I was at Northrop twice, at ages 11 and 14. My brother and sister also were campers there. I remember my sister Cory saying, "I'm so glad we're poor so we could go to Northrop!" My parents were separated and my mother worked full time. I needed the summers to be mended. Counselors blended their love for us with their love for nature to provide an irresistable source of nourishment. They taught us to see, appreciate, love and incorporate every living thing. I learned that the rain, wind, stars and moon were part of me too. My Northrop experience has served as a source of strength, joy and comfort each day of my life. The woods still call to me . . .
--- Harvey J. Gardner (camper 1943 and 1946). Dr. Gardner is an audiologist and speech pathologist in Huntington, NY.
Each camper had a nature project for the summer. My first project was on useful wild plants and my second . . . was on identifying wild flowers. These projects extended into a lifelong hobby and career. I am now a plant propagator for the New Jersey Native Plant Society; there are currently two species of endangered plants on my window sill . . .
Dr. Grace Petersen was the very dedicated nature director during my camp days. She . . . was a hard lady to stump but I did give her a hard time when I asked the names of some of the smaller mosses, various flies, and non-sporulating slime molds. Other than that she seemed to know just about all the kinds of plants, animals, minerals, and stars. . . Dr. Petersen was the first person to show me a slime mold . . . She mentioned that this blobby giant amoeba we saw in the woods would move and that we could detect movement if we were to put a stick or some other marker on the log where it was migrating and come back several hours later (slime molds crawl about one inch in two hours). Later in college I found that one of my biology teachers, Dr. O.R. Collins, did his research on slime molds. Since my curiosity was already aroused, I carried out undergraduate research with Dr. Collins, got out a series of publications, a Master's in botany, and a Ph.D. in microbial genetics . . .
--- Hubert Ling (camper, 1954 and 1956). Dr. Ling is a botanist and microbiologist living in New Jersey.
I remember when we were told not to put food in our cabins, and I did. The following morning I found a raccoon in my cabin eating my candy. I named my raccoon Charlie, and every day I left candy in front of my cabin for him.
--- Keli Christopher (camper, 1989). Ms. Christopher is studying veterinary medicine at Talladega College in Alabama.
Being a camper at Northrop was a wonderful experience. The setting was beautiful, the programs were mind-opening, and the people were great! There was real comraderie and a true spirit of teamwork in an atmosphere that made learning about science and nature so much fun. I still show my kids what wintergreen looks like and how to find salamanders under rocks, which I learned from my camp days! I learned to dive and swim several new strokes at camp. I fondly recall packing a bedroll and hiking about two miles to camp outside for a night. It was a terrific growth experience that I'll never forget! (And it's the first time I ever ate s'mores. Yum!)
--- Maria Puoti Bellman (camper, 1973). Ms. Bellman lives in New Jersey and writes advertising copy for Campbell Soup.
Northrop was a place where I learned who I was and what I valued. It was the first place where being a girl who was smart and in love with nature was "okay". In fact, here, there were 19 other girls who were also smart, not ashamed of or embarrassed by it and in love with nature too. Camp was the first place that I felt safe in sharing my secret love of poetry, reading and writing. Our counselor, Nome (Margaret H. Perry), read us poetry around the campfires and quoted poetry when we saw something magnificent, like a spider spinning a web. This was my introduction to Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Phyllis McGinley and Robinson Jeffers. I'll never forget hearing "Hurt Hawks" for the first time and weeping... That image has stayed with me for 36 years... I later became an English teacher with a passion for American poetry.
--- Susan Argutto (camper, 1961). Ms. Argutto is a reading specialist living in New Jersey.
Northrop Camp was my first contact with the experience of Nature larger than one can have with an empty lot between two buildings in New York City. It's unlikely I would have had that experience otherwise during my childhood.
Theoretically, of course, I knew that food came out of the ground. But it was not until I pulled up my very first radish from my garden row at Northrop that I realized that vegetables didn't grow in cellophane wrap.
--- David Norris (camper, 1954). Dr. Norris has a Ph.D. in English and Comparitive Literature from Columbia University. He is now a management consultant living in the Black Forest area of Germany.
When I attended Northrop, [there was] an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that ... Nome [Perry] liked to quote...
Nothing that ever flew,
Nor the lark, nor you,
Can die as others do.
[We who] attended Northrop learned to fly, on [our] own God-given wings, and we truly felt we were going to make a difference in life.
--- Enilda Lozada (camper, 1961). Considered a brilliant student, Ms. Lozada suffered a devastating
brain aneurysm in 1963, but after years of superhuman effort, she recovered enough to graduate from Brandeis University. She now works for the Head Injury Foundation and lives in New York.
Wherever I am, I can recognize a plant if it grew on Mt. Washington... I remember Northrop with the original farmhouse ... no electricity, polishing the glass globes of kerosene lanterns, chopping wood for the stove (what marvelous pies we ate), making terraria, pressing plant specimens in old catalogs, sleeping with all our clothes on, including gloves, because the August nights were so cold...
It has been suggested that the camp be enlarged, so that more children could attend each year. But ... it is that very smallness that makes Northrop so special -- one large family, rather than just another institution... There is still a certain magic on the mountain at Northrop; the spirit of those who founded and loved the camp still permeates the air, so that youngsters who stay for a summer amid Northrop's fields and forests cannot help but be imbued with the gift of wonder.
-- Joan Menkin Gerver (camper, 1936 and 1938). Dr. Gerver is a retired psychologist living in New York
I still feel great pain when I think about the fire... I was relieved to learn that the library was spared... You have no idea what those books meant to me during rainy afternoons. [They] started my interest in rare book collecting.
Perhaps...the greatest impression left in me at Northrop was the night sky view from Sunset Rock. I still dream about it.
--- Anthony Torres (camper, 1978). After being named a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in high school, Mr. Torres attended Brooklyn Polytechnic University. He lives in Nagoya City, Japan, and heads an internet marketing company, www.torresdigital.com/chest/
My warmest, deepest memories are of Doc Pete [Dr. Grace Petersen], our nature counselor/ leader/ mentor. She was wonderful!! She inspired my interests in biology, and this led directly to my college major (biochemical sciences) and then medicine. Under her guidance, I skinned a rattlesnake (dead!), grew vegetables, learned about lichens and ferns and fungi, and learned even more about life. She was warm, caring, and peaceful --- in harmony with life.
We picked and ate blueberries, with metal buckets and cups. The routine was, "One for me, one for Northrop," as we ate and picked. Sometimes it became, "Three for me, to heck with Northrop!" but not really!
As an aide, I stood in the kitchen and reconstituted the government surplus powdered milk with a hand beater (no Cuisinarts!). The boys who were aides would come through the kitchen and kid me with choruses of "Moo! Moo! Moo!"... It was a no-frills camp --- despite the Waldorf and the Ritz [the wash house and the outhouse] --- but the lack of amenities didn't matter.
--- Judith Dick Kellman (camper, 1957). Dr. Kellman is a primary care physician living in Berkeley, Ca.
Living at Northrop Camp for a month taught me a lot about nature and friendship... The night sky at Northrop is beautiful. It was there that I saw my first shooting stars.
--- Charlotte Lee (camper, 1987). Ms. Lee is a recent graduate of the School of Business at SUNY-Buffalo. She lives in New York and works for Bloomberg L.P.
Can you imagine what it was like for me to spend a month there, a kid from Brooklyn who had never been out of the city? I came home with a pet snake in a cardboard box... I credit choosing veterinary medicine as a career directly with [my] Camp Northrop experience.
--- Gary Cane (camper, 1952). Dr. Cane runs the Hillsdale Animal Clinic, a few miles from Northrop.
The first time I ever slept in a tent was as a camper at Northrop. When it rained it was very cozy. At times a gentle Irish setter, that belonged to a farmer down the road, would enter my tent to keep dry. Although he sometimes smelled bad when when he was wet, and in the small tent the odor was overpowering, neither I nor my cousin, who shared the tent with me, tried to get rid of the dog. Neither of us had ever had a pet dog before.
--- Sasha Menkin Milgram (camper, 1942). Before her retirement, Mrs. Milgram was a social worker who worked with Holocaust victims. She lives in New York.
I remember my month at Camp Northrop with fondness and appreciation and as a very special experience... Jerry Metzner [one of the conunselors] had a good voice and loved to sing. It was my introduction to "Clementine" and all those songs that we sang around camp fires and on the hikes to Mt. Everett. For parents' weekend,... Metzner produced an abbreviated version of H.M.S. Pinafore. He was the captain and all the campers had some part... I was not very tall so they dressed me in a skirt and shawl to be Buttercup. I can still sing the part and of course I became a lifelong G and S devotee. I did grow up to be six feet...
--- Robert E. Schwartz (camper, 1937). Mr. Schwartz graduated from the Columbia school of Architecture in 1950, and in the following decades did architectural renderings in watercolor for most of the major buildings built in New York. He spends summers in Martha's Vineyard and winters in Conn.
One day, ... returning from a nature walk, I overheard a young camper's voice raised in protest: "Aw, let the poor thing go, Francie! If you take him back to camp, you'll only forget to feed him half the time; and anyhow, a caterpillar doesn't like being kept in a cage...!" It was Jane speaking; ... a fortnight earlier [she] had wanted to test the powers of a "burning glass" on a swarm of foraging ants.
Here then, is one good reason for the study of nature: its potency in the building of good citizenship. The child who finds that his prejudice against certain kinds of creatures -- in this case, insects -- vanishes when he becomes better acquainted with them, is more likely to carry this lesson over into his relationships with human beings and so become more tolerant of his fellow man. The child who discovers that each kind of creature has its own special function in nature's plan ceases to regard the lesser forms of life as insignificant; in recognizing their importance in relationship to the whole, he develops respect for them and thus acquires a budding sense of true democracy.
-- Grace A. Petersen (nature counselor, 1943-1960). Dr. Petersen died in 1960.
Those were, without question, the happiest days of my childhood. ...I was 15 years old and had never been away from home before. My communion with nature...had been a quick glance at the greenery as I ran to the playground... After those first four weeks at Northrop a whole new world opened for me. For now, the green things that grow around me as I walk a country road or stroll through the park are still, after thirty years, familiar friends to be admired and enjoyed and preserved and to be greeted warmly by name. I thought , in 1938, that I owed this [experience] to only four people... the directors and... the counselors. It wasn't until some time later that I learned how many people gave of their money, time and energy to... make it possible for city kids like me to have this wonderful experience, to know that there is a beautiful world beyond the concrete caves we call home, that there is a... breath of air that you cannot see or smell because there is no grit or smoke or smog in it, that the night sky is deep black, not red, and filled as far as the eye can see with great shining stars that are not obscured by the reflection of neon lights.
-- Rose Geoghan (camper, 1938). Ms. Geoghan worked for Montgomery Ward. She died in 1983.
We are trying to raise funds to rebuild the camp. If you would like to make a donation or have a skill you are willing to contribute (construction, fundraising, publicity, CPA, legal work, etc.), please contact Northrop or write to:
Alice Rich Northrop Memorial Camp
c/o Norval Soleyn
925 Lincoln PLace
Brooklyn, NY 11213
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