From left to right: Danny Trevor, Ben Trevor, me (Jim Gibbons), half of Quint Owen's head and Sam Hulka. I have no idea who took this photo. Possibly a sasquatch, but more than likely a camper.

Taken down at the archery range on a sunny afternoon during my last year at camp (2001), I’m a second year JC (junior counselor) in this photo and instructing/supervising these fine young lads in their arrow-flinging endeavors. Obviously, I was sporting a soul patch and a “Hi, my name is Slim Shady” t-shirt because I was a super cool 16-year-old. ‘Nuff said, right?!

I’ll wager a guess that before, during and after this picture was taken, I was lamenting the fact that I had become an American Archer when I was a camper. Quick explanation: An American Archer is someone who has achieved every target shooting award at the 15, 25, 30, 40 and 50-yard lines with a bow and arrow under the Camp Archery Association’s achievement program. There were usually only one or two handfuls of American Archers at camp each summer making the bragging rights it entailed a cool perk as a camper (Note: They are also kind of cool as a 25-year-old.), but as one of only three staffers with the distinction in 2001 it was a different story. The other two American Archers on staff were Waterfront Director Brent Parker and Head Archery Instructor David Owen, a fellow JC one or two ears older than me. Brent, busy with all things waterfront-related, would have been a rare staffer to see instructing archery that year, which made me (more or less by default) Assistant Head Archery Instructor—or something like that. What that meant was David normally got the morning shift down at the range (Which was preferable because it was usually cooler and your morning was usually more relaxed—a definite perk for anyone among the sleep-deprived staff.), I ended up down there in the sweltering hot afternoons… when I would have rather been down on the waterfront… by the cool, cool water… doing anything, anything other than archery.

That said, with the rose-colored glasses of hindsight, I realize that I ended up spending most of my afternoons on staff leading a bunch of kids as we all fired dangerous projectiles at bails of hay (or sometimes an old t-shirt) for a few hours. Not too shabby.

This photo also exemplifies a lot of camp experiences. It’s a bunch of dudes, surrounded by trees, doing something potentially dangerous. Good times, indeed.

I love how maniacal Sam looks in this photo. Little would the casual viewer suspect that the half-headed Quint was the real threat here. After the photo was taken, he jabbed two or three arrows into my side, filing them in between the gaps of my rib cage like some sort of pointed and deadly piece of paperwork, before fleeing into the nearby swamp… never to be seen or heard from again.

I’m kidding, of course! In my two years instructing archery, no one was shot, stabbed or lost in the swamp. A few arrows, however, did find their way into that quagmire at my discretion…

I didn’t say being an Archery Instructor was completely without its upsides!Similar Posts:

• Regarding archery in comics and a long, long absence…
• Some song sheets: Johnny Verbeck, Frozen North and more!
• Second generation Shewahmegonites

From left to right: Axel Owen, Owen Aronson, Tim Bergstrom, Andrew Porter (counselor), me (Jim Gibbons) and Brian Swan. In the back, Cabin 10's David Will and Ben McIntyre (Counselor). Photo nabbed from Pete Reckard's Facebook.

I think I’m 11-years-old in this picture. Clearly, at the time, I was an extremely impressive dresser, as are all my compatriots here. Our counselor Andrew Porter was from the Isle of Man in the UK and I consider him to be one of the first truly cool people I have ever known—a title that, disregarding the chronological aspect, I think I likely applied to most Shewahmegon counselors while I attended camp. Andrew played guitar, informed us he was in a band called “Radiohead and the Scabby Donkeys” (the type of outlandish and playful lie you’d hear often at camp) and introduced me (with the help of Australian nurse Steve Guinea) to a song we were frequently regaled with on hiking trips that went a little something like…

There was (Name) (Name)
Looking mighty (word that rhymed with person’s name)
In the store, in the store.

There was (Name) (Name)
Looking mighty (word that rhymed with person’s name)
In the Corner Master store.

My eyes are dim
They cannot see
I left my glasses in the W.C.

I left my glasses in the W. C.!

Andrew, I also realize, taught me that W.C. stands for Water Closet. (A term synonymous with “bathroom” for some Brits and Aussies.) And, if memory serves, Andrew had a shirt that featuring a grenade-like emblem and words that I can’t remember now which had a meaning none of us younger campers, despite numerous guesses, could ever figure out. I presume it was something horribly offensive disguised by British slang—and I have to presume it was more than just a little offensive as we had pretty filthy mouths for a group on 11-year-olds.

At this point, Luis Orduña had not arrived from Toluca, Mexico, to join our cabin yet.

Lastly, memory doesn’t have to play into this reminiscence thanks to the photo, but we were clearly a well-fed group of kids. Look at those chubby cheeks!

Oh, also, I think I wore that St. Louis Cardinals hat (at least, I think it was a Cardinals cap) for 90 percent of the summer.

———
Quick notes: If I mention your full name on this blog and you’d prefer I wouldn’t, drop me a line and let me know. I’m at jimgibbons1 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Also, nothing I state here is necessarily fact. I plan to relay stories the way I remember them. Memory is an imperfect thing, so I may get things wrong from time to time. If I do and you know better, comment on the post and help flesh out these long forgotten stories! Thanks!

Similar Posts:

• Random Recollections—A messy first
• How a chubby, young asthmatic ended up deciding to go to camp.
• Fiction-fueled preconceptions of camp

Welcome back to Nothing More American, a summer camp memoir blog of an archival nature posting at regular intervals with a photoblog vibe!

So, why was this blog left oh so neglected for such a long time? Well, last year when I vowed to get this puppy back on track, I had a box full of photos and scanner. I was fully ready to populate this web space with some atrocious teenage photography from Kodak one-time-use cameras with diligence. I had decided to abandon the “maybe one day I can compile this into a novel” memoir approach I originally wanted this blog to take and moved over to a yearbook style scan-a-thon.

Clearly, I say again, that didn’t happen. But… BUT… I have a pretty decent excuse…

In early September of 2009, I was let go from my job. I woke up late. I let my beard from long. I showered infrequently at best…

2009: Hairy.

Jessi and I the day after my birthday (four days after being let go) in a park where we saw Peter Dinklage walking his dogs. We were eating egg sandwiches!

Long story short, I got a job at Dark Horse Comics in Portland, Ore., and Jessi and I moved across the country in November. It’s been great so far, but finding time to get this ol’ bitch of a blog up and running again just hadn’t come along. Now, Jessi’s rocking the Rose City as a professional ballroom dancer and ballroom dance instructor working crazy hours and that leaves me with a good four hour block each evening to spend on hobbies. Hobbies like this blog! So, I’ve got my box of pictures. I’ve got the scanner out. And, I’ve got a librarian-esque drive to archive every single one of those photos on this blog.

Before I get started, here are a few quick notes…

• Nothing More American will now be primarily organized by year—the seven years I went to Camp Shewahmegon to be more precise. The main categories will be the summer of 1995 through the summer of 2001.
• Blog posts will lead with a picture and be followed by as much explanation of said photo as I can muster after that. The info may be descriptive or it may just reminisce about something slightly related. Either way, I hope to squeeze a ton of camp memories out of my brain by just rolling with the pictures. If you’re a camp friend with more insight into the images, please comment and add to the story.
• Most of these photos were taken by my brother Dan, me or someone we handed one of our cameras to. Presuming I know who took the shot, I’ll give them credit.

That’s pretty much it. Basically, this blog is taking its lead from photoblogs. I’ll show a photo and then scribble down a story of some length to explain it—pretty much like some old fart taking you through the slides from his vacation only much more fun. (I hope!)

Let’s get started…Similar Posts:

• Let’s get visual!
• Round the blazing…
• A group shot of Cabin 11 circa 1995

Conan: An Adventurer.

“As for Conan’s eventual fate—frankly, I can’t predict it. In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”
-Robert E. Howard, March 10, 1936, critiquing an article entitled “A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career” in a letter to P. Schuyler Miller.

After reading this quote, it dawned on me that most of my creative struggle with this blog has been based on trying to keep an element of chronology to my stories and posts. Thanks to Howard, I’ve realized that as an average adventurer—a title I think applies to most who attend summer camp—I need not worry about relating my yarns in order, but should simply make sure they get told.

That said, I’ll be telling tales more frequently here, but they won’t be in any order. I’ll just let them flow and explain the “when” during the story itself. What would Conan do if he had a blog? He’d do it this way!

This guy has some stories to tell, to be sure!

• Random Recollections
• Dear Readers…
• Let’s get visual!

In honor of those three glorious printed pages stapled together by hand to circulate our camp news, I have added a section (look to your right, there it is!) that’ll display all recent comments made on the blog. Hopefully, this will help people see a multitude of other camp stories posted in response to my main entries and foster the open forum feel I hope Nothing More American has in the future.

So, comment away! Now with NMA‘s Chipmunk Chatter, it may be seen by an old camp buddy who has an addition to your story, get you an answer to a nagging nostalgic question or give another former camper a good and much-needed laugh.Similar Posts:

• Chipmunk Chatter: Vol. 53, No. 6
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• Dear Readers…

I just wanted to address you all directly with a few things.

First, I chatted with a few friends recently who told me they have been enjoying the blog. You know who you are, but I just wanted to put an additional “thank you” up here. It means a lot to know that people are actually looking into what is essentially a labor of love for me, not to mention a place to record all these memories before they slip away. If you’re reading then you’re probably reading this, so thanks for supporting me and Nothing More American in our bloggy infancy!

Second, many of the same people who have expressed a love for the blog have also expressed that they don’t feel quite comfortable posting comments and what not after posts. No question or comment is inane or irrelevant here and all of them should hopefully stir up more memories that I can blog, not to mention stir up the memories of other readers. If my talk about canoeing brings up an unrelated canoeing memory you want to share, post it! If my posts are lacking crucial information, post a question! If you wish you had memories as fantastic as mine, post that! I’d really love this place to become as much a forum as it is a place for me to catalog the amazing events of my childhood summers, so please don’t be shy and comment frequently. I guarantee things will get even better if you do!

Lastly, if you read some of my introductory posts then I am sure you may be wondering where the webcomics I mentioned are. I finished the first installment of the blog’s namesake webcomic Nothing More American recently, but issues with my scanner have put posting it on hold. Be patient, it’s on its way.

That does it for me. Again, thanks to everyone who has shown support in the early going of NMA, I really do appreciate it!

Till we meet again,

JIMSimilar Posts:

• Introducing “Chipmunk Chatter”——>
• Round the blazing…
• How “an adventurer” tells stories

Before my first summer at Camp Shewahmegon (’95), I was a husky, asthmatic without an abundance of confidence—though I did have a healthy helping of awkwardness and cheek chubbiness—who would have rather spent his summer at the occasional swim meet, watching cartoons and playing Sega Genesis. The summer before, my cousin Tim (who’s a few months older than I am) and my cousin Ryan (who’s years older than me, and as I’m the oldest in my immediate family, like a big brother to me as well) both sent letters to my younger brother Dan and I from camp. Dan, who was much more energetic, outgoing, confident and adventurous than me at the time (and only nine years old), was ready to grab a sleeping bag and head North immediately. I wasn’t. I had a hard time making it through sleepovers, and the idea of being sent off into the forest for a minimum of four weeks was terrifying. Obviously, I ended up deciding to go, and here’s why I think I did…

Though camp was never described as a tradition in my family, it was one. Both of my uncles (Ryan and Tim’s dads) went to camp for a number of years, starting as campers and then going on to fill a number of different staff positions between the two of them—from counselor to tripper and even on to maintenance man at one point for my uncle Jim. Their sons later followed in their footsteps and went to Shewahmegon. Also, my grandparents on the same side of the family (my mom’s, for the record) were friends with Bill and Gerry Will, who founded Camp Shewahmegon in 1947 and ran it for 54 years until it closed in 2001. Heck, my mom even spent some time up at the “Private Camp For Boys” because she was friends with one of the Will daughters! There was never any pressure to go and continue the legacy, aside from some healthy ribbing in Ryan and Tim’s letters, but it was a family tradition to head up to the Northwoods of Wisconsin, even if it was never referred to with that exact language—the word “tradition.”

Secondly, I owe a great deal to my brother Dan for all my years of summer camp enjoyment. I won’t deny I was a bit of a “baby” at the age when I should have been ready and rearing to get up into the woods and play some capture the flag, and the fact that my younger brother was more apt to do so than I was…well, safe to say that struck a chord. Camp helped tremendously to bring my inner courage to the forefront of my character, but at the time, I would have been happy to cuddle up in a corner with some comics all summer. When I was 10, Mom said she wouldn’t send Dan to camp the year before unless I went. I didn’t. The next year, Dan was set to go, and I certainly wasn’t going to have my little brother show me up. And so, I went too. I’m sure Dan, in his infinite 10-year-old wisdom, knew that by doing this I’d owe him an eternal debt of gratitude, or—at the time—the use of numerous Ninja Turtle toys, so Dan played a major part in convincing me to go as well. Not just because he was going and I felt I should, but because the kid made some pretty compelling arguments about how great it would be. I listened, and it turns out he was very right.

While I would love to say that the Camp Shewahmegon video sent to our house also helped, I’d be lying if I did. However, it was well worth watching for the memories alone, and because it stands as testament to the fact that Camp Shewahmegon was one of the most beautifully “stuck in time” places ever. The video, which I saw in 1995, was ripped straight from the mid-‘80s and featured all the male short-shorts to prove it! Based on the video, 11-year-old Jim would have assumed camp literally was the movie “Meatballs”—if I’d seen it at that age—or at least had the same dress code. Oddly enough, during my years at camp it became fashionable for the staff to visit a thrift store called the Bargain Hut in Ashland, WI, which—oddly enough—led the style of dress during my time at camp to be shockingly similar to what I saw in that extremely dated video.

An example of the fine, old school summer fashion worn by the Shewahmegon staff in 2000, shown here at the nearby Hayward Mini Golf.

Either way, aside from the video convincing me you arrived at camp via time machine, it did make things up at Shewahmegon look like a ton of fun.

Lastly, I think there was some inborn call of the wild that led me to go to camp. I know that sounds incredibly cheesy, but there was an element of adventure that roused even a lump of dough like my near-teen self off the couch. Also, I am sure there were quite a few convincing talks with my mom and dad about how it’d all be a lot of fun and a real good thing. Either way, every encouragement fueled that innate sense of adventure and I listened.

So, the summer of 1995 saw my mom, my brother, my sister and me driving in my mom’s suburban up from our house in Georgia to the O’Hare Oasis in Chicago, where the bus picked up most of the campers heading to Shewahmegon. To say I was still scared after all that deliberation and convincing would be a gross understatement, but to say it was one of the best decisions of my life would be as well.Similar Posts:

• Second generation Shewahmegonites
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At some point earlier in the trip, Miles had discovered that the tin housing the cappuccino mix had one of those goofy little descriptions oft-times found on coffees. Though I can’t be sure General Foods International hasn’t changed it since then, it would have read something like, “A wonderfully full-bodied coffee with the enticing flavors of orange and spices, inspired by the cafe’s of Europe.” Each morning afterward, including the final one of the trip, Miles would riff on other possible coffee tin epithets, switching into a rich, TV commercial-like voice, probably placing one foot on a rock and leaning on his raised knee with a steaming mug in hand.

“There’s nothing like the warm aroma of General Foods Orange Cappuccino to thaw the chill of a crisp Fall evening from your quivering lips.”

Or…

“Just like the snow falls on a barren meadow, blanketing in white the homes of the forest denizens, General Foods Orange Cappuccino is a fresh, clean start to your day—whether you’re waking up to the peace of a thatched cottage or to the hustle and bustle of the big city.”

Years later, I actually saw a skit on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” where two rival writers of these coffee tin vignettes had a poetry slam-esque face-off before deciding the victor in a brutal cage match. After seeing that, I couldn’t help but be reminded of those mornings and think, “Man, camp certainly was ahead of its time in the comedy department!” As, so very clearly, we were.Similar Posts:

• Random Recollections—A messy first
• Regarding archery in comics and a long, long absence…
• Cyclops on the A-Field: A Comic-Con mini-hiatus post.

Hopefully, by posting chance camp thoughts that creep into my cranium on NMA as they randomly occur, I can deliver some of the spontaneous joy I receive from my headspace’s incidents of unplanned nostalgia. Also, this will potentially help me to tell many more stories while leaving plenty of tidbits out there that will one day get hashed out—little bread crumbs to lead you folks along, while acting as tasty morsels to some who might have more intimate knowledge of these vignettes. For now, enjoy them as they are and know that these scenes are part of a larger tapestry of tales.Similar Posts:

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Like many kids from my generation, those of us who grew up watching Nickelodeon in its heyday, my early thoughts on camp and camp culture were primarily influenced by “Salute Your Shorts“—a half hour show about a group of oddball male and female campers getting into wacky predicaments in the woods with only a single authority figure to watch over them.

Between the awful waffles (some sort of hazing involving a tennis racket and syrup), cruel nicknames (the fat fella was called “Donkeylips”) and the too-old-to-be-a-counselor Kevin “Ug” Lee (played by the near 40-year-old Kirk Bailey), watching “Salute Your Shorts” as an introduction to camp was like watching “Animal House” as a primer on college. The show, full of sitcom-style exaggeration, was more like middle school displaced in the forest than any sort of camp, yet at the time it was really all I had to go on—that, and the fact I presumed some sort of extreme boating competition against a pack of bullies had to take place à la “Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.” Not to say that camp-centric movies and TV shows don’t capture aspects of the experience, it seems they mostly end up just capturing the scenery of it while keeping their plots relatable to general audiences.

For the record, I’ll say that the film “Wet Hot American Summer” seems to be the flick that best represents many of the intangibles that other camp-fiction lacks.

Though it’s an over-the-top comedy spoofing camp itself and camp films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, writers David Wain and Michael Showalter—camp-goers themselves as children—don’t forget the elements that make many of those summer stories uproarious: that smelly kid who never showered, the joy staff experience on an outing away from camp no matter how brief, the goofy interactions counselors have with their oft-times annoying campers and the peculiar social dynamics that thrive in small camp communes. Sure, “Wet Hot” is far to extreme to be an accurate portrayal of camp life, but for those who have had the summer camp experience, there are plenty of nuggets in the film that ring true.

And while there is certainly an element of obvious comedy behind a fellow camper rolling down a hill directly into a tree at the end of a five-mile hike and pooping himself, the basics of the situation never seem to live up to the true hilarity of the memory. There’s some type of inexplicable aspect to camp that is near impossible for fiction to capture, and thus, was hardest for me to imagine before my first summer.

Now try to envision the aforementioned doughy 11-year-old, full of husky fourth-grader anxiety and child-like excitement, knowing that he spent far too much time in front of the television—equally limiting and nurturing his outlandish imagination—and that was me when my mom first broached the topic of camp.Similar Posts:

• How a chubby, young asthmatic ended up deciding to go to camp.
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