Wordless Wednesday: Hobie Cats

 

Wordless Wednesday: Campers

 

Welcome Noah Joseph Riester!

In the twists and turns of life we may never know the crazy connections. Last night a family I grew up camping and playing with became a grandma, great-aunt and great uncles to a little one at the same instant I became a great-great aunt. Welcome little Noah.

Saturday Fun Challenge- Youth Organizations

 From an older Saturday Fun Challenge on Randy Seaver's GeneaMusings:

Did you join a youth organization such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Camp Fire, Job's Daughters, for example?

I belonged to the Happy-Go-Lucky Teens. It was a progression from an informal group of pre-teens that camped and played together. However, the start of the belonging to the group really began with my parents.

Back when I was about 3 or 4 years old we went camping one weekend. It was probably in the first year or so that my parents owned a travel trailer. We camped that weekend at River Forest Campground in Weedsport. Setting up the site, Mom kept glancing up the hill to another site about two away. She asked Dad if he thought she was right about the people there.

We sat down to eat our supper and about when we were finishing, the man from that campsite walked down the hill and peered at our campsite looking at my parents and also at the name plaque hung on the front of the camper.

Smiling, he hollered up the hill. “It is them! C’mon down Barb!”

Soon all four adults were talking a mile a minute. Mom had been right. She had recognized an old classmate of hers from Skaneateles and her husband who was a year ahead of them. That night Mom put me to bed, but her and Dad sat up talking around the campfire with Barb and Bill Harper. The conversations lasted until about two in the morning from what Mom told me years later, not only Friday night, but Saturday night as well. Amongst the topics was this club that Harpers’ belonged to and were Field Directors for- NCHA— National Campers and Hikers Association. Mom and Dad’s membership application went in the mail the following week.

Thus I was a child camping with NCHA and specifically, the area club, North Central District. I had many friends that I camped and played with and we all looked forward to turning 13 and joining the “big kids” in the Happy-Go-Luckys group.

What was the Happy-Go-Lucky teens? It was a group open to any teens in the district. We camped and played together as well as worked. At state campouts we would field a softball and volleyball team to compete against other districts. We had dances and went out for ice cream or pizza, especially after the winter meetings that were held upstairs from the adults’ district meeting. We also helped the adults with campouts and held some of our own. We did fund raisers and helped out with various charities. Some of the ones that stand out were making favors and distributing them to nursing homes at holidays and cleaning up a stream in the spring. The stream was a public waterway, but we camped on the private property of some adult club members and had a grand time. While the adults sat around a campfire Saturday night, the teens along with a few pre-teen siblings, played hide and seek in an almost pitch-dark field darting here and there.

Saturday Challenge: The Summer I Was 12

Another older GeneaMusing Challenge I finally got around to writing:

1) Remember when you were 12 years old? On a summer day out of school? What memory do you have of fun activities?

2) Tell us about that memory (just one - you can do more if you want to) in a blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a comment on Facebook.  Please leave a link to your own post in comments on this post. 

I would have been 12 years old in the summer of 1978. I had just finished sixth grade, the last of elementary school, and would be entering junior high at the bigger high school in the fall. It would have been a typical summer vacation for me out in the country. Playing outside and riding my bicycle around the neighborhood would have kept me entertained for many an hour.

Mom would have gone to Auburn one day during the week and I almost always accompanied her. We would walk around various stores in the morning. I believe Nichols, Neisner’s and Ames were the popular discount stores about then that she liked to browse through. We’d have lunch, perhaps meeting Dad and going to one of the local fast food restaurants or one of a couple diners that they liked in Auburn. After lunch, it was time to get groceries and go home.

Another day we were likely to “go to camp.” My friends, Peggy and Billy May had a cottage on Owasco Lake that their parents would move them to as soon as school was out. While the three of us played and swam in the lake, Mom and Barb, would sit chatting and working on craft projects together. Other times, Barb would bring them to our house and we would hang out there playing together.

Friday was likely busy as we packed the camper and got ready to go camping somewhere for the weekend. This would have been the year that Mom and Dad had traded the travel trailer for a mini-motorhome. It was easier for Dad to manipulate than the trailer behind the car. Driving and such was a bit harder after he had been burned badly a couple years before.

Looking through pictures of that summer, I realize that our big trip that year was to ECHO in Canada. We belonged to a group called the National Campers and Hikers Association (NCHA). Many campouts were with either the local, district, or state level groups of NCHA. Across Lake Ontario was ECHO- Eastern Campers and Hikers of Ontario- I think it stood for. We attended their big summer campout and then drove through part of Ontario on an extended journey home. One of the places that we stopped at was Upper Canada Village, a restored village of about 1867. I actually got to revisit this place this summer!

Wordless Wednesday- Remembering Mom Part 2

From my growing up years...