Camp Cachalot Alumni Association Forums

[George Ramos]

We all had our favorite Staffers when we were campers. Similarly when we joined staff, there was always someone we looked up to. Who did you look up to on staff? Who was that Staffer you wanted to be exactly like?

Myself, I looked up to: Rene Dupont, Jason "Manny" Olivera, Chris Fernandes, & Pat Fitzgerald, just to name a few from my early years on Staff.

YiS,
-George

[BrianB]

I looked up to so many of the staff guys when I was a camper. Jim and Andy Novic, Russel Monast, Chico Degrace, Tom Makin, Leo Guertin, Larry Guilette,...

To me at the time these were the most impressive peoplet that I had ever met. Everything that they did was done with all that they had to give. It was done very well - no matter the effort required.

They were a principle reason that I became a staffer a few years later. I wanted to be counted among these people. I worked with some of them and others have become clse and cherished friends. I remember so many informal lessons learned working for Larry and I still remember a quote about camp staff and scouting from Russel one sunny Saturday cicra 1989, "You are never even. You can never give back as much as you have been given (by camp and scouting)."

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I’m just a bit older than Brian, and I remember looking up to a lot of the same folks (and also like Brian, I’m fortunate enough to count several of them among my friends).

The folks who I worked for when they were program directors really stand out (Leo, Larry, and “big” Dave Goldrick in particular), but I think I’d also have to add names like Mickey Ingles (who taught me how to build reliable, consistent Council fires), Jon Briggs (who was not only a senior staffer, but my OA Elangomat), and people like the Menard brothers to that list.

I don’t think I ever wanted to be exactly like any of them when I did my summers on camp staff. I wanted to be respected the way I thought many of them were respected, and I wanted to be as zany and enthusiastic as they were. The two biggest lessons I learned as a staffer came from Larry Guillette and Leo Guertin.

In my first year as Scoutcraft director, which I was thrown into as a 16 year old with one year of CIT under my belt, after the senior staff all graduated en masse. Larry showed (by example!) that I (and my staff) needed to be the absolute best “Scoutcraft Guys” in camp--we needed to own it: know more knots and lashings that anyone else, be able to build the best fires, cook the best food, and know everything required for anything we taught (and a whole lot of stuff that wasn’t), to be able to teach those skills better than anyone else. To this day I can tie a bowline a half-dozen ways, and can tie the eight basic knots left- or right-handed. (And yes, I know there are really only seven basic Scout knots, but Larry wasn’t the only person who thought learning more than the requirements was a good idea... thanks, Mr. Hall.)

The lesson I learned from Leo didn’t sink in right away, while he was running the CIT corp in ’85, but I figured it out soon enough in that first year as Scoutcraft director: Sing, or else. Singing well is a plus, but the only requirement is enthusiasm (fortunately for me). Entertaining the campers might be just as important as teaching them--if camp feels like school-in-the-woods, we’ve lost.

I’m sure I probably remember myself as being better at both of those things than I really was (memory’s funny that way), but I know how much effort the staffs I was involved with put into it (and, yeah, I still hope I was looked up to just a little like the staffers I looked up to).
_________________
Dennis
Minister of Propaganda, Webmaestro, and Chief Bottle Washer

"Everything that passes unattempted is impossible." - Stephen R. Donaldson

[Pippen]