My mother got a summer job as a counselor at a day camp and part of the deal was that I was to attend as a camper. And it turned out that the counselor for the boys of my age group, 10? 12? was Mr. Blattman my fifth grade teacher, my all time favorite teacher, so I was really happy about it.

But the fun summer also came with some painful lessons for me. Like many summer camps there were a few tetherball courts, and though it was new to me, I took to it right away and played it whenever I could. And soon made friends with a nice gentle kid who also hung around the tetherball courts. However a very tough and assertive kid decided that I was his new best friend and pushed the other kid out of the picture. And I allowed that to take place because I was flattered that the tough kid wanted me for his best friend.

I got together with the tough kid a few times outside of camp; he came to my house, I went to his house. I can remember as we were building a series of cookout fires to heat up lunch, him obsessing about how amazing it would be if they could hook up 1,000 Ferarri engines and 1,000 Maserati engines – imagine how fast that could be. I asked why nobody ever tried it and he said that the engineering problems would be too difficult. I never was a kid that spent time thinking about Ferrari and Maserati sports cars, so the whole idea seemed pretty stupid.

And then at his house, in the nearby city of Peekskill, we were sitting on his front steps, him holding his BB gun. A delivery truck drove by and he shot the side of the truck. The truck screeched to a stop and the driver ran right up to us and gave us quite a talking to. But the tough kid’s parents were not home and the driver eventually drove away. I hope that I learned from all that  – just because someone wants to be your friend that that is really not any reason alone to take the offer. Might have taken me several more lessons to learn that, if I ever did.

But tetherball was the thing for me that summer. There are real rules, but we didn’t follow them all that much. One kid tried to punch the ball to wind up around the pole one way, the other kid the other way. We allowed “setups” where you could hit the ball twice: once to set it up for the main hit, then hit it with total power and direction. 

After a few weeks I learned that with a good set up I could hit the ball so hard that it would fly up at a steep angle, and wind around the pole over the head of the opponent, all the way up and they would never get a chance to hit it again.

One time I grabbed two guys and told them I could beat both of them at once, which I did with my single swat.

But the tetherball has a heavy rubber loop where the ball meets the rope, and I accidentally hit that hard spot – and the pole itself – so many times that summer that my right thumb was twice the width of my left. Took years to get back towards normal.

We played a lot of softball at that camp and I was somehow introduced as an outstanding outfielder, but I do remember that on a few occasions I did make spectacular catches, though nearly all during batting practice.

We had a talent show at which a bunch of us played and sang “Five foot two, eyes are blue…” and I played the guitar for our group. 

We had a scary Halloween style event, even though it was summer. We thought up many nasty and scary tricks to play on the younger kids. I decided that I would pick some burrs, the marble-sized thorny dried sticker balls from burdock weeds – and stick them in the hair of the kids going through our “fun” house. And I went ahead and stuck some in the hair of the only black girl in the camp before I realized what a bad idea this was. Thinking of that girl with those burrs in her hair still makes me feel shame to this day.

I also remember that some of the older girls sang a camp song at one point, a song that included the line “where a Jew can live in peace.” I was startled, having not really thought about the camp being all that Jewish, but in fact probably every camper and counselor was Jewish, excluding the obvious single black girl but including my tough guy gangster buddy.

There was a younger kid who was very outspoken and annoying and at one point I got so angry I hit him. He went running to the grownups to report the incident and I held up my hand in admission of guilt. But nothing ever came of it, perhaps because my mother was a counselor.

I’m not sure why it was only one summer. But I have these few vivid scenes of tetherball and softball, plus the talent show, but most of the rest is lost to me, other than one friend discarded and another I should have avoided.