Archive for the 'Pemi literature' Category

I have been asked to write an introduction to the Saffer, Geoff Morrell (yes that one!), Karl See, and Justin T-G years of Bean Soup, which range between – according to my slightly hazy memory -  1987 through to – in various fits and starts – to the early/mid 90s.

 As I have a fair amount of trouble remembering events such as: the previous week, why I went into the kitchen, or what I may or may not have done to upset my wife and children – it is with some trepidation that I cast my mind back 25 years ago to a small community about 4000 miles away from where I am currently sitting (Spreyton, Devon, England).  But to kick start some thoughts, I thought a list of lessons that I learnt from being a Bean Soup editor is as good as place to start, since the experience of writing, speaking, and listening to the journals of the Pemi community was a fairly influential part of my existence – up til now.  Or at least that’s what my therapist says.

Anyway a list of jumbled and ill-thought-out comments follow below, which already does much to remind me of the mind-set that I experienced as an editor all those years ago.

Pemi Editor List:

1. Giving yourself time to write an article is generally a good thing but a situation that never seemed to occur due to enormous amounts of “faffing” (an English word – not sure if it exists across the pond?!),  idleness, and constant belief that the whole thing might go away if you waited long enough;
2. Giving yourself no time at all is stressful, scary, and not necessarily a good thing but remains my ongoing professional and social modus operandi.
3. Not being funny is generally a bad thing and can lead to mental scarring;
4. Tom Reed Jr’s standard of article writing means that at least one part of Bean Soup can compete with the best writing in the world. I’m currently working with a couple of vaguely famous screenwriters and I bet they couldn’t have written the epic oeuvre “One Armed Brake-person”;
5. Sitting on a precariously balanced metal chair 4 feet up on a rickety table over a group of bemused looking 8-year-olds is not advisable;
6. Having a co-editor who can write very funny articles at a drop of hat is a bad thing, and the noise of a highly appreciative audience’s laughter at his very funny article is a terrible thing to hear when you realize that the article you are about to read parodying an event involving a canoe, a camper, and a cake might not work as well as you initially hoped;
7. Any article that contains a list is probably a good thing as there is an expectation from the audience that at least one item must be funny.  Even if none of the items do succeed in hitting the spot, the audience do at least appreciate that you can count.  It also allows you to include the word “pagoda,” which never fails to amuse, unless you try and use it in front of a room full of accountants as part of a detailed business presentation or as a way to break the ice with a potential girlfriend;
8. Reading an article, finishing, and then being able to hear a pin drop is character forming;
9. Being in the Lodge hearing 200 people laugh at an article and feeling the electricity of a unique camp community buzz all around you and realizing that you are part of one of the great communities in the world is a good thing;
10. Parodying a Pemi song is life-affirming:

A Song that could be parodied:

Bloomer Girl

In the style of Rakim, KRS – One, Snoop Dogg, and Dr Dre:  Very much unaccompanied with a fair amount of blowing and self-inflicted drum beats with a slight look of wariness and humbleness combined with a pinch of macho pride.

****: ****; *****:  ! ! !
Bloomer Bloomer Girl;
*******; ******:
***;
********; *****,
Bloomer Girl.

 

A new song called “Pagoda” – in the style of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

I would hope that if we could get the Junior camp to memorise the words it might go viral very quickly.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
Oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad smell

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
Oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad smell

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah!
Pago-Pag-o-dah!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Ooh what a bad smell

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah!
Pago-aha-da-ah!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
That’s quite a bad smell.

Were you at Pemi during the 1980′s?  If you are interested in receiving one issue or more from 1980-1989, please let me know. I will be happy to send you any given issue or issues in PDF form.  You may contact me at alumni@camppemi.com. Stay tuned for future releases.  ~Nikki Wilkinson Tropeano

Pemi must really be coming out of the Stone Age, if the most determinedly Luddite of its institutions, Bean Soup, is in the process of digitizing all of its past numbers. What’s next? Virtual Polar Bears? Infrared webcams for night patrol? Spy satellites in stationary orbit over Camp Tecumseh? Tweets from the One-Armed Brakeman? Actually, Bean Soup began its descent into the technological maelstrom several years ago when editors Josh Fischel, James Finley, and Ian Axness regularly slunk to the front of the Lodge on Monday nights with laptops in hand, leaving many of us wondering whether they had actually written the material they were reading or if it was simply streaming from internet sites like The Onion, Al Jazeera, or Damn You, Autocorrect! But it’s true. Eat your heart out Bob Dylan: we are scanning and digitizing all of our back pages. Moth and worm may corrupt all those thousands of paper copies strewn out across the decades and the time zones, but nothing short of solar flares that muscle out past the orbit of Mercury will take all those incomprehensible Junior One articles, all those oh-so-politically-incorrect Ogontz (or Wyoda, or Lochearn, or Merriwood) Day articles, all those endless strings of Tecumseh Day articles out of our collective ken. For former campers, it’s going to be like having every day be candy day. For former counselors, it’s going to be like having days off four times a week and nights the other three. For former Bean Soup editors, it’s going to be like a nightmare where you can never, ever escape your lurid past. Seriously, this is a GOOD THING for reasons even cynical Bean Soup humor can’t obscure. We all owe a special vote of thanks to the folks who are making this happen, Nikki Wilkinson Tropeano, Ander Wensberg, and especially Robie “Calvin” Johnson. Their efforts (and the support of the Pemi Board) have been remarkable.

Here’s the deal. We’re going decade-by-decade, generally working from the present back into in the past. In case those moths and worms have been active in your own personal bookshelves, any of you who were eligible for a print copy of our esteemed journal in any past year can request a searchable pdf copy of the same. Blast notification will go out as each decade becomes available, and if you want to exercise your digital option, simply email Nikki. We will also occasionally re-publish select sections of various numbers for celebratory or informational reasons – and anyone interested in a legitimate historical or familial project that requires access to larger portions of the archive is welcome to request that. We’ll do our best to oblige in ways that appropriately respect the privacy of past campers and staff.

Nikki informs me that each decade’s release will feature a preface (or perhaps a legal disclaimer) from a distinguished Bean Soup editor of the past: the likes of Justin Thompson-Glover, Sky Fauver, Brad Saffer, or Karl See. For this first notice, she’s asked what Rob Grabill would alternatively call “an extinguished ex-editor” – that would be me – to do the honors. Well, I was indeed an editor for portions of three decades, beginning in the late sixties and ending in the late eighties. (If you don’t believe me, look at how much hair I’m missing.) Adding to that my earlier years as a camper and counselor and subsequent years as a director, I can say that I have laughed (and sometimes grimaced) my way through over fifty years of “Monday Night Fever.” When I think about Pemi, I think about campfires a lot. I think about Gilbert and Sullivan and singing in the messhall. I think about Tecumseh Days and hut trips to the Presidentials. But, in many ways, Bean Soup is the single thing that – if it could indeed be described to anyone – I would offer as a window into the soul of Pemi. Sure, part of the reason is because it documents a lot of what we actually do and say and think at camp (and a lot, too, of what we most certainly never did or said or thought!) But it’s the flow of good feeling, and common engagement, and masterful language, and often wicked humor that we witness every Monday up there that says it all – or, if not all, then at least so, so well. In the words of Doc Reed’s Campfire Song, Bean Soup often enough documents “mistakes of the head” – and it may, in fact, be guilty of a few of its own. (There have been times when a few folks here and there may have thought the Beans had been traded in for the Means. In fact, way back when, new campers were told to carve those wooden spoons because there would indeed BE bean soup served up at 7:30 in the Lodge. It was a bald-faced lie!) But “good will in the heart” has almost always prevailed, and more boys (and now gals) than I are likely to have learned how to be observant, and smart, and cutting but caring as much from Bean Soup as from anywhere else in life. What a blessing to come to a place like Pemi where you can do so much, meet so many worthwhile and welcoming people, grow in so many ways – and all with the constant reminder that you can care a lot about a lot of things without taking yourself too seriously.

So, let’s all take a moment to celebrate the Joe Campbell’s, and Rollie DeVere’s, and Bill Westfall’s, and Rob Grabill’s who have over the years invented the sport of Gummidge, and the Adventures of  Doorlock Sholmes, and Things to Look For, and the Ol’ Perfessor and Clive Bean. As Doc Nick used to say about Pemi’s history in the first Sunday Meeting of the year, “Yea, it is a goodly heritage.” (I think, in fact, he was plagiarizing from the Bible!) So it is with Bean Soup’s own storied history. Here’s to its rebirth in a form such that “age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety.” (I think I may be plagiarizing, too. Just can’t quite remember.)

And now, on with the Soup.

~      Tom Reed, Jr.

 

Were you at Pemi during the 1970′s?  If you are interested in receiving one issue or more from 1970-1979, please let me know. I will be happy to send you any given issue or issues in PDF form.  You may contact me at alumni@camppemi.com. Stay tuned for future releases.  ~Nikki Wilkinson Tropeano

From the Pemi archives comes this wonderful poem by Tom Reed, Jr., originally written in the 1970s but shared more recently at campfire. The subtitle is A Sentimental, Moral, Melodramatic Tragi-Comedy in Tetrameter Couplets. We hope you enjoy this poem, which begins with the conventions of the ghost-story genre– and ends with an unexpected twist.

In former years, a woman’s fate

Was sadly in the home to wait

While menfolk ventured forth each day

To earn their daily bread some way.

But now and then a female few,

In search of something bold to do,

Abandoned dresses, skirts, and shawls

To seek a job – in overalls.

 

In New York town, in 1910,

One woman thus hood-winked the men

And won a job for all her pains,

One working New York Central trains.

She tucked her hair up in a hat

And bound her chest down extra flat,

Said “Dang” instead of “goodness sakes,”

And joined the crew that manned the brakes.

 

It went just fine for several years:

She’d join the boys for days-end beers,

Then hurry home to spend her nights

Engaging in a woman’s rites.

She’d let her hair down, brush her curls,

Adorn her throat with broach and pearls,

And now and then bewail the strife

Occasioned by her double life.

She had respect, and weekly pay,

Secure employment day to day –

But what a price to pay for these –

To curb all femininities!

 

By middle June, in 1912,

She’s almost vowed her job to shelve

And find a line of work, perchance,

That called for persons, not just pants.

But times were changing far too slow

To give our friend an option, so

She soon resolved one Saturday

To force the issue, come what may.

 

To soothe her soul, it was her plan

To start one work day as a man

But change her clothes to skirt and blouse

Before the train left stationhouse.

She’d do her job just as before,

But play the man she would no more.

“It’s as I am I’ll work,” she said –

But hearken what befell instead.

 

The train was packed that fateful day

With campers bound for far away,

In flight from Gotham’s filthy air

In search of sylvan settings fair.

Among the throngs that boarded then,

A group of stalwart Pemi men

And neophytes, yet to be boys;

The coaches rang with joyous noise.

The whistle blew. They took their seats,

Descending on the fruits and sweets

Their mothers had, with loving care,

Provided for their travelling fare.

Some told of summers spent before

Along the Lower Baker shore,

While others boasted, proud and flushed,

How old Tecumseh’s teams they’d crushed.

 

They passed through Greenwich, Stamford too,

Then north towards Hartford fairly flew.

The day was clear; the rails were fast;

New England’s landscape hurtled past.

The engine belched out smoke and steam;

‘Twas bliss to hear the whistle scream.

Said engineer to fireman, “Son,

It’s apt to be a record run.”

 

Then suddenly, above the din

Of racing engine, whistling wind,

There came a sound he knew too well –

The dread alarm, the brakeman’s bell.

 

With brakes engaged, he throttled back.

The engine’s wheels locked on the track;

With thund’rous crash and deaf’ning squeal,

There rose the reek of scorching steel.

Inside the coaches, standees stumbled.

Ladies screamed as luggage tumbled.

All surged forward with a rush,

Then all was still – a deathly hush.

The engine whispered, idling there;

The smoke rose straight in still June air.

 

The train crew, shaking off a daze,

Back through the coaches made their ways

To find the one who’d stopped the train

By yanking on the braking chain.

Between two cars they found a lass –

Her eyes were fixed, and glazed as glass.

She knelt upon the platform there.

Tears coursed her cheeks, bedewed her hair.

“He almost fell,” she murmured then,

Her voice most strange – so thought the men.

“He wandered out. I saw him go.

I didn’t know his purpose, though.”

Again, that voice – familiar sound:

The men gazed quizzically around.

A little boy was standing there,

A Pemi cap on tousled hair.

 

“I almost fell. I came so near.

She saved me. Her. This lady here.”

The woman stood. They eyed her face.

A sudden silence seized the place

‘Til, to a man, they recognized

The wench who’d worked with them, disguised.

“What’s this?” asked one, the engineer.

“I smell a rat. It’s Joey here!”

“Not Joe,” cried one, “Perhaps Joanne,

A tom-boy dressed up like a man.”

 

Some laughed aloud, some quipped and joked,

But others felt their anger stoked

And scorned the woman who could deign

To hide her sex to work the train.

“You had no right,” they yelled with rage.

“You should know better, at your age:

A woman’s place is in the home.

This world’s for men to rule and roam.”

 

‘Midst slurs and insults such as these

She crumpled once more to her knees.

They turned to leave – but then the lad

Cried, “Please, sirs, look. I think it’s bad!”

The woman knelt, just as before –

But there, advancing, ‘cross the floor,

A crimson fan, a scarlet flood –

“Oh God,” said one – “I think it’s blood!”

“It’s not just there, look over here,”

Sighed the conductor, drawing near.

“That bumper’s covered with the stuff!

Oh no, please God, I’ve seen enough!”

The others turned, then staggered back,

For there, stretched out upon the track,

Half wound in fabric, drenched in gore,

A human arm – attached no more.

 

A hammer blow, straight to the brain,

Could not have dealt these men more pain.

Their words of cruelty echoed loud

For e’en the harshest of the crowd.

In silence there they stood as dead,

‘Til bowed by grief, the fireman said,

“We’re sorry ma’am. We didn’t know

The crashing cars had hurt you so.

We didn’t mean those things we spoke.

Forgive us please. Our hearts are broke.”

 

“Forgive?” she sighed, with distant air

While staring at each train man there.

“I think I’ve heard too much today

To give forgiveness any play.”

With that, she lost all consciousness.

 

They cared for her, I must confess.

They put her in a doctor’s care

And paid for all expenses there.

Once she was well, and passing strong,

They asked if she would come along

And join them daily, once again,

As brakeman on the New York Train.

With cool politeness, she declined.

She said, “I’ve got a yen to find

A place where I can change the ways

That men treat women all their days.”

 

Her task was hard, her search was long,

As any quest to right a wrong,

But now and then her thoughts returned

To the Pemi lad whose loved she’d earned.

To make an epic story short,

She soon resolved her best resort

Was haunting woods on Pemi Hill –

No, not to torture, maim, or kill

But just to do the things she could

To banish wrong and foster good.

 

So Pemi men, and Pemi boys,

When next you hear an eerie noise,

Examine well your heart and mind

And tell us, truly, what you find:

If you think women equal, peers,

Compose yourself, allay your fears;

The one-armed brakeperson is here

To bring you comfort, joy, and cheer.

But if your way’s to take a poke

At womankind, in tale or joke,

Prepare yourselves – for one night soon,

You may be moved to change your tune.

For though she’s loathe to slash and bind,

The one-armed brakeperson’s inclined

To sit you down and lecture you

Until you for forgiveness sue.

 

In midnight woods, ‘midst bugs galore,

She’ll let you know what lies in store

For domineering males and those

Who make of half our race their foes.

 

So there you have it, straight and true –

What one-armed brakepeople will do:

They seldom terrorize the place.

Their task? To heal the human race.

 

–TRJR (possessed by the spirit of someone)

© 2011