Julia Sdao and Mitchel Vedder at the waterfront, one of the camp's most popular destinations. (Photo by Kyle Norris)
A couple in their eighties has spent the last sixty years running
a summer camp for kids old enough to be their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. Kyle Norris has the
story of how the couple has stuck to the old ways of summer
camp, from outdoor activities to food:
Transcript
A couple in their eighties has spent the last sixty years running
a summer camp for kids old enough to be their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. Kyle Norris has the
story of how the couple has stuck to the old ways of summer
camp, from outdoor activities to food:
What you arrive at Varsity Day Camp, you’ll see a ton of kids
running around outside. They’re doing all kinds of fun kid
activities. Like this one:
(Sound of pogo stick)
Pogo stick jumping. Jane Selner is the assistant business manager at Varsity. Her
parents, the Wizniewskis – or Mr. and Mrs. Wiz for short – have
run this camp for nearly six decades:
“We pretty much keep it down to earth. No electronics. No cell
phones, no Game Boys. That type of thing. We like them to
really discover nature. The birds, the trees, the animals, the
frogs and fish.”
Varsity is known as an old-school camp. Its campers are
supervised but their day is pretty much unstructured. They’re free to roam-
about the camp’s twenty-or-so activity stations. And everything
happens outside at this South Central Michigan camp. Kids can
choose activities like archery, tetherball, a miniature hockey
game I didn’t really understand, swimming, and arts and crafts.
Mr. Wiz helps supervises the activities, and Mrs. Wiz cooks all
the food from scratch, just like she’s done for the past 58 years.
She says it’s your basic standard camp food. Here she is breezing
through the week’s menu:
“Sloppy joe’s, and we have PB & J sandwiches, celery sticks,
Kool-Aid and chocolate chip cookies (I make all my cookies).
Turkey salad with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly. Tortilla
strips. Warm cinnamon coffee cake, which we’ll have
tomorrow. Grilled cheese, the kids love grilled cheese. They’ll
sit down an hour before we eat. I’ll say we’re going to feed you –
I want to be first and dill pickles…”
Mrs. Wiz’s cooking is pretty popular with all the kids I’ve talked
to. Campers have been known to eat three, four, sometime even
five helpings of her lunches.
But the food is just your basic camp fare. Mrs. Wiz, doesn’t use
any special cooking techniques or fancy-pants ingredients. But
you know what, the kids just rave about the food. They just
love the stuff:
“I’ve had a mother call me and said, ‘Mrs. Wiz, how do you do your
hot dogs?’ I said I put them in a pan of water and boil them. It’s
just they’re so hungry out here. That they play so hard, that it
tastes very good to them.”
Down at the waterfront, eleven-year-old Mitchell is hanging out
with a couple of pals. He’s got sandy-blond hair, surfer shorts,
and a faded t-shirt. He tells me I picked a good day to come to
Varsity, because today is sloppy joe day. Mitchell says – and
this is a direct quote from his mouth – that the sloppy joe’s taste like a little
piece of heaven:
“I’ve been coming here for 5 years and everything’s good…I
think it has something to do with like cooking all day ’cause
they cook all day in morning and cook desserts and it’s all day
cooking, I think it’s made good.”
Six-year old Julia jumps out of her canoe and onto the sandy
beach. Julia says the sloppy joe’s are her favorite thing at camp,
hands-down:
“It’s good because it’s very sweet and hot. It’s very good.”
The sloppy joe’s, like everything else, are cooked in the camp’s
tiny kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Wiz could easily ship in food from a
food service. Or hire other people to do their cooking. “No way,
no how,” they both say. For them, homemade is the way to go:
“Summer camp food should be enjoyable, homemade I think. Because it
tastes good.”
Mr. and Mrs. Wiz not only want the kids to enjoy good food,
but they want them to enjoy time that’s unscheduled and not
filled with violin lessons, after-school clubs, and busy life
activites.
“There’s no pressure, free to choose activity, free to choose
whatever they want lunch, that’s the entire philosophy, that they enjoy themselves and don’t get hurt…And eating is part of the enjoyment.”
Through good food, fun activities, and the great outdoors, Mr.
and Mrs. Wiz teach the kids to open their senses. And to just be
kids in a simple place.
Oh, and as for the sloppy joe’s, I tasted them and they were
really good.
For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.