Summer Camp Memories: May-September 1970 (Conclusion)

I never saw Harriet again either. Near the end of 1970, I wrote her a love letter. But she did not bother replying. Susan, however, did reply to a letter I wrote her in 1971, when I was considering applying to the University of Tennessee (where the tuition for out-of-state students was still very low in 1971) to study agricultural economics (Many U.S. Movement people were theninto “going back to the land” by that time and into living in agricultural communes).

Susan was still friendly, but planning to spend the summer of 1971 at Mayer’s summer camp again as a staff person. Because she was now still only 17, I again reminded myself that I was probably too world weary for her to want to see me again outside of a summer camp work situation. But because I wanted to encourage Susan’s willingness to be friendly to an anti-war activist, rebel spirit like myself, I bought a pair of tickets to a Joan Baez concert at Carnegie Hall. Then I mailed the two tickets to Susan for her and one of her current boyfriends in New Jersey to use.

In early September 1970 I went to Coney Island one day with the pre-med guy who had been the counselor in the cabin next to door to mine that I spent evenings talking to a lot after Harriet suddenly pulled back emotionally from me. But he was too into being a money-oriented pre-med student for me to feel we had enough in common for us to stay in contact. The only guy from the camp, ironically, with whom I developed an after-summer friendship turned out to be the young boys’ group counselor who had been fired after the drinking/rowboat capsizing incident, Charlie.

I bumped into Charlie while changing subway trains in 1973 during the evening rush hour. He was now trapped in some meaningless 9 to 5 job in the business world. But since the summer of 1970, Charlie had come to feel that, he preferred men sexually and now considered himself bisexual.

By 1974, Charlie couldn’t take his culturally-straight 9 to 5 corporate world job anymore and was now a grad student in psychology at Harvard who lived in the Boston area. I took a bus up from New York City to visit him one weekend and we spent a Saturday night drinking in one of the Cambridge bars near Harvard Square. But because he had gotten more back into the academic track, while I was still on the musician/activist cultural dropout track, we soon lost touch and I never saw him again. By the mid-1980s, I began to fear that Charlie had become one of the casualties of the U.S. government’s inaction in response to the AIDS epidemic.

Mayer, predictably, ended up only paying me $500 of the $1,000 he had previously promised to pay me for my counseling work when he hired me. After I telephoned him in the Fall of 1970 to complain about him not paying me the $1,000 he originally agreed to pay me, Mayer denied that I was ever promised more than $500. So I ended up going to small claims court in the Bronx to get a summons for Mayer to appear there, which I delivered to his office at the Special Ed school in Queens where he had hired me the previous May.

But by the date the trial was scheduled, my 1970 summer camp experience seemed like ancient history and I did not think I possessed sufficient written evidence to get a small claims court judge, who would probably prefer Mayer’s straight appearance to my then hippie appearance, to rule in my favor. So I did not bother to show up in court and I let the matter drop. Yet I did find some satisfaction in seeing Mayer’s reaction when I handed him the summons to appear in small claims court, and in knowing that I at least had been able to inconvenience him for a day by compelling him to go to small claims court to make sure the case against him was dismissed by the judge.

So these are my memories of being at Summer Camp in 1970. In an historical period when it still looked to me like a free love-oriented, leisure-oriented, culturally hip society would be created within the United States by the end of the 1970s. But the future would confirm that Sandy, after all, ended up having a more realistic picture of how economically viable being a hippie drop-out would be as the 1970s progressed — within the real world of 9 to 5 slavery, not the fantasy world of a country summer camp in the Poconos.

(The End)