By Anndee Hochman
In Joey Berlin’s first week at Berkshire Hills Camp—he was 14, the oldest kid in his bunk—he sent home a missive so replete with misery that his mother called it the “Camp Granada” letter, after the 1963 Allan Sherman song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!”: “Camp is very entertaining/and they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining…”
By the time the letter reached his parents on the north shore of Long Island, Berlin had changed his tune.
He was deft at tennis, softball, and basketball; other campers were starting to appreciate his prowess. There were the girls’ cabins, just a softball-field’s-length away. And there was a girl—though he wouldn’t really take note of her for another dozen years—a star tennis player and all-around athlete whose older brother occupied the bunk under his and would routinely kick him from below.
“It took me several days to fall in love with camp,” Berlin recalls. “But I’ve been in love with it ever since.”
He returned the next summer as a counselor in training, the following year as a waiter. At a camp reunion 12 years later, he reconnected with that tennis-playing girl, one in a cadre of female campers who were so intrepid on the courts and playing fields that the boys admiringly called them “The Mooses.”
Ivy Tombak was 25 then, and Berlin was 28. She showed up at his apartment on 56th Street with a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts for the ride to camp. Their first date, after the reunion, was a picnic in Central Park. They married in 1985, with a handful of camp friends among their guests.
And, for the last few years, though the couple officially lives in Los Angeles and New York, they’ve rented a place on the old Berkshire Hills Camp grounds—The Lodge, where the girls’ bunks used to be—and spent the autumn there.
“I always like to say that we have a house in Sodom, an apartment in Gomorrah, and this rental here in Eden,” Berlin says. “It’s a magical spot.”
For adults who grew up going to camp in the Berkshires—and especially for those who found themselves magnetically drawn back to the area for full-time or vacation homes—that’s a common refrain.
They talk about the lakes. The sunsets. The womblike serenity of western Massachusetts, especially in the tumultuous years of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
But they also remember camp as a site of personal metamorphosis, the place where they won their first trophy or risked their first kiss, the place where a brainiac could trot out her mischievous alter-ego or a self-conscious boy could learn that humility, not bravado, draws friends to your side.
Joey Berlin (second from left) and his family on Visiting Day, Summer 1968.
Mindy Tucker grew up on Long Island and spent four formative years at Camp Romaca in Hinsdale, starting when she was 12. At school, she was an academic superstar; at camp, no one knew her rep. So she plunged into every activity: sports, drama, Color War. One night, she and some other girls streaked across the campus. When workers re-surfaced the tennis courts in a shade of ocean blue, Tucker and her pals painted sharks on them. They sneaked into the camp’s kitchen for late-night snacks.
Romaca was a girls’ camp, and the single-sex environment felt liberating. No one wore make-up; no one fretted over their clothing. Instead, there were campfires and sing-alongs and goofy games: “Bring me a girl with 10 ponytails…Come up with 10 songs that have the word ‘yellow’ in them.”
The girls bonded fiercely, relationships forged in the crucible of adolescence without parents nearby to scold or comfort. “It’s a very intense relationship; when you have a bad day, you can’t go to your mother, so you go to your camp friends,” Tucker says. She’s still in touch with seven of her campmates, and they’ve held reunions.
“We used to cry for days when we came home from camp,” she says. “I think we all knew how special and incredible it was.”
While Tucker raised her own daughters in Westchester, they also went to Romaca, and the family has a vacation home half an hour from camp. It all floods back: the mountains, the hiking trails, the lake swims. “For a child, it was a very idyllic place to spend the summer,” she says.
Photos courtesy of Camp Romaca
Michelle Young remembers playing cello in a chicken coop. She recalls perching on a balustrade on the terrace at Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI), the summer after her sophomore year in high school, reading a handwritten letter from a friend. She remembers the in-joke, how campers would say, “Get your BUTI (booty) on the floor…Get your BUTI on the chair.”
Young was a serious musician, raised on Long Island, who spent school-year weekends studying classical cello at Juilliard and hours practicing both cello and piano. By high school, she felt adrift from the kids she’d grown up with. “But at music camp, it was all these other people just like me. You almost instantly connected.”
What she didn’t fully cherish—not until years later, when she’d begun to study art history and urban planning—was that BUTI occupied a former Gilded Age estate, a massive stone mansion with sprawling gardens and the Berkshires as a backdrop. “As a teenager, you don’t really appreciate all this beauty and history.”
She does now. Young, a professor of architecture and writer of narrative nonfiction, lives in Mount Washington with her family. “Going to camp here inspired me to want to live here. The rolling, green hills instantly put me into a place of relaxation.”
Photo courtesy of Samantha Costanza
Perry Garfinkel’s summer memories come in shades of sepia tone: formative, indelible, irretrievable snapshots, especially from the years he spent as a waiter and counselor at Silver Birch Camp in West Stockbridge.
He was 15 that first summer, a New Jersey kid eager to get out of West Orange. Some friends told him Silver Birch was hiring waiters, and though the staff sleeping quarters were literal shacks—one room, bunk beds, a single window—and Garfinkel had no idea how to schlep trays of food from the kitchen to a table of ravenous, rowdy campers, he thought it was paradise.
There was a ping-pong room, populated mostly by guys who were too insecure to mingle with the girls. There was the shed where younger campers took a mid-morning break for milk and cookies. There was the day his pal Steve quickly devised camp-specific lyrics to the tune of the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere.”
It was at Silver Birch that Garfinkel smoked his first cigarette—he became sweaty and dizzy and had to lie down for half the night—and, on a staff day off, drank his first beer. And it’s where he made out with Iris, his first legit girlfriend, the one he would later marry (and, still later, divorce).
The camp was on a dirt road; silver birches flanked the archway. There was a lake, the spot where Garfinkel and a pal, for reasons he cannot fathom, decided to run backwards all the way to the milk shed on the final day of camp.
In some ways, Silver Birch meant kinship. “At every meal we said the b’rucha (blessing) over bread. On Fridays, you had to wear white to dinner. There weren’t Bible classes, but there were bookends to remind us: Oh, you’re Jewish.”
At the same time, Garfinkel was etching his own identity. A lot of the male campers from New York struck him as edgy—smoking cigarettes, talking loud and fast. “I decided I was going to be the soft-spoken guy…Summer camp in the Berkshires is like living in a little cocoon. Like a test tube, where you see who you can be or who you don’t want to be.”
Garfinkel became a journalist, teacher, and percussionist who now writes books, mostly on spiritual topics. Young is also an author. Tucker works in real estate. Berlin produces awards shows. But each fall, he returns to the site of BHC, the camp where he sang the role of Lt. Cable in “South Pacific” and learned that lox actually tastes good.
He and Ivy, now 72 and 69, kayak on the lake, play tennis on the same courts where they lobbed balls as teens, drive around the area to farm stands and markets. They watch the leaves drizzle down. “You get older, you get slower, you lose your hair, you can’t run as fast or hit the ball as hard,” Berlin says. “But this place is the same.”
Courtesy of Robert Salerno
