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Big Chief Dad
WARNING: This might be politically incorrect, so if you’re easily offended by the way life was in the 1960s, it’s okay to move on.
My Dad was always larger than life, but I didn’t know that until I was about five or six.
Dad was the director of a summer camp for inner-city kids (as they were called then) along Lake Michigan. The camp was called Camp Blodgett; it’s still there, happily humming along despite the pandemic.
We spent every summer at Camp until I was about nine. My sister and I, and eventually my oldest brother, would run wild around the camp because we could. I remember spending hours up a tree, reading the latest Bobsey Twins or Boxcar Children book, or running up and down the sand dunes that led to Lake Michigan. I learned how to swim, how to shoot a bow and arrows, and how not to care for a duck.
(Apparently, my folks got me a duckling one year. I carried it around non-stop, so much so that its neck never developed, so its head and neck drooped down over my arm.)
My first inkling that Dad was amazing was at Camp. Every two weeks, a new group of campers would join us. The first night, there was a bonfire, and everyone got to know each other.
There were ten cabins at the time, each named after a Native American tribe. I always had at least one friend from all the campers that I’d…
