As he will remind you if you speak about the age of Camp Rising Sun, Rick Richter is the same age as Camp. As we are celebrating our 90th Anniversary this year, Rick Richter celebrates his 90th birthday. Rick has asked anyone who wishes to celebrate his 90th birthday by supporting CRS with a donation. To find Rick’s campaign, go to our website here. Below are some reflections that Rick shared with us when we asked how CRS has changed over the years.
Some Thoughts On the History of CRS
By Maurice N. Richter, Jr.
George E. Jonas, who came to be known to hundreds of people as "Freddie," was a successful businessman who had no previous camp experience and no experience in working with young people when he created Camp Rising Sun in 1930. He was warned that he should not take boys from different countries because they would constantly be fighting one another but he ignored that advice. Beginning in 1930 with 25 campers, all white boys from New York City, CRS today takes about 60 boys and 60 girls each summer, from many parts of the world, and has offered a unique educational and camping experience to about 6000 boys and girls in the 90 years since then.
A group photo taken at CRS from the 1940’s. ‘Freddie’ is seen in the back row to the right.
One very likely source of inspiration for Freddie was Camp Ahmek, a camp for boys on Canoe Lake in the wilderness of Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1921, Camp Ahmek still exists, although its program today is very different from what it once was. It counts among its alumni the former and now deceased Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau, and his son Justin Trudeau who also became Prime Minister. A book, Camping and Character, by two former staff members at Camp Ahmek, Hedley S. Dimock and Charles E. Hendry, published in 1929, is largely a description of that camp as it was in the 1920s. Freddie possessed a copy of Camping and Character, and the junior author of that book, Charles E. Hendry, visited CRS at Freddie's invitation. Features of the Camp Ahmek of the 1920s that came to be adopted by CRS long ago included international recruitment of campers and staff, the awarding of "feathers" for achievements of various kinds (discontinued at CRS in the late 1950s), use of the Algonquin term "sachem" for camper leaders and the Dakota Sioux phrase "how how" to indicate approval or applause, and some Formal Council rituals, including a native American call to Council, which appeared on page 73 of Camping and Character: "Yo-hay-y --- Yo-hay-y-y; Neetah Kola Nahompo Omnee-chee-yaynee-chopi -- Hear me, my friends, we are about to hold a Council."
In an Introduction to Camping and Character, Professor William Kilpatrick wrote that "Apart from the negative demands to allow no harm to their charges there are...few or no insistent demands made on the camp, either by parents or by society, other than the very immediate one of making the youth happy. Not being counted 'educative' in the traditional sense, the camp is free...to be honestly and seriously educative in the true sense." And that is what Freddie wanted to demonstrate, in his own unique way.
Another probable source of inspiration for Freddie was the Lincoln School of Columbia University's Teachers College, (a school which I attended in eighth and ninth grades, 1943-45). Freddie, who maintained lifelong ties to Columbia University, knew about this school. In 1929 and again in 1932 he wrote to a teacher at the Lincoln School, seeking campers, and in 1944 he took a student from that school as a camper. The experimental, pioneering nature of the Lincoln School curriculum was well known and was proudly embraced by its students. Lincoln was a very small school (my class had only 68 students) but it had a huge impact on the American educational system: Diane Ravitch, in her book "Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms", wrote that "the single most influential showcase for progressive methods was the Lincoln School of Teachers College" (p. 183). Freddie, whose camp was also very small, hoped that it would similarly become a widely imitated demonstration project: "My efforts are, of course, on a small scale, but perhaps they can demonstrate what could be done with many camps or schools" (December 1, 1963). The "many" camps or schools that Freddie hoped for have not materialized, although a Camp Rising Sun (for girls only) functioned in Denmark from 2001 until 2009, and his CRS experience in 1952 encouraged Kenjiro Nagasaka to establish the Pacific Rim International Camp in Japan, and David Weikart, on the CRS staff in summers 1959-1962, was inspired by his CRS experience to create the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation which operated a camp for several years, and a number of CRS alumni/ae have achieved great success in careers in educational administration and teaching.
Several changes in CRS came very quickly after Camp's founding. CRS was originally for "poor" boys, but the requirement of poverty was never consistently enforced. From the beginning Freddie began to take not only boys from poor families (largely from settlement houses) but also students at elite New York high schools, including, in Camp's second year, the son of the headmaster of the high school that I graduated from years later. Tuition, originally $5.00 per week, also disappeared in the late 1930s -- but Freddie never said, after that, that Camp was "free," instead he would say that each family paid whatever they thought they could afford. CRS originally grew all its own vegetables, which had to be planted by camp's farmer before the campers arrived, and CRS also had a hundred apple trees, but agriculture at CRS disappeared after a few years -- and also, again after a few years, Freddie no longer felt the need to say, in his advertising documents, that all the milk consumed at Camp was pasteurized.
Some other changes that have taken place with CRS are generally well known to alumni/ae. CRS began to take international campers in 1934, and campers from places in the US far from New York in the late 1950s, and the CRS experience was opened for girls in 1989. And beginning in 2015 the original boys' Red Hook campsite on the banks of the Sawkill was at least temporarily closed, and both boys and girls since then have had camp sessions each shortened to one month at what had been the girls' campsite at Clinton -- girls in July, boys in August. Shortening of the camp season has been not only a response to the consolidation of both girls' and boys' camp programs at a single site but also a response to the growing incompatibility between the camp calendar and school calendars in many places from which CRS draws campers -- some campers have had to miss a full month of school to attend a month of Camp. With the shortening of the camp season off-campus trips to religious services in nearby communities, and to the Tanglewood music festival, have been eliminated, and overnight camping trips to the Catskills, for which overnight trips to the otherwise largely unused original Red Hook campsite have become a substitute. Some other off-campus trips, to Washington for international campers, and to local attractions such as the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, had already been abandoned for other reasons before the camp program was shortened to one month. But the losses to the camp program that these changes have entailed have been compensated for by new communication technologies that now make it possible for campers to maintain contact with one another after they return home, and to become active participants in alumni/ae activities, in ways that were not possible and not even imagined in Camp's earliest decades.
The Clinton cohort of 1989
As greater diversity developed among campers, with respect to race, culture and nationality, another big change was taking place: a movement away from a highly competitive atmosphere, to one that focuses more on encouraging friendship and mutual understanding and solidarity among the campers who go through the CRS experience together. Movement in this direction has been facilitated by important limitations on the kinds of "diversity" among campers. All those who share the same camp experience together are of the same gender and similar age, can communicate in the same language (English), are selected for high intelligence, excellent character, and potential leadership ability, and these similarities among them make it much easier than it would otherwise be, for close ties to develop among them across the boundaries of race, culture and nationality.
The growing similarity among campers with respect to age is worth commenting on especially. There has been a drastic narrowing of the age range of campers. One camper, now 101, was eleven when he came to CRS as a camper in Camp's first year 1930. In the early years of CRS, Freddie imitated many commercial camps in having campers of widely varying ages, from 11 to 18, although most CRS campers were at ages intermediate between these extremes. The wide range of ages represented at CRS in its early years reflected the fact that some CRS campers returned for 3 or 4 or even perhaps 5 summers, while 2 summers is the maximum permitted today. But also Freddie took boys at initially highly varied ages, contrary to his original plans. I happen to know about two CRS alumni who were born only about four months apart, and while one of them was a camper in 1930 (at the age of 11) the other did not come to Camp until 1935 (at the age of 16). Later the age range was greatly narrowed, 14-15, subsequently adjusted to 15-16 at least partly because of the reluctance of airlines to permit flights by unaccompanied 14-year-olds.
In the early years of Camp it was expected that the older campers would be the leaders. The fact that the age range of CRS campers today is very sharply narrowed eliminates the link between leadership and age; CRS now encourages all campers to become leaders in a way that would not be possible with a much wider age range. The significance of the change that has taken place in this respect is enormous. It is one thing for an eighteen-year-old to provide "leadership" to an eleven-year old. It is something fundamentally different for a teenager to provide leadership to others of his/her own age.
And camp life at CRS is organized in a way that discourages competition, inequality, and clique formation among campers and makes it relatively easy for each camper to get to know and to become friendly with every other camper. CRS no longer participates in athletic (softball) competitions with nearby camps, as it did in its very early years, thus avoiding the boastful "team spirit" that once existed at CRS ("Rising Sons are out to win, We'll trim the foe to the skin"), and avoiding also the emergence within CRS of athletic "stars" and competition for stardom. CRS also long ago abandoned the competitive striving for "feathers" similar to Boy Scout Merit Badges, and official leadership positions among campers are filled by staff-determined appointments on a rotating basis rather than through elections, thus avoiding a distinction between electoral "winners" and "losers." And, formation of significant subgroups or cliques among campers is inhibited by rotation and reshuffling of tent assignments, team (work group) assignments, and dining table assignments, and when opposing teams are formed for some competitive sports event the division is for a single game only (the summer-long division of campers into "Wildcat" and "Zuni" teams having been abandoned very long ago, in the late 1930s).
The basically noncompetitive atmosphere at CRS is reflected in the absence of boastful Camp songs. The only CRS songs today, and in recent years, have been welcoming songs for visitors. (The boys at CRS also have an old tradition of welcoming visitors to the "wrong" campsite -- alumni who were campers long ago will remember when visitors to CRS were welcomed with the Camp Henry welcome song, and today the boys at CRS welcome visitors to "the banks of the winding Sawkill", even though the banks of the Sawkill are about twelve miles from their current campsite.)
Despite many changes (including some that space limitations prevent me from discussing here), CRS today is basically similar in many ways to the CRS that I first came to know 70 years ago. Already in 1950, just as today, campers were selected from diverse racial, cultural and national backgrounds, on the basis of character and intelligence. Also, by 1950, camp life had come to be organized in ways that still prevail today, ways that discourage rivalries and encourage solidarity among campers, as described above. And by 1950 leadership of Camp life by campers who in those days were called "sachems," appointed by staff on a rotating basis, had already become well established. The camp schedule today is basically the same as it was in 1950 -- with instructions and projects, teamwork (formerly called "squad work") and tent prep after breakfast, rest period after lunch, evening programs, several Assemblies during the day, and a weekly Formal Council. A camper from 1950 returning for a visit today after an absence of 70 years would notice many small changes, and a few very big changes (the re-location of Camp to the Clinton site, the opening of the Camp experience to girls, and the shortening of the Camp season), but would have no trouble at all in understanding what is going on.
Would you like more details about the history of CRS? Send an email message to me at mauricerichter@gmail.com and I will forward to you, in a pdf. attachment, the 53-page history of Camp that I wrote first in 2001 and have revised several times, most recently in 2018.
Rick (Maurice) Richter.