When I was in grade school, we lived in a business section of Baltimore. The closest blade of grass was at a city park 12 blocks away. However, just two blocks away was a Salvation Army Boys Club where I enjoyed many evening activities. They also offered a summer camp that enabled city boys like me to experience the great out-of-doors.
Camp Puh’tok, an Indian name that means “in the pines,” was in a heavily wooded area about 30 miles from Baltimore.
I attended Camp Puh’tok for three summers during the early 1940s. Although Indians were always portrayed as the bad guys in cowboy-and-Indian movies of that era, we were taught that Native Americans deserved our admiration.
Camp Puh’tok was very rustic during those years. We slept on Army cots in large tents. We ate in the only building. Our toilets were outhouses, and we used lanterns or flashlights after sunset. Although we didn’t have activities as fancy as horseback riding, we did have a swimming pool where I learned to swim.
We also had a rope, suspended over a gully, that we pretended was a vine. We used it to play Tarzan, swinging from one side of the gully to the other and unleashing loud Tarzan yells that Carol Burnett would envy.
I decided to get more into the Indian motif by wearing a loincloth. I straddled a large folded towel to cover the essential areas, using my belt to hold the towel in place while allowing flaps to drape over the belt in front and back. I’ll ask you to take my word for this, rather than provide a demonstration. This attire turned out to be popular enough that some of the other boys began wearing similar loincloths.
I can’t remember much about the food, except as active campers we were always ready to eat. I’m fairly sure our beverage was Kool-Aid, which we all called bug juice.
During my third year, the camp had a bugle, but no bugler. So I tried and found I could play the four notes that comprise all bugle calls. I quickly learned to play bugle calls for reveille, flag-raising and -lowering, meal times and taps. At 9 years old, I became the official camp bugler. Although it’s been more than 60 years since I played a bugle, I think I could probably still play those simple tunes.
I recently decided to Google up Camp Puh’tok, and was surprised to find that a less rustic version of the camp still exists and has been operated by a son of the man who was the camp leader during my camper days.
However, the most interesting thing I learned was that Camp Puh’tok moved to that location just one year before I first attended. That’s because the Salvation Army’s previous camp was taken over by the federal government. It became a presidential retreat that President Roosevelt called Shangri-La. President Eisenhower later renamed it Camp David.
Although it would have been a better story if I had gone to summer camp two years earlier, I came closer to summer camping at Camp David than I could have imagined.
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