Summer Stories

Vignettes from summers past

By Elinor Spokes

Summer evokes images of children newly liberated from their year of academic studies, engaged in carefree play in and around neighborhoods. Raucous laughing, water splashing, mosquitoes whirring and fireworks exploding make up the season’s soundtrack.

Perhaps because of the often sweltering heat and humidity of summer here in Baltimore, life seems to slow down a bit come late June, July and August. The season has its own very distinct pace, a relaxed feel, a different air about it. The relationships forged throughout the summer months in camp, on vacation, or merely in the neighborhood offer the possibility of friendships for a lifetime.

From the memories of four Baltimoreans come these vignettes from the summers of their youth.

Nighttime In The Neighborhood
Michael Stein

Michael Stein grew up in the Stoneybrook North community of Randallstown with his older sister. Now living in Owings Mills with his wife and two children, he recalls the summer days of his youth spent riding his bike, playing games with the neighborhood kids, hanging out at the community pool and being able to stay out until dark.

“Times were so different then,” he reminisces. “You could ride your bike anywhere and I could ride wherever I wanted to go.” Now, he says he would be reluctant to allow his own children to ride beyond the boundaries of his street. “I remember riding my bike to my friends’ houses and riding to the Stoneybrook Swim Club, where all the neighborhood kids hung out,” he adds.

From post dinnertime until dark, kids from around the neighborhood would gather in the backyard of one particular family because it backed up to a big open space. It was there that games would ensue until it was nearly too dark to play.

“We played hide-and-seek throughout the whole neighborhood,” Stein says. “One particular porch was home base and one kid was ‘it.’ The ‘it’ had to tag you before you got back to home base and then that kid would become ‘it.’ Anyone who was around could play, but it was mostly boys.”

The neighborhood kids would also play long games of capture the flag, basketball and baseball in the street. Baseball was played in a court where the manhole covers were in the exact configuration as those on a baseball field, says Stein. He specifically recalls that if the ball was hit into a certain neighbor’s yard, the neighbor, who was less than thrilled, would confiscate the ball, thus ending the game.

Stein remembers that some kids, including himself, would go to camp for a few weeks of the summer. Then they would come back and spend the rest of the summer in the neighborhood. Snowball truck driver Herbie was a staple in the neighborhood and visits from the Good Humor truck on sweltering hot days was always a highlight.

“We just played and played, and didn’t come in until it was too dark to see. We had no cell phones, but the parents didn’t think twice about us being out and about in the neighborhood as long as we were home by the time it was dark,” he says.

First Time Away From Home
Naomi Hoffman

I went away to camp for the first time when I was eight, which now seems very young to me,” reflects Naomi Hoffman, now a mother of two living in Stevenson. Growing up in Farmington Hills, Mich., Hoffman attended the Habonim Dror Camp Tavor, located in Three Rivers, Mich., until she was in her early twenties.

She recalls vividly “My trunk was packed. I had all my clothes labeled, my camera, my yellow and pink flowered lap pad stuffed with Hello Kitty stationery and, most importantly, my mosquito netting for my soon-to-be cot away from home. I rolled the car window down to help calm my feelings that I was probably going to throw up any second as we approached the bus to take me away for my first four weeks at sleep-away camp.”

Her memories of her earliest camp days focus on life in her cabin. She remembers the consistently sandy concrete floor of the cabin and consequently the sandy sheets. She also remembers seeking the comfort of her bunkmates during violent summer thunderstorms by either climbing into their cots or holding their hands for the duration of the storm through the mosquito netting between the heads of the beds.

Hoffman recalls the cold, damp walk through the scary woods to the bathrooms, which required the companionship of a bunkmate in the case of a “Crepsy sighting” (the legendary half burnt ghost of a man who still traipsed camp grounds looking for his child who died in a fire). “None of us youngest girls had actually ever seen him, but we still fully believed that he existed,” she recalls.

Every summer at Camp Tavor, the counselors would plan a surprise “special day” for which there would be a theme with activities revolving around that theme. Hoffman remembers that during her first summer, the special day was a re-enactment of the Aliyah Bet, a post World War II boatlift of Holocaust survivors to Palestine, then under British rule. The counselors began the day by waking campers before sunrise and dividing them into two groups — the British and the Jewish Settlers.

Hoffman was one of the Jewish settlers and she recalls being terrified to be woken so early and being told to run fast through the woods to escape from the British, who were trying to form a blockade against the settlers. She ran to the destination, the dining hall, where there was much celebratory yelling and cheering as the “settlers” made it through the British lines. After her traumatic morning, she returned to her cabin and fell asleep.

Most of her memories from Camp Tavor are of the lifelong friends she made there and life lessons learned. “At the end of four weeks I dreaded going home. Lifelong friendships were budding, as well as a love for Israel, Judaism, social justice, James Taylor and Cat Stevens, bonfires, a perpetual fear of ghost stories, how to be a good and decent human being, an appreciation of my environment and, most importantly, a developing sense of self-confidence and self-awareness,” she says.

Summer Romance
Elana Nawy

As a young 7-year-old camper, Elana Nawy remembers boys being a “big thing” at Camp Tagola, a co-ed camp in the Catskill Mountains of New York. She recalls that even though many activities at this Jewish camp were single-sex, there were opportunities to get to know and spend time with the boys.

In fact, says Nawy, who grew up in Manhattan and Hollywood, Fla. and now lives in Reisterstown with her husband and two sons, sports were co-ed, evening activities were co-ed and on Shabbat girls were allowed to take walks with the boys.

There was one particular boy who caught her eye early on in her camp experience, Mark Cohen. They would often attend the Tuesday night roller-skating socials together and enjoyed each other’s company. During their conversations, Nawy remembers sharing Dixie Cups filled with Koolaid powder with Cohen, dipping their fingers in the sugary substance and spending hours and hours talking about family, among other topics.

Nawy recalls being quite adventurous as a young girl of 10 and Cohen, then 13, recognized that quality in her. One rainy day towards the end of the summer, he dared her to enter the boys’ bunk, which was strictly forbidden.

At his suggestion, she put on a rain poncho so that no one would recognize her, and she walked to the boys’ side of the camp and into Cohen’s bunk. Meanwhile he had decided to adventure to the girls’ side, also under a poncho.

One evening towards the end of the summer, after she and Cohen had been chatting, Nawy remembers that “all of a sudden he planted a huge kiss on me. All I could think of to do was to slap him across the face and run away from him.” She remembers thinking that she and he were just buddies, not boyfriend and girlfriend, but that clearly he had a different perception.

Her counselor, Monique, saw her running towards her bunk and was able to assess what had happened, give her advice and calm her down after her traumatic incident.

For the remaining week-and-a-half, Cohen would try to talk to Nawy and wrote letters to her, but she did not want to have anything to do with him.

“He was older and I was naive; I didn’t know how to handle it,” she says. The next year, Cohen attended a different camp.

Fast forward to 2005: Nawy was in Florida at her parents’ friend’s home for cocktails with their friends. Among them, by sheer coincidence, was Cohen and his wife. “It took me about seven minutes to catch my breath when he walked in the door. We recognized each other immediately, ” she says.

They were able to talk and catch up with each other’s lives. “It gave me closure,” she says. “A little part of me always wondered ‘what if?’ And I also felt it was beshert. God was saying, now you are mature enough and ready to see one another again. “

She adds, “I never told him I still had all his letters.”

The First Night Home
Rachael Abrams

For Rachael Abrams, an Owings Mills mother of two, the memories of her first night at home after a summer spent at Camp Ramah in the Poconos are still vivid: being all by herself, in her eerily quiet, abnormally clean room, surrounded by a deafening white noise, not being able to fall asleep.

Summer after summer, Abrams would return to her beloved camp, first as a camper and eventually as a counselor, growing friendships and making memories. The best part of her summers was the camaraderie provided by the girls with whom she shared her bunk.

She recalls being up late at night, hanging out with her 16-year-old bunkmates, being silly. “Looking back at life as a 16-year-old, we had no worries. We were surrounded by people who loved and cared about you. There was no stress; just having fun with people who meant a lot to you,” she adds.

She recalls with clarity the last day of camp, when all the campers would gather in the camp dining hall in groups designated by which bus they were to board for their return trip home. The conversations buzzing throughout the cavernous room would revolve around when the campers, who had formed such strong bonds with one another throughout the summer, would see each other again. They would write “bus notes” to one another, which were not to be read until they had boarded their respective buses and were on their journey home. Abrams says she kept the bus notes she received by her bedside and read them again and again as a teenager. They helped her cope with being apart from her dear friends.

She remembers rushing to the camera store with the rolls of film she took while at camp and eagerly awaiting for the photographs to be developed and returned so she could relive her summer and place them in photo albums.

Returning to Baltimore at the end of each summer was always bittersweet. Once the school year began, Abrams says, the memories would fade slightly and she didn’t think about camp all the time. During her winter school break, her parents, who wanted her to stay in touch with her camp friends, would let her host them at their home in Pikesville. For several days, the girls would pore over the multiple photo albums that they had each created as mementos of their summers. And the camp would produce a VHS video montage each year that they would watch together.

“You don’t realize how special camp is until you are by yourself,” recalls Abrams. “You don’t realize how good you have had it all summer until your first night home,” she says.

Photo captions:
Growing up, Michael Stein spent summers with neighborhood friends playing baseball in the street, as well as capture the flag, hide-and-seek and basketball.

Naomi Hoffman first went to overnight camp when she was eight.

Elana Nawy saved the letters Mark Cohen wrote her while they both were at camp.

Rachael Abrams recalls her first night home from camp.

July 2010