MONTREAL — What do you remember most about Camp Wooden Acres, a small Jewish community-subsidized camp that flourished for more than 20 years near Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard?
The view from the lake of
the iconic Camp Wooden Acres bandshell.
Was it the bandshell right on the waterfront? The intimacy of the place? Its heimishness? The friendships that formed and endured? The tree-named bunkhouses, such as Fir and Poplar? The inevitable cascade of tears on the last day?
On Sept. 5, over the Labour Day weekend, Ken Kates and a few other former campers will try to recreate and recapture the experience that made Wooden Acres so special for so many by staging the first-ever all-day reunion for former campers and staff – on the actual site of the camp.
“There was simply no other camp like it,” said Kates, who is 50 and spent eight “unforgettable” summers there between 1969 and 1976. “You could walk from one end of the camp to the other in 10, 15 minutes.
“We had a pristine, mountain-fed lake, maybe the cleanest in the Laurentians.
“But it wasn’t just the intimacy. It was about the people, a kind of close-knittedness and culture that you could not find at any other camp. This was the only annual vacation we knew. We felt safe and happy.”
Kates wants the planned reunion to capture the essence of Wooden Acres. It was attended mostly by kids from working class and unpretentious middle-class neighbourhoods on a sliding fee scale, a genuine departure from the “high-end” kids at other Jewish camps, Kates said.
“Some kids came for years for $60 a season,” he said. “We weren’t Camp B’nai Brith, which was huge and had twice the number, or YCC [the Y Country Camp], which was much further away and also had 500 people. We were intimate and cohesive, and we all felt like one.”
The camp ran from about 1954 (it was a Jewish resort before that) until it closed “unceremoniously,” in 1977, Kates said, due to high maintenance costs, and briefly became a part of the YCC.
The original campsite then operated as a (non-Jewish) resort for several years before eventually being taken over by the chassidic community.
For Kates, who was in the cut-flower business for almost 20 years before joining Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem as executive director, the planned reunion is not only a labour of love, it’s also taking up an inordinate amount of his time, along with that of former campers and organizers Sari Medicoff, Edie Braverman-Svetliza, Mindy Weigensberg and Brenda Barbalat Demberg.
Indeed, “planned reunion,” at least at the time this article was being written, was still the operative phrase.
Even though about 250 people had joined a Facebook message board related to the event, and Kates had launched a special reunion website – www.campwoodenacres.ca – just under half the minimum of 100 people needed for the reunion to happen had actually signed on.
The charge is a flat $100 (and less for teens and kids), which sounds expensive, Kates acknowledged, but he stressed that it’s strictly a break-even price, since the reunion’s costs include renting the campsite for the entire day, an all-you-can-eat lunch, posters, and publicity.
Organizers also plan to include buttons, T-shirts, a baseball game, a walking tour of the camp, the viewing of archival pictures and home movies and a closing bonfire/marshmallow roast.
And, most importantly, there will be reminiscing and nostalgia.
“That’s why this article is so important,” Kates said. “If we don’t have the 100 people by the end of July or so, it won’t be able to go ahead. It’s make-or-break time.”
Still, those already confirmed for the event, Kates said, include former directors such as Herb Finkelberg, Elliott Larman, Manny Weiner and Joe Friedman, as well as former campers and staff from as far as Toronto, Philadelphia and Vancouver.
Well-known Wooden Acres alumni include veteran Cote. St. Luc city councilor Ruth Kovac and pop music impresario Sheldon Kagan.
Registration forms are available on the Camp Wooden Acres website, www.campwoodenacres.ca. Kates can be e-mailed at [email protected] or ken@ campwoodenacres.ca, and Medicoff can be e-mailed at [email protected].
