1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/CAMP WANICA INTEGRATES

In September of 1967,  my senior year,  Corsicana High School integrated for the first time.  Well, I guess you could call it that.  About 8 students who went to Jackson High School, the school across on the east side of town that was totally attended by people we referred to as Negroes, transferred to CHS.  I had no idea what they called us, nor had most of us given it any thought, as our paths just didn't cross that much with those our own age.   They had their school and church events; we had ours.

I don't know that anyone on either side had that much curiosity about it.  We just lived parallel lives on the east and west side of town, marking graduation, football games, summer vacation in our own ways, but with the shared joy and angst of teenagers.   Certainly, there were those who spoke in pejoratives and who made fun of those of whom they had no real knowledge.  They had been taught that by their parents, some of them, on both sides of town. 

One of the kids, a very nice boy my age, rode our bus.  He sat quietly, bothered no one, and when it was time for him to get off the bus, stood up, made his way to the front and exited as quietly as he entered.  After a month or so of this, and after we learned his name, we waved and yelled goodbye to him out the bus windows.

"Bye Walter," seven or eight of us would yell, hands waving wildly out the bus windows.  He'd make a small wave gesture with his hand and smile that weak smile as he walked slowly down the gravel road toward the shack he lived in.  The green roof was barely visible among the junked cars.  We thought the cars were his dad's business, but he never talked about it.  We didn't ask either. He was a good student and a genuinely nice kid.


The only other student I knew of the transferees was a young girl named Faith, who had an ebullient spirit, huge smile, and mega talent.  She was my sister's age, two years younger than I and had started to school with them either 8th or 9th grade year, transferring to the high school in the 10th. She played the piano like a pro and was immediately recognized for her ability and personality.  Everyone I knew liked and respected her.

That was the extent of our exposure to integration.  The real test came several years later when a new high school was built, and both groups were merged into one new building.  Coming from a world where black and white had only seen one another from afar or in certain prescribed social roles into the new world of forced equality made for interesting dynamics in our little town on both sides of the aisle. 

Our high school principal, Mr. Don Bowen, was very popular with the students.  After a couple years as principal, he was made superintendent at age 28.  Then he had to deal with the contentious issue of integrating the schools.  It must have been very hard for him, with people of both races taking up hard stands with entrenched views on the changes. 

I graduated in 1968, and that summer would be the first summer that Camp Wanica, the Camp Fire Girls' Camp ouside of Corsicana, integrated.  I knew I wanted to be one of the counselors for the girls who would come from the east side of Corsicana.  Pat Gnoza wanted to, too, so we both volunteered, and our requests were granted.  The kids loved Pat because she was so funloving and humorous.  They seemed to like me, too, but for different reasons that I wasn't sure I could name.  Maybe because I laughed a lot and didn't yell too loudly at them when they needed correction.

The camp probably should have served as the model for the United Nations because we had no problem integrating.  The 15  little girls, aged 8-10, filled two cabins of the eight or so at the camp.  They were funny, intelligent, and inquiring. 

They were very interested in my boyfriend, and on the one night I was allowed to go on a date with him, they waited up for me and met me with all sorts of questions about what we did, where we went, and what he looked like. 

"Can we go up to the gate with you to meet him when he comes to get you?" Valerie had asked before I left.

"No, I don't think Ms. Fish would allow that," I said. 

"Well, can you just bring him to the cabin for a minute?" she continued.

"No can do," I said.  "I'd get kicked out of the camp for sure."

"Hmmph," she said, folding her arms across her chest.

"How we gonna ever get to meet him then?"

"Well, maybe later this summer you can meet him when we're not at camp," I suggested.  That seemed to pacify her for the moment.

"Y'all go to the carnival?" she asked.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, we usually do.  He's really good at winning teddy bears and stuffed animals on the games."

"Then we'll see you there," she said with authority.

As it turned out, she was right.  Later that summer, I met five of the girls at the carnival, and introduced them, giggling, squirming, slapping their legs, and acting silly, to my boyfriend, Coy.  They told me later they thought he was handsome and he sure was good at the games, so I assumed he met their approval.

In years past, they could have seen him daily as he delivered ice to the camp with his dad, who worked for Southern Ice.  Each day they brought 50 pound blocks of ice and filled up the wooden holder outside the lodge dining hall.  Ice was chipped for drinks, used to ice down everything that needed to stay cold that wouldn't fit into the refrigerator and for miscellaneous things. 

This year, he had taken a job working at the Hat Factory, where his mother worked, because it paid more.  He also hauled hay on the weekends, hefting it from the field onto a trailer, then taking it to some rancher's barn where they unloaded it.  Both jobs were hot and dirty, but he seemed to thrive on hard work, and his 130 pound body had no fat on it at all.

Camp sessions, lasting ten days, were filled with constant activity, except for the enforced rest period immediately after lunch each day.  Each girl had to stay on her metal bunkbed.  Some slept, others read or wrote letters, but quiet time was enforced, and the soft buzzing of the fans in that tiny cabin lulled us as though they echoed the soft whir of eternity.  Life stretched out before us, clear as a summer's morning and vibrant as the nighttime sound of cicadas. I lay on my bed smiling, staring up at the raw ceiling boards.  The girls were thinking of returning to their families while I contemplated leaving mine, moving to a college dorm.  And that bronze wiry young guy pulling levers at Adam Hat Factory was increasingly a part of my thoughts, including those for the future.

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/Camp Wanica

Camp Wanica provided a month of pure fun in the summer.  I attended as a young Camp Fire girl, when I was 8 to 12 or so, but the sessions were only 10 days long.  We were just getting wound up when it was suddenly over.  But the summers after my tenth and eleventh grades in high school, a group of about ten of us became Junior C.I.T.s (counselors in training) and then Senior C.I.T.s, and finally after graduation, full fledged counselors.

We oversaw the campers and assisted them as they did various chores around the camp: busing the tables in the screened-in dining room in the log lodge, mopping the latrines, cleaning the lavatories and toilets, and emptying trash.  They also had to clean their cabins and make their bunkbeds. 

We led sessions on beading vests (they earned beads for certain attainments, and these were put on their Camp Fire vest), leathercraft, Indian lore (about which we knew very little-we just read out of a book and tried to make it sound authentic), and we helped them learn to fold the American flag and give it proper respect. 

The first summer I was a counselor in 1968, some of my peers in the larger cities,  unhappy with the U.S. policies and the war in Vietnam,  started burning flags, while we at the camp still held tightly to tradition and love of country.  We stood on the precipice of cataclysmic social change, unaware and naive, happy at  Camp Cocoon.

One of my compadres, Pat,  taught swimming as she was an excellent swimmer.  I didn't teach swimming, having barely passed the Senior Lifesaver test myself,  relieved to have survived it.

We almost let one of our team drown as we watched her sink and surface about three times,  thinking she'd start swimming to the side of the pool at any time.  Finally, I think Pat had the good sense to dive in, push her up, and help her to the side, where she sputtered for about ten minutes while we all explained why we hadn't jumped in to save her.  In that regard, I had very little explaining to do as everyone knew I was only capable of keeping myself afloat, not anyone else. I still managed to guilt myself about it for the rest of the day though.

Pat was known for her fishlike ability in the water.  She could swim laps for hours, strong and adaptable.  Once, while at "free swim", I laughed hard at one of her witticisms, and the cap on my front tooth flew up and out, several feet from my mouth, made an arc, and landed in the pool.  Though we immediately started looking for it, we couldn't find it on the rough white bottom of the pool.  I kept my mouth firmly closed though six or eight little campers were hanging all over me begging, then commanding me to, "Smile, smile!"

"No," I said through clenched teeth and tight lips as they tried to peer in my mouth. 

"Let us see what you look like," they chimed in unison.

"No," I said again, folding my lips inside.

"Pleeeeease," they begged, laughing.

"Not funny!" I said, without opening my mouth, which caused looks of consternation on all their faces.

"What did you say?" they all asked at once. 

At that, I just shook them off my arms and back and turned abruptly, walking toward the ladder to escape them.

"Hey, hey, hey!!"

I turned toward the exclamations.  There was Pat, treading water in the middle of the deep part of the pool, holding something tiny and white in her hand.  "I found it!  I found it!" she yelled.  "It had washed to the drain.  I've got it!"

"Thank you!" I yelled, momentarily forgetting to keep my mouth closed.  I was standing on the side of the pool now, above the gaggle of campers who wanted to see what I looked like with only half a front tooth.  I knew it was not pretty.

I looked down at them, standing in a tight group, their mouths agape, eyes at full alert.  "We're sorry.  We didn't know it would look that bad," Belinda said, ostensibly on behalf of the entire knot of girls.  She looked like she might cry as did several others.

Now that I knew I would have the cap back in place in seonds, I felt much more secure.  I turned directly toward the girls, looked down, and gave them my biggest smile.  "Awwww, it ain't that bad," I drawled like a hillbilly, "sometimes ya just have ta be tough out here in th' country."

Pat pulled herself up on the side of the pool and handed me the precious white porcelain.  I popped it onto the tiny nub of tooth the dentist's drill had left where my front tooth had been and walked toward the cabin.  I glanced back toward the pool where the little girls seemed to have lost their zeal for swimming.  Several of them stared after me, but turned away sadly when I looked back at them. 

"We older girls have feelings too," I told them as we walked to the cabin that night after we returned from the program in the lodge.  Several of them had already said they were sorry.  "But it was funny.  Thank goodness Pat is such a good diver or I'd have had to keep my mouth closed the rest of camp!" 

Laughing, we linked arms and walked through the dry bermuda grass down the hill to our cabin, the midpoint in a semicircle of cabins that ringed thebase of the hill. The lodge was behind us at the top of the hill.

The canvas flaps, just long wooden frames covered with heavy canvas, were raised all the way around the cabin, creating the appearance of an odd-shaped craft that might lift off in flight at any moment.  We rarely put them down, only if it rained or was unseasonably cool, which it rarely was in those searing Texas summers.

Each cabin had responsibility during the session for raising, lowering, and folding the flag.  It was a solemn ceremony, and here was where we demonstrated the seriousness of handling the flag properly.  Singing Taps usually made a lump come in my throat, and sometimes, even when I was a counselor, not a camper, it made me homesick.  Everyone stood at attention, still and quiet through the entire routines.

We also took the campers fishing at least once during the session.  We trekked through the scorching sun, tennis shoes stirring the dust in the fields as we walked among the stunted mesquite trees and prickly pear cactus leading to the muddy tank where we often fished in vain. 

On one hike, a camper named Gertie,(not her real name)  who was a whiner, was walking behind me in the line separated by three or four kids.  There were at least three of us counselors accompanying the ten or so children aged 6-9 .  Gertie had whined about the heat, the walk, the dry grass, the flying grasshoppers hitting her, and finally began to complain about something biting her. 

At first, it just seemed like more of the same, so we basically ignored her.  Her pleas and cries became more insistent, and I finally let the other children pass and waited for Gertie.  She stopped beside me and started crying in earnest, saying something was stinging her.  I spotted a red ant on her sock, then another and another.  I began frantically knocking them off, when I realized they were on her pants.  I grabbed her jeans by the waist, unzipped the pants, and yanked them off, leaving the poor little thing standing there in her Snow White underwear.

  By this time, Pat had stopped and was helping me as we knocked red ants off her legs.  She had at least 10 stings.  We applied ointment out of the First Aid kit.  Someone carefully checked the inside of her jeans for ants clinging to the denim, and knocked the ants off before we had her step back into them.  It was the first, and probably the only time,  anyone felt sorry for her.

 All I could think of was thank goodness she was not terribly allergic to stings.  How she could have crossed an antbed none of us saw, and crossed it slowly enough for ants to cling to her is still a mystery.  But it happened, and thankfully, it was before our society became so litigious.  We might have told her parents.  I don't really remember.  But there was nothing more made of it.   She continued to whine throughout the camp, but we paid a little more attention now. 

Sundays, we all dressed in white shorts and white blouses with red ties around our necks.  The red neckpieces were short and gave a little flair to the Sunday uniform.  Miss Fish led the procession to the pasture where there was a large circle of white painted rocks.   We carried towels on which to sit.  There we had a prayer service, sang hymns, and generally acknowledged God.  It was a quiet time and solemn and everyone respected the calm of the hour.

With the same respect, but a bigger air of excitement was the night each session when we had a nighttime "Council Fire", harking, I'm sure, to some Indian tradition, the links murky to we youthful Texas girls.  The entire camp dressed up, this time in navy blue shorts with an offwhite Camp Wanica logo  and crisp white shirts.  I think we wore the same red ties. 

We processed with "measured steps", as instructed, in a very long line, all 100 or so of us, just at dusk, singing "We come, we come to the Council Fire, with measured tread and slow, to light the fire of our desire, to light the fire of Wohelo, wohelo, wohelo."  Wohelo meant work, health, love.

"The little twinkling stars above, are whispering nature's lore, while all about us the soft winds sigh,  and great Wokanda watches o'er.  Wohelo.  Wohelo."

We ended up on the banks of the tank (called a pond everywhere but Texas), again sitting on our towels.

At a signal, some of the counselors came across the tank on a log raft, their sanitary napkin torches, fasioned earlier in the day, lighting up the night.   They were dressed in hopsacks, their hair in breads, paint on their faces, looking surprisingly like the Indians in Hollywood movies. 

When they were almost to the bank, several counselors on horseback, also dressed in Indian attire and holding torches aloft,  thundered up from the pasture and brought their steeds to abrupt stops 20 yards or so behind the admiring campers. 

Following that, we listened to some Indian lore and sang both Indian songs and camp songs.  Sometimes those somber ceremonies dredged up deep emotions unsummoned.

"I miss my mommy," I heard Gertie say quietly.  "I miss my mommy," she said again a little louder.  As I moved to sit by her, she said very loudly "I miss my mommy!" and began sobbing. 

Miss Fish, the camp director,  had looked our way with a frown, put her finger to her lips and made a shushing sound.  I knew Gertie would not be quiet, but I put my arm around her and tried to console her by talking. 

I heard someone sniffing, looked behind me and saw that Edie, another of the campers was crying.  She put her head down and her shoulders were shaking.  Pat went to her and tried to talk her out of crying.  She continued.

Eventually, at least ten of the children were crying uncontrollably, so Miss Fish stood up, announced the Council Fire was officially over, and we started our half mile walk back to camp, other campers and counselors trying to comfort the criers, some children remaining stoic though their faces were contorted because they wanted to cry but wouldn't. 

"Go we forth from the Council Fire, into the night, into the night.  In our hearts renewed desire, burning bright, burning bright."  The campers mostly didn't seem convinced.

"Sing, Gertie," I urged her. 

"Loveliness of thought we've found, warmth and friendship's love.  Forest stillness closes round, sky and stars above.  Blend into the mystic call of wohelo, wohelo.  May Wokanda's blessing fall upon us as we go."

That night, after lights out, I heard sniffling and noseblowing throughout the cabin. 

"Camp's over in two days," I said out loud in the dark.  Silence.  "You'll all be home on Saturday." 
Silence.

The sniffles stopped momentarily. 

A small voice from one of the top bunks,  "Saturday?"

"Yes, two days from now."

"Oh.  I'll miss camp."

Little voices chime in.  "We want to stay.  We'll miss camp.  We don't want it to be over.  That's sad."

The stillness covered the cabin like a soft sheet.  No more sniffles.  I could hear mosquitos buzzing outside the screened windows, soft night sounds, leaves moving gently against the branches as a warm breeze kissed the trees.  They would leave on Saturday, and this summer would be a tiny footnote of their lives.  Who knew what effect the camp experience had on them?  I doubted any of them would choose leatherworking or torchmaking as a career. 

"Wohelo, wohelo," I sang to myself quietly before drifting off to sleep.