In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (43 page)

Funny lines Sam remembers:

Says Sam, “I remember my father wrote me twice a week and as part of the address (he copied it from the ad), he included, “LG RMS … ALL IMPMTS, ALL SPTS, 75 M.N.Y. RSNBLE.”

Sam adds, “I don’t think I did much for the mountains but they did plenty for me. They took me out of the tenements for several summers, provided me with tuition for college and much good subject matter for my unanticipated career in comedy.

“Let’s give the little hills a big hand.”

As I watched star after star take his turn on the mammoth Madison Square Garden stage, each a product of the Catskills, U.S.A., I kept wondering what there was about that place that manufactured so many big theatrical names. What kind of food did they have that brought out a Van Johnson, an Earl Wrightson, a Gene Barry, a John Garfield, a Shelley Winters? What kind of air did they breathe at Swan Lake that turned erstwhile violin players Henny Youngman and Jan Peerce into stars? What kind of water did Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers and Jackie Miles drink that helped to develop their funny bones? What was it that inspired Arthur Kober to write
Having a Wonderful Time
and Herman Wouk to scribble
Marjorie Morningstar
?

The Borscht Belt not only spawned Clifford Odets, Morrie Ryskind and Yip Harburg, but it also gave birth to Bob Cousy, and it groomed Barney Ross and other top sports figures. Then, too, the hills are filled with the sound of music made by those successful doctors and lawyers who worked their way through college serving as busboys, bellhops and Romeos to the love-starved file clerks. And for those whose life-long ambition was matrimony, Mountaindale, Monticello and South Fallsburgh proved the greatest Garden of Eden since Eve propositioned Adam.

How did it all start? How did we go from borscht to bouillabaisse in one short lifetime? Like some feller said before me: “There’s gold in them thar hills!”

The Social Director at the Adult Summer Camp

Moss Hart

T
o understand the stresses and strains a camp season entailed, and which a social director of those days labored under, it is necessary, I think, to set down an actual week’s schedule of camp activity, which was repeated, though with different material of course, every week of the entire camp season.

Monday was campfire night. This was presumably an informal get-together, for the new guests usually arrived on Sunday; and a campfire in the woods, with entertainment provided while marshmallows and hot dogs were being roasted over the fire, was supposed to initiate the new arrival into the carefree camp spirit. I suppose it did—but since the wood for the fire, as well as the hot dogs, marshmallows and the blankets to sit on, had to be dragged out into the woods by the social director and his staff, it did not hold quite the same easygoing informality and gaiety for us that it did for the guests, to say nothing of the fact that the entertainment around the fire had to be devised and rehearsed, and was not informal at all.

Campfire night always held a special kind of torment for me, for Eddie had delegated to me at the beginning of the season the task of leading the community singing that opened the festivities as the campfire was lit, a job that I was unfortunately good at and which I whole-heartedly loathed. There was always a good deal of heckling, actually quite good-natured, as I stood up in front of the fire to start the singing off, and it had to be answered with equally good-natured banter in return on my part. It was a rare campfire night that I did not devoutly wish that I could disappear into the air or sink into the earth.

I had two other regular spots in the campfire programs. One, a Shakespearean recitation, usually a soliloquy out of
Hamlet
,
Macbeth
or
Romeo and Juliet
, and a “boy and girl” number complete with ukulele, which I strummed and sang to while a female guest, carefully selected that afternoon as the best of a bad lot, sat on my knee and sang along with me. The fact that the crowd was usually insistent that we encore the number by doing the Charleston together did nothing to minimize the deep hatred I held for each Monday night that stretched from June to September.

Tuesday night was costume or dress-up night. Depending upon the whim of the social director and the kind of costumes at hand, the night was designated and proclaimed as “Greenwich Village Night,” “A Night in Old Montmartre” or “The Beaux Arts Ball.” The social hall had to be decorated by the staff to simulate old Montmartre or Greenwich Village, and tables and chairs were set around the hall in night-club fashion. It was imperative, moreover, that the guests, both male and female, turn out in appropriate costumes, for the evening was a failure if they did not; so most of Tuesday afternoon from after lunchtime on was spent in going from cabin to cabin and helping guests prepare their costumes or cajoling them into getting themselves up in one if they showed a disinclination to do so.

Most girls arrived in camp with some sort of catch-all costume for dress-up night, as advised in the camp brochure; but the men usually brought along nothing but the inevitable white flannel trousers and blue sport jackets. We had a supply of costumes in the camp wardrobe that could be used for just such emergencies week after week, and I have yet to see a figure of a French apache on the stage or in the movies that does not give me a shudder as I recall how many unwilling male guests I badgered into being an apache from old Montmartre. We seemed always to have had more apache costumes in the wardrobe trunk than any other kind, though “A Night in Old Japan” was a close runner-up for the male contingent for reasons that now escape me.

For “A Night in Old Montmartre” one or possibly two Grand Guignol sketches were usually presented—with the result that there was almost never any catsup to be had in camp the next day because we used it to simulate the streams of blood always necessary in the Guignol sketches, and the social staff’s hair was usually matted or streaked with catsup that would not come out for the next two days.

On “Greenwich Village Night” there was a good deal of candle-lit free-verse poetry reading, usually done by Eddie, and a good deal of Edna St. Vincent Millay usually read by me. No one was ever more weary of hearing, “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night” than I was by the end of that first summer. And there were quite a few evenings when I was not quite sure that I would last the night myself, Edna St. Vincent Millay or no Edna St. Vincent Millay!

For “A Night in Old Japan” we presented our own version, complete with local jokes and lyrics, of
The Mikado
, and for “Beaux Arts Night” there were tableaux of guests, decked out in silver and gold gilt paint, gilded and arranged, of course, by a sweating and cursing social staff.

Wednesday evening was “Games Night,” and between dances, potato races, sack races, one-legged races and peanut relay races were run off for prizes, and though no entertainment was deemed necessary by the management for this carefree evening, it was thought essential, nevertheless, for the social staff to encourage participation in the games by setting the example of being the first ones out on the floor for each game and seeing to it that the shy or unattractive girls in particular were included in at least one game during the evening. It is not easy to feel the proper compassion for a shy girl or an ugly duckling when you are tied into a sack with her and are hobbling down the social hall to the finish line. On the contrary, rolling a peanut along the floor side by side with a bad-complexioned girl with thick glasses and unfortunate front teeth does nothing to kindle the fires of pity within you, but instead makes you want to kick her right in her unfortunate teeth.

There was no escape possible from this nightly gallantry, however, for the one camp rule that was inviolate—that could never be broken under any consideration—was that the male members of the social staff dance only with the girls who were not being danced with, and that the shy and ugly ones be “socialized” with first. It was up to the social staff and to the social director and his assistant to set the example for this, not only so far as dancing was concerned, but in every other aspect of camp activity.

There was actually a sound reason for this. The population of every summer camp was always predominantly female—the girls sometimes outnumbering the men two to one—and this thorny problem the wily camp owners met by hiring college boys instead of professional waiters to wait on tables, for these college boys were part of the social staff after their duties in the dining room were finished.

Indeed, it mattered very little how sloppy a waiter a young medical or legal student might be if he was a good dancer and “mixed and mingled” well in the social hall. The trouble, of course, lay in the fact that the college boys disliked dancing with “the pots,” as they called them, quite as much as we did, and devised all sorts of stratagems to be out on the floor with an attractive girl in their arms almost before the first note of each dance number sounded from the orchestra. It was always necessary to make a blanket rule at the beginning of each season that if a girl was not dancing after the first sixteen bars of music, she must be danced with forthwith. And there was a further ironclad rule that no one girl was to be danced with more than once in an evening, for it was the boys’ practice to latch onto a pretty girl and dance every dance with her, proclaiming loudly and innocently that they had danced every dance that evening and had not sat out one!

By the middle of July in every season, it was always necessary to ship one or two insubordinate waiters home for flouting this rule, for inevitably love blossomed between a waiter and a guest, and when that happened, he would defiantly dance every dance with his beloved. There was nothing to do but ship him home as a stern example to the others. I was not always certain that it was exactly love that blossomed in a waiter’s bosom, for once a waiter glimpsed that unmistakable light in a girl’s eyes, it almost inevitably followed that the hapless girl, for the entire span of her two weeks’ vacation, barely saw the sunlight from then on. Instead, she was in the kitchen most of the time helping him polish silver and make salads, and then setting his tables for him. These poor creatures would arrive in camp with a decent glow of health on their cheeks and leave two weeks later hollow-eyed wrecks.

Curiously enough, this practice of guests’ helping waiters in their work was not frowned upon by camp owners, but in a way had their blessing, for I don’t suppose the waiters could have gone on moonlight canoe rides night after night and been up at six thirty every morning to prepare for breakfast without some sort of unpaid slave labor to help them. And I am certain it was love by and large that kept the camp silverware as clean as it generally was. Week by week one could very often tell whether or not love was rampant among the waiters by the way the tables were set or how the salads were decorated, and when love ran riot in the kitchen, it played hell with the dancing in the social hall at night.

I am certain, too, those camp years ruined the pleasure of dancing for me forever. It is seldom now that I will venture out onto a dance floor. For six whole years I danced with nothing but “the pots,” and that was enough to make me welcome the glorious choice of sitting down for the rest of my life.

The one night in camp when there was no dancing at all was Thursday night, and it may be imagined that sometimes it seemed to the social staff that Thursday was terribly slow in arriving or had disappeared out of the week entirely. That was the night for basketball, played by a team of our own waiters against a team of waiters from a neighboring camp, sometimes in our own social hall and sometimes in theirs.

This night was always held up with a great show of largesse by camp owners as the night that the social staff was entirely free to rehearse the weekend’s play and musical, but it was not entirely as generous as it sounded. Thursday night after the game was the night that the owners always chose to give a party in their own quarters for specially selected guests, and to this party the social staff was not only invited but more or less
ordered
to appear, for they were expected to supply the necessary entertainment for the festivities. The idea was, I suppose, that since the social staff had not entertained guests for the entire evening, they must now be panting to do so, beginning at midnight.