The sun is shining and dishes are clanging on this warm fall afternoon as Jack Hunter (SAM director ’63-’68, TF staff ’70-’72, ED ’73) and Bruce Ergood (SAM Director ’72-’74, TF Director ’58) sing a few words from the folk song, “Good Old Mountain Dew.” Over 50 combined years of SAM directors, staff and alumni are sitting around the SAM lodge recalling their tenure.
“For me, what kept me, when I was 11, 12, and 13 and then brought me back for so long was just this incredible land, and then this radical space on this land, where each person, whether they are 11 or 21 or 35, could let their whole self flourish and be, and that for me was a lesson in justice.”
-Maddie Fox (SAM Director ’04-’07, Questers staff ’02, SAM staff ’98-’99, SAM camper ’88-’91)
“The structure is such an awesome structure for working with kids. They come here, so this is a nervous place, this is their growing edge and we immediately put them on the trail, so when they come back, this is their home. It’s brilliant.”
-Michelle Golden (SAM Director ’89-’96)
“I think one of the things that I learned is that everything we do has to have the kids at the center of the equation. Everything.”
-Becca Balint (SAM staff ’94-’97, SAM Director ’99-’01)
“It’s a profound incubator for community and incubator for connection and really a sampling what’s essential in life.”
-Jerry Thompson (SAM staff ’74-’76, SAM Director ’78-’79)
“I think we always need to remember the freedom this gives boys to be male in a different way and have different role models. When I say that Farm & Wilder- ness was life-saving for me, that is what I mean, because there was a way to be masculine that didn’t involve football, baseball, basketball, it involved canoeing and hiking which I could be good at.”
-Charlie Spiegel (SAM camper ’70-’72, SAM staff ’76-’77)
“The best educational institution I’ve ever worked at was Farm & Wilderness. And that helped me help people become teachers in a very different way. It im- pacted so many people that I helped become teachers, to imagine that education could be different than the way they saw it in the public schools.”
-Deborah Roose (TF Co-Director ’74-’77, SAM Co-Director ’85-’88, Trustee ’06-’12)