…We Landed on the Moon…(and the TV in the Lodge was almost as incredible)
Winship (Lee) Cook (IB Staff ’66-’71, ’69): Fifty years ago on July 20th, 1969, I was head of the waterfront at Indian Brook and, with the head of the waterfront from Timberlake, we lead the first coed canoe trip in the Adirondacks across the Fulton Chain of Lakes. It was a particularly rainy trip and that night we were all huddled in our soggy sleeping bags (desperately batting off the mosquitoes in a large three-sided shelter with pine bow bedding), listening to a scratchy, portable transistor radio (batteries dry & in working order) in awe of what we were hearing – audio coverage of the moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s incredible words: “One step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” Closing our eyes and imagining what it looked like, we all took a deep breath knowing how important an achievement this was. Here we were, just having traversed, slowly, across a watery terrain, and they were stepping out on the moon! Somehow hearing the landing unfold on this tiny radio, battling the elements of the Adirondacks, sharing an incredible moment together felt perfect.
Annie Storr (IB ’66-’68; TF ’69-’70; IB Staff ’71): I was in the upper lodge at Tamarack Farm, and we all clustered around one static-y TV set. I was embroidering blue work shirts. I have a weird memory of riding fixed bikes to run a generator so that we could watch the TV…The lodge had electricity, I think, so I’m not sure why we would have done this, except perhaps it struck counselors as a good learning situation.
Michael Warburton (TL ‘66-’71, ’74; TL staff ‘78-’78, ‘81, ‘88): Timberlake was having a sing in the Old Lodge [editor’s note: It seems Ken Webb was a stalwart holdout for having TV at TL, even for this event]. I remember a verse being added to “We Shall Overcome.” We sang, “We Shall Own the Moon.”
…The Great Flood of ’73 was Summer Programming
[On July 4th, 1973, a west moving frontal system and a moist, southeasterly flow from the Atlantic joined to pour 5-8” of rain down on Windsor county, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 1927. A State Disaster was declared.]Rebecca (Porter) Pedigo (IB ’74-’76): I remember this well. We were woken up in the early morning around 4 a.m. and got to dig run-off trenches along the camp road. We saved the camp road but were shocked the next day when we lost the paved road on both sides of the lake…Very exciting for a ten-year-old camper!
Patricia Hawkins (Dark Meadow ‘73-76, SAM Quester ‘77): It was my first summer at Dark Meadow, and I was 12. We were cut off from the lower camps, not that the connection was ever good…The roads were pretty drastically washed out. I remember one road that had a good strong stream that cut a deep channel right across it; our counselor, Julie, got wet and chilled crossing it with one of the SAM counselors, but I think the rest of us got across okay a little higher upstream….All summer we saw amazing washouts—former roads that were now plunging ravines, trees torn up and piled in giant tangles, good-sized pine trees along a river that had mud nearly to their tops.
Alan Lasky (TL ‘72-73; TL staff ‘83-‘85; FC staff ’86; All Camp Staff ‘06): It was a great time. I was a big lodger. I remember rolling rocks down the hill to shore up washouts in the camp road, working to save it. We succeeded, but Rt 100 was impassable for several days.