August 1, 2003 11:28 a.m. EDT

Stern Camp Is Happy Memory, And to Some It's an Obsession

By LUCETTE LAGNADO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Wearing the official Stern Summer Camp uniform -- white T-shirt and blue shorts -- Lenny Loewentritt summoned his fellow campers and counselors to the flagpole for the daily saluting of the flag, then led them into a rousing rendition of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," the camp anthem.

A typical slice of camp life, familiar to thousands of American children away at camp this summer? Well, not exactly.

The campers in this case are mostly in their 50s and 60s, with big stomachs, wrinkles, and gray, thinning hair, while some of their counselors are well into their 80s. The flagpole is rusty. And the camp itself, situated by New York's Shawangunk Mountains, has been closed since 1965. The camp site where they gathered so solemnly is a forlorn shell of its old self: The pool is covered up, the tennis courts are weedy, and the boys' and girls' bunks have been converted into somebody's home.


But to the 110 or so Stern alumni and their families who journeyed from as far away as England, Australia, California and Florida to attend the camp's first reunion, these few careworn acres of green are every bit as idyllic as they remembered them from childhood, when camp was a welcome escape from the scalding tenements of Upper Manhattan.

Most of the campers who attended Stern after it opened following World War II were children of German-Jewish refugees. Their parents, many of whom had lost family members to the Nazis, arrived in the U.S. with few means and considerable angst. They settled in a part of Manhattan celebrated in the book "Frankfurt on the Hudson" for its concentration of German exiles. And they took any menial jobs they could -- as door-to-door salesmen, cooks, maids, seamstresses -- while they stitched their lives back together.

The camp's founders, Gerry and Ellen Bucky, were war refugees who ran a popular nursery school in the neighborhood. Nearly everyone agrees that Stern was far from lavish. In the early years, the swimming pool was a hole in the ground, a few feet deep and with no filter. The camp didn't have its own lake and children were taken by station wagon to one nearby. The field where the kids played baseball was a raggedy two-tiered affair, with a ditch running through the outfield, from left to center.

Yet for those who spent summers there, Stern exercised a powerful hold on the imagination. Some liked it because they felt at home with other German Jewish children who came from similar backgrounds -- disciplined, rigid and focused on achievement. For others, it was the thrill of such distinctly American pleasures as playing Spin the Bottle and dancing to Paul Anka's "Put Your Head on My Shoulder."

"I have wondered whether because so many of us had lost our extended family, this became an extended family," said Elaine Hanauer Ravich, one of the organizers. Ms. Ravich's parents fled Germany in the 1930s, and her father lost most of his family to the Nazis.


The 'Smuffies,' a bunk group from the Stern Summer Camp in 1952. Lenny Loewentritt, who started attending at the age of 3, is in the front row, lower left.


The Holocaust was never a subject of conversation at camp. "Our parents -- even the most Americanized among them -- carried within them this horrific experience," remarked Allen Meyer, who attended camp in the 1960s. "Going to camp was so freeing."

The reunion was a year in the planning. Leslie Cooper Fox posted a note on the Internet looking for camp alumni. She, Ms. Ravich and others surfed the Internet, hunting down long-lost friends, who were persuaded to cross oceans and continents to attend a gathering that would re-create, in one weekend, all those past summers. The setting was the Nevele in Ellenville, N.Y., a grand hotel of faded charm, and a throwback to the era when large borscht-belt hotels lured masses of New Yorkers with promises of socializing, fresh mountain air -- and plenty of food.

So, on a Friday evening in late June, the campers gathered in a hotel dining room for their first meal together in four decades. Former bunkmates gleefully sat together at the same table. Old cliques bonded all over again. Objects of puppy love were reappraised through the harsher lens of middle age.

Hank Edelman -- tall and handsome as a youth at camp -- walked confidently across the dining room, amiably greeting everyone he encountered. The son of a watchmaker, he is now president of the U.S. distributorship of Patek Phillipe, the luxury Swiss watch company. He was wearing an $11,000 watch. Later, his wife marveled at how many women came up to tell him that they had had a crush on him.

Some spouses appeared ill at ease; others gamely tried to join in. Mr. Loewentritt's wife, Anne, sat back and watched with a gimlet eye. Her husband attended Stern longer than just about anyone else did -- from 1950 when he was 3 to 1965, when the camp closed. He grew up, graduated from college and law school, went to work for the U.S. government -- and never found any other place he loved as much. "My whole life is around camp," said Mr. Loewentritt, a boyish 56, who looks a lot like he did in old home movies of camp he has preserved and set to music.

His wife recalled how, about the time they became engaged in 1969, he insisted on taking her to camp. On the way there, he began to sing, "Tramp Tramp Tramp." Then, he gave her a grand tour of the grounds. As Mr. Loewentritt raved about the camp, she looked around and saw nothing but derelict buildings and a "yucky" abandoned pool. "I wasn't too impressed," she said.

Yvonne Eichel Sherrington, 55, grew misty-eyed at the mere mention of Stern, which she attended between the ages of 10 and 12. She flew in from London, with her younger sister, Barbara Eichel Gee, to reconnect with a place both see as the high point of their childhoods. "I can't remember what I did yesterday, but I remember the words of every camp song," said Ms. Sherrington, who recently lost her husband. Stern camp "was very black and white," she said. "This is the time to get up, this is the time to go to the flagpole."

It was also at Stern that, as a 12-year-old girl, Ms. Sherrington had her first taste of romance. "I had a boyfriend, but I don't remember that we kissed," she said.

Steven Bucky, a San Diego psychologist and the son of the camp's founders, was on hand at the reunion, too. On Saturday morning, he held a sort of group-therapy session. The reunion, he suggested, offered an opportunity to explore the hold Stern camp exercised on him and so many others through the years.

Testimonials poured forth. Ms. Sherrington volunteered that though she has lived abroad for 35 years, "I feel intensely American -- and that is because of camp."

Harry Reis, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, said that it was at Stern that he learned to play baseball.

"I learned to be an American teenager," declared Alan Stamm, a newspaper editor in Detroit. He conjured up the memory of dancing under the stars on summer nights. Mr. Stamm's parents had fled Germany in the late 1930s. His mother lost her parents at Auschwitz. His father, who had been a dental student in Dusseldorf, took a job as a Fuller Brush salesman. Camp was a haven: "We blossomed socially, romantically."

Among the middle-age campers, there was a general euphoria, a sense of having overcome great odds. Many in the group had prospered. They had become professionals, amassed wealth beyond their parents' dreams. Jeff Bauml, a commodity trader on Wall Street, sends his children to private schools, and they go to camps with all the frills Stern lacked. Mr. Bauml now owns a weekend house in the Catskills, an hour from the old camp grounds. "I really never left camp," he says.

On Saturday afternoon came the much-anticipated jaunt from the hotel to the camp itself. Mr. Loewentritt and his family piled into a car and drove through the now-bedraggled Catskill towns, passing boarded-up houses and stores. As they got closer to the old camp site, in Pine Bush, N.Y., things became more prosperous.

"This is like a religious experience, going back," Mr. Loewentritt remarked. Spotting a familiar landmark, the Hoot Owl pizza parlor, he yelled: "Here we are guys. Are you getting the willies? I am getting the willies."

A number of Stern alumni had gathered on a grassy hill. Some seemed bewildered at how small and insignificant the place now appears. Others insisted that nothing had changed. Every familiar object or place -- the uneven ball field, the rec hall, the flagpole -- evoked squeals of delight.

The whistle blew. Mr. Loewentritt called: "To the flagpole!" The group surrounded him. Lyrics to old camp songs were passed out. The group started to sing, "I'll sit at my window and watch the rain. ... I wish that I could be back there again."

Write to Lucette Lagnado at lucette.lagnado@wsj.com2

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