Leisure: Reveille

The organized summer camp is the most significant contribution to education that America has given to the world.

—Dr. Charles William Eliot,

President of Harvard University (1869-1909)

The call of the wild is sounding again across the land, and mothers are responding to it with their rolls of name tapes and their nonstop check lists: three blankets, four cot sheets, one laundry bag, warm socks, flashlight, and on and on. Soon railroad stations and bus terminals will be shrill with young voices and heavy with premonitory pangs of homesickness as some 5,500,000 children set out for almost 14,000 summer camps. And many of them will be learning things that would have surprised Dr. Eliot.

For the trend is toward specialty camping. There are music camps that serve up chorales after calisthenics and offer fugues around the campfire. There are dance camps and science camps, art camps, and camps whose campers make expeditions to local straw-hat theaters while more orthodox campers are doing their canoe trips and overnight hikes. There are football camps such as the All-America at Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., and baseball camps like Dodgertown at Vero Beach, Fla. Buster Crabbe’s Camp Meenahga in Onchiota, N.Y., specializes, naturally, in swimming and skindiving.

There are camps where rich children can do farm chores, camps that cram French or Hebrew. Three are especially appealing to the mind’s eye: Vacation Place (Southampton, N.Y.) is a camp for aspiring models; Camp All-American (Hartland, Mich.) is for cheerleaders and drum majorettes; and Camp Seascape (Cape Cod, Mass.) has a 100% population of overweight teen-age girls.