew him 20 years or so ago. I also knew that his first wife—depicted in this woodcut, a copy of which I own—had died and that he had remarried. So, we invited them to visit us at Rondine and then we went to visit them in Florence which included a Friends meeting held in the city’s English cemetery. I learned more about how Howard Bunting had gone out of his way to support Nick’s immigrant family and that he had been extremely proud of helping me on my CO application. I won’t claim that Nick and I picked up as if nothing had changed since 1970 when we last saw each other. But the bond of Camp Hazen, Howard Bunting’s profound ethical commitment, and (of course) the memory of my pig made out time delightful and educational for us both. This is a woodcut he made of his first wife who died a few years ago. Gretchen and I inherited a copy of it which will hang in our new condo.
The Y Today—Teaming Up for Social Change
This all happened because I met Mike at the New Pluralists workshop at the end of January where we were in the same hackathon. If we hadn’t met there, I would never have known about its Team Up Project which will be the next phase of my relationship with the Y.
I knew that the Y had changed. No more skinny dipping in the pool. Camp Hazen is now coed. The cabins all have bathrooms. The leadership training program that I used to lead now includes conflict resolution training. It doesn’t cost $70.00 for a two week session any more.
What I hadn’t expected was that Mike would hand me a project that could contribute to what we’re doing at AfP with Peacebuilding Starts at Home.
In 2023, the Y, Catholic Charities, Habitat for Humanity, and Interfaith America started the Team Up Project which is one of the dozens of bridge building projects that sprang to life in response to the growing polarization in our country over the last decade or so. This one is more promising than most given its founding partners and their ability to reach deep into American society.
They started by gathering about 100 local leaders from the four organizations and gave them some basic training in bridge building across lines of division. Then, by last fall, the project had spawned initiatives in 32 sites in 23 states. No two are alike. As befits their founders, some built homes. Others distributed food. Yet others focused on young people. All, however, infused a spirit of cooperation despite our divisions on top of the social service programs that these organizations are best known for. Last fall, the Team Up team announced a second round of funding to extend its work to the more than 7,500 sites maintained by the four founding organizations.
We never got to what AfP and the Team Up Project could do together at the lunch. That wasn’t ever in the plans. We just wanted to meet and share an Ethiopian lunch with each other.
Now comes the hard part.
And the fun part.
Starting with a breakfast with someone else who was at the hackathon with Mike and me on Wednesday.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
