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Making Summer Last

Making Summer Last

 

If your vision of a camp director is a clipboard, a whistle, and a busy summer – well, you’re only partly right Meet "Sunshine".

Audrey Kremer Monke ‘84 launched her career not because of her Cate education, or the Stanford one that followed it, but because she could drive a boat. “I wanted to be a teacher,” she explained, “and I thought that working at a summer camp would be good training.” During the winter of 1986, her sophomore year of college, she was in the Stanford career center flipping through binders of flyers advertising summer jobs. One – Gold Arrow Camp – caught her eye. “Oh my gosh I loved that place,” she recalls thinking, remembering the one session she had attended as a camper nearly ten years earlier.  Her boating skills – her father had taught her how to captain a Boston Whaler in Newport Harbor (CA) by the time she was twelve–made her a hot commodity. She got the job and spent a memorable summer at Gold Arrow, and hasn’t missed a single summer since.

It’s easy to see why. Set on Huntington Lake, high in the California Sierra, Gold Arrow Camp, or GAC, as it’s fondly called, has a rustic, no-frills, and traditional feel. On a late August day the fun seems to start right at breakfast, when sleepy campers file into a busy, open-air dining hall, as the music thrumming on speakers begins to energize them. Activities are listed on a board outside–from horseback riding, to wakeboarding, to canoeing, to pretty much every other outdoor possibility, each camper appears to have a fun day in store. Counselors are everywhere and campers gravitate easily toward them, calling them by their summer names – like Gecko, Mocha, Freckles, Sensie, and Big Foot. It’s a simple touch that seems to help transport everyone to different world (Audrey, becomes “Sunshine” for the summer.)

Monke remembers well her first summer as a counselor, and how she began to feel that she had found her calling.

“There were some kids who just loved waterskiing, and they would get up and go out on the water early with me. I got really close to them, and we ended up talking about their lives at home and what they were going through, and I really loved the connection. I felt more connected to Gold Arrow, and more a part of a community, than I did at college.”

She returned to Gold Arrow the next few summers, rising through the counselor ranks until she was supervising counselors and taking an administrative role in the camp. And

all the while, she knew the camp was for sale. The owner, Manny Vezie, who had founded  Gold Arrow in 1933, had died, and his widow Jeanie had been touring prospective buyers through the facility.

Monke had a vague notion that she wanted to stay a part of the camp somehow, and even wrote a letter to her father telling him, “we should buy this place” – a letter he still has. Still, when she heard the later that a deal to buy the camp had been struck, she prepared to move on with her life, getting a teaching job in Northern California.

 

Jeanie Vezie called her the day after Christmas in 1988 to tell Monke that the buyer had backed out. That was her chance. “I had written a business plan and pulled it out, and we went to the bank and got a loan.”

While she agrees that not too many recent college grads dream of owning a summer camp, to her, it just felt right.

“What it came from was that I loved this place and loved working here ... and I was somewhat motivated by the idea that this was a really amazing place. I had ideas to make it even better. I just felt I could make a difference.”

That lofty goal was put on hold however, as Monke, still in her early 20s, delved into the business of running a camp, with the help of the camp’s former director, Ken Baker. “Those first five years were hard. It was anything but a dream coming in and learning about worker’s comp, insurance, payroll taxes—pretty much the headaches any other business owner would have.” And she had very little time with campers –  “I was definitely not having as much fun as I did when I was a counselor.”

The second hard task was putting changes in place, and in particular, when it came to staffing.

“I felt like our whole experience should revolve around the campers and their experience and we really needed to get away from staff shenanigans and that type of thing. It’s really difficult to make a cultural shift. It requires some tough decisions; some long-time people who weren’t on board had to leave, and it took years to get it to the point where I wanted it to be.”

Support came unexpectedly. She had married a fellow camp employee, Steve Monke, whom she first met in 1989. In the early years of their marriage he was in graduate school and heading toward a career in medicine. As children arrived, they began to realize that the camp lifestyle fit their family, and that they would pursue it together.

“He’s more analytical than I am, and he’s good at figuring out the budget and which building needs to be renovated.... I would much rather spend my time figuring out what we’re going to talk about around the campfire and the character development we do here.”

Camp seems to run in the family; of their five children, three, including Charlotte ’16, are counselors.

The demands are year round. “I find it so funny when people say to me – ‘oh you’re a camp director. What do you to the rest of the year?’” Her answer: screening and hiring a staff of 140, attracting and registering 1200 campers, and keeping a large, lakeside property up-to-date. It’s a complex operation, run during the off-season from their office in Clovis, CA., where the Monkes also make their winter home.

Still, she admits, the magic happens during the summer. When she tries to define just what attracts GAC campers (and keeps them coming back – repeat business is strong), she lands on this explanation. “A lot of them will say that camp is like their second home and that they spend the whole year looking forward to these two weeks because they feel happy and good and accepted while they’re here…. The kids just appreciate this time of being together and these face-to-face, real relationships. Right away you’re welcomed here and you’re part of it. You don’t need to know anyone before you get here.”

Another draw, she says, is that the GAC summer experience is short on the competition and specialization that now characterizes growing up. Nobody knows whether a camper is a club soccer or lacrosse player or champion swimmer back at home. All that matters is who they are at camp.

Part of that stems from founder Manny Vezie’s original goals. Though he was a football player at Notre Dame (and in the locker room when legendary Knute Rockne gave his give “Win one for the Gipper” speech) he purposefully chose to reward campers for citizenship and character over achievement. The camp’s name – Gold Arrow–comes from an award given at a Wisconsin camp where Vezie was a counselor. It honored a camper who demonstrated integrity and kindness.

Monke’s version of GAC has built on that principle, and has also evolved as an antidote to another common issue among tweens and teens—the proliferation of technology. At Gold Arrow, nature and relationships take center stage; there’s just no place for phones and screens. Other than the two-way radios the staff uses to communicate, there’s not an electronic device in sight.

Her years at the helm have turned her into an evangelist not only for her own camp, but for the summer camp experience in general. She now writes for the American Camp Association blog and their camping magazine.

Her message centers on why parents and children should make the camp leap.

“As parents, we have this vision that we are the creators of our children’s childhood.

But the reality is that some of the best stuff happens without us and camp is a gift parents give to their kids. It’s really hard not to be there when your child is going sailing for the first time or climbing the rock wall or doing any of these things that kids do at camp without their parents. But what makes it great for kids is that their parents aren’t there. I think a lot of kids wouldn’t be doing these things if their parents were there.”

The residential aspect is powerful, she says, giving kids emotional safety. “You get a lot closer to people when you’re eating your meals across from them and sleeping in dorm rooms or cabins at camp. That’s what really builds the community so well at places like Cate or summer camp.”

 Importantly, more than twenty-five years after graduating from college, she doesn’t think she’s strayed from her original goal.  

“Here at camp we’re teachers too. What we’re teaching are life skills, not academic skills.”

And she feels fully enriched by having taken an important role in raising an extended family of campers and counselors, some of whom, like her and Steve, ended up together. “I can’t tell you how much fun it is to go to the weddings of some of these counselors– there have been several of them.”

 

The ceremony at hand, though, is the one when will campers receive five-year blankets, for consecutive attendance, and another, which will honor the campers about to age out completely. There will be tears, she promises.

“It’s bittersweet. We just tell them that they can use what they’ve learned here and take it out into the world and make the world more like camp – which is what I think the world needs to be – more like camp.”