DUMMERSTON — Even though the 93-year-old Green Mountain Camp for Girls has a Facebook page, kids say goodbye to such digital distractions when they enroll for summer camp - day or overnight, one week or several, up to six - at the sanctuary-like, 13-acre site in Dummerston.
There's electricity, and there are showers (and an elegant pool), but you won't see any hand-held electronic devices - at least among the campers - or even old-fashioned devices you have to plug into the wall, like TVs, or battery-operated listening luxuries like radios.
“No makeup, no mirrors,” said Fran Lynggaard Hansen, the camp's executive director for the past three years and a former seven-year camp alumna.
“If you have to worry about what you look like,” she added, “it gets in the way of being yourself. I'm very protective of their self-image.”
The camp, as she sees it, is a place for female empowerment. It runs for six weeks from the last week in June. The price is $325 a week for day campers and $425 for sleepovers. One-third to one-half of the campers are on scholarship. The camp population has ranged from 20 to 160-plus. The camper-staff ratio is five to one.
The cabins, at least from the outside, look like early Yosemite. The centerpiece is the rustic 1919 Hildreth Hall, where campers gather to do what campers do - sing, have birthday parties with piñatas and use all sorts of hand signals for “shush.”
Last week, the camp was the destination for about 50 former campers and counselors at the first reunion in 93 years. They came from California, Canada, South Carolina and other points to visit, to join in familiar activities, and to join a Friday night alumnae spaghetti supper and sing-along.
Among the 50-plus alums was one especially welcome guest.
Isidore “Coach” Battino, a former director of the camp for 11 years, from 1963 to 1974, came back with his wife Patricia and two of their four grown children, Allen and Eric. The family was contacted through Allen's Facebook page.
The Bettinos stayed in the heart of the campus in the small director's cottage, a house Lynggaard Hansen sometimes uses during camp sessions, “so I can be in the middle of everything.”
She was a camper when Bettino was director.
“Fran is family,” Bettino said.
Learning from the Coach
A gymnast and all-around athlete, Bettino was a tumbling student, a gymnastics coach and a physical education teacher for many years, and is a role model for all 83-year-olds who wish to stay healthy, active and trim.
When Battino first managed the camp, the weekly fee was $20 and some of the food came from military surplus. Also, the campers' families sometimes paid with food.
The son of Greek/Jewish immigrants, Bettino said his family lived in downtown Manhattan near Broome Street, where a Greek/Jewish community had established itself.
A veteran of World War II, Bettino said he was in the middle of the Pacific on V-J Day. Thanks to the GI Bill, he went to Springfield College where he majored in physical education and health education. He also attended Keene (N.H.) Teachers College and subsequently taught for many years at Darien High School in Connecticut, where his teams won 13 state championships and 132 gymnastic matches.
“We lost six,” he said.
He lives now in Clemson, S.C. and has taught at Clemson University.
Bettino came to direct Green Mountain Camp through the camp's connection to the Experiment in International Living, then in Putney. A good friend of Bettino's that he knew from his settlement camp work, George Young, was at the Experiment at the time.
“I was born to teach and coach,” Bettino said. “God gave each kid uniqueness.”
Among his goals are to foster that individuality and to foster respect for one another.
“We see possibilities,” he said, adding that his wife was a partner in running the camp.
Bettino lives with a compendium of songs in his head, many of them anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as other popular folk songs.
He says he is absolutely non-political and leads singing events with songs he loves just for their musicality. He plays the banjo, taught, in part, he said by Pete Seeger, who has been a friend.
Watching Bettino lead the campers in a birthday celebration last week, featuring a home-made piñata held aloft by his two sons perched on rafters above, it becomes clear how much he enjoys children and camp activities.
“Coach is an inspiration to me and I hope I can run the camp with the same level of joy, love and care,” said Lynggaard Hansen.
A 'safe place'
The camp began as a project of two wealthy local women, who discovered that country girls were not as healthy as city girls, who had, for one thing, more food. This helped to determine what the camp could do.
Lynggaard Hansen said campers represent a cross-section of the country, but Windham County sends the majority of kids. “This is also a place for cousins to get to know one another,” she said.
When the camp started in 1917, she points out, “Girls were still in corsets.” She noted that in an old diary, the writer spoke of “the sound of carriages” and horses hooves coming up the road.
The camp offers the full range of activities but, Lynggaard Hansen explains, “I think about it as visiting my great grandmother and think about what she would have done. So we make ice cream and butter and multi-grain bread. We teach canning and nutrition.”
Life there is also balanced by fun. Lynggaard Hansen described the annual water carnival, where the object of the game was to stay wet. “My personal favorite,” she said, “is putting ice down people's pants.”
Most importantly, she said, the camp for her was a “safe place” when she was a child, and she believes she helps to create that safe place for the girls today.
She created that safe place during this interview when a counselor came into Lynggaard Hansen's small, early 19th century house on the property with Sophie, a camper who was slightly crying and feeling, she said, “a little homesick.”
Lynggaard Hansen swept Sophie into her commodious lap where she stayed, just about restored, for nearly an hour.