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Happy Campers
95-year-old boys' camp, Becket-in-the Berkshires, keeps traditions alive
By Nathan Cobb, Globe Staff

At Camp Becket-in-the- Berkshires, the boys of Iroquois Village gather around the fire to talk. (Globe Staff Photos / Pat Greenhouse)
BECKET - ''B-B-B-Becket, in the Berkshires,
'Neath the birches and the pine,
B-B-B-Becket, in the Berkshires,
Where we live one kindred mind... ''

There's more to the song, lots more, but you get the idea. Or perhaps you don't, because to really appreciate it you've got to hear some 280 boys, ages 8 to 16, send it bouncing off the walls of Paul Dudley White Dining Hall like rolling thunder. The sound is enough to scatter even jaded blue jays.

Joe Shulan, 12, sweeps as part of the morning cleanup.
(Globe Staff Photo / Pat Greenhouse)

In an era of specialized summer camps - for computer geeks, for entire families, for tennis prodigies, and so on - Camp Becket-in-the-Berkshires remains a traditional boys' camp rooted in the notion of developing ''life skills'' rather than a perfect topspin lob. As the oldest accredited camp in Massachusetts eases through its 95th summer on the shores of man-made Rudd Pond here, 125 miles west of Boston, the homilies are spread as thick as the white pines. Lest ''The Becket Way'' be momentarily forgotten, it is permanently etched in the dining hall in the form of eight mottoes, starting with ''Do Your Best'' and ending with ''Better Faithful Than Famous.''

''I was watching some kids with crew cuts walk down the road the other day, and it could have been 30 years ago,'' muses John Burns, a.k.a. Burnsie, Camp Becket's nature director.

Burns should know. This is his 23d summer here, stretching from 11-year-old boy to 34-year-old man. The sailboat in which he won the 1976 Otis Bailey Cup is still here too (although someone swiped the trophy, he laments). Such biographies are common in a place where tradition runs deeper than Rudd Pond itself, where 29 of the counselors who oversee Camp Becket's 34 cabins have previously summered here as campers or staff. It would be hard to imagine a camp with more memorial plaques, from the one at Moose Field honoring former program director ''Moose'' Silva to the one in the library - where, yes, there are Hardy Boys mystery books - honoring Becket's first registered camper, Henry K. Messenger of the summer of '03. That first season, incidentally, saw 21 campers, five tents, and a $425 debt.

The camp focuses on cabin living and cooperation: Counselor-in-training, Brian Gold, 17, above, pauses to talk to Alexander Mott, 9. (Globe Staff Photos / Pat Greenhouse)

Most of Camp Becket's current campers, almost all of whom come for one of two four-week periods, are middle-class kids whose parents can afford the $1,675 fee for such a nonprofit YMCA camp but might balk at, say, $6,000 for eight weeks at Camp Greylock, a nearby private camp. Many hail from the suburbs. Nearly half live in Massachusetts, although about 20 states are represented. Roughly two-thirds of the kids have been here before, and several have arrived in the footsteps of their fathers. But many, like 10-year-old Zachary Mazzeo-Snyder of New York City, found their way by following a trail of peer recommendations: ''My friend Ernie heard about it from his cousin James. So he told me and I came. And I told my friend, Kevin, so he came, too.''

They have entered a 1,200-acre summer world where they applaud the raising and lowering of the colors each day, where they wear white to the interfaith Sunday services in the outdoor Chapel-by-the-Lake, where birthday boys are raised high in their chairs in the dining hall during dinner, and where 30-year-old staffer Bob Pflugfelder, a 15-summer veteran, begins each and every morning by rallying his troops with the reminder that ''it's a beauuuutiful Becket day today.'' Even when it isn't.

Ghost stories are generally not told at Becket-in-the-Berkshires, but the camp has enough fictional - or are they? - characters to keep any kid on the edge of his bunk. A Nessian monster named Ruddy hasn't been spotted in the pond for years, but every camper has recently heard dark tales of the One-Armed Brakeman, the La-La Lady, and the Kafoochee. The first is a maniac who lives over by the dam, the second is a former mutant child residing in the woods, and the third is the camp's resident Sasquatch. ''They all eat kids,'' is how 12-year-old Jay Shulin of Akron, Ohio, explains their similarity.

And what about the Upper Automat? ''Automats'' are the camp's flush-but-not-plush bathroom facilities, but the Upper Automat is a place no camper has ever seen, a mystical lair where staff members are said to party late at night amid candy, soda, and - say it isn't so! - video games. ''It's definitely mythical,'' announces Barney Keller, 12, of Belmont. He pauses for a long moment, then adds worriedly, ''Of course, maybe it's not mythical.''

Lessons of cabin living

To take a tour of Camp Becket and its 75 or so brown wooden buildings is to see kids doing what they've done at summer camp for decades. In the Creative Arts Center, 9-year-old Danny Ludman of Needham is using Rexlace, a.k.a. gimp, to make something that will be a key chain but maybe not a key chain. Eight-year-old Andy Dawson of Agawam is in the Nature Center creating a terrarium while fretting that a daddy longlegs has taken up residence somewhere on his body. Eight kids from one cabin have hiked a mile or so to the so-called Enchanted Forest to build Gnome Homes, tiny twig structures that will be inhabited, it is said, by invisible creatures after the campers depart. And down on the waterfront, at the edge of the 70-acre pond, a classic dialogue is unfolding:

''You peed in the water!''

''I did not! Andrew did!''

The focus here is on cabin living, on learning what it means to cooperate, share responsibility, and make collective decisions. The 34 structures have no electricity and are grouped in four age-level ''villages.'' ''At first, it's hard,'' 13-year-old Robert Kelly of Springfield says of moving in with seven new kids. ''Everyone's used to their own space back home. Here you have to give up space. And you have to learn to get along. Even if you don't like the other kids, you have to make a connection. Eventually you do. Because if you don't, you'll kill each other.''

But if the issues that are worked on here - such as homesickness, self-esteem, self-consciousness, and bullying - have remained the same, the kids have not. Says Burns: ''They're inclined to be entertained by outside stimuli - computers and TV, for example - so they're not as aware as to how to entertain themselves without that entertainment being presented to them. And although they're aware of, say, the great animal diversity in the world, they're less aware of the animals that live right here in these woods. They're less experienced.''

Summer romance

One of the things many of the older campers would dearly like to experience is Chimney Corners Camp, Becket's sister camp. Located about a mile away as the Intercamp Trail meanders, Chimney Corners simply doesn't exist as far as the younger boys are concerned. But for a few of the 12- and 13-year-olds in Camp Becket's Frontier Village, and especially the 14- and 15-year-olds of Ranger Village, it's almost worth going through the One-Armed Brakeman to meet a Chimney Corners girl. To this end, both the Frontier and Ranger villages have a low-key ''social'' and a dance with some of the girls from Chimney Corners, events which, depending on the boy, are either exciting or traumatic.

Meanwhile, kids in both camps can write messages to each other via free Intercamp Mail. Or, like 14-year-old Brian Japp of Vestel, N.Y., they can target an entire Chimney Corners cabin. ''I wrote to the Great Bear Cabin,'' Japp announces on his fourth day in camp. ''I told them I was really bored. I said my hobbies are windsurfing, basketball, and track. I said I enjoy intimate walks on the beach, and that I'm tall, have blond hair and blue eyes, and I'm built. I told them to please write, but I probably won't get anything back.''

''Of course you won't. They'll think you're a psycho,'' declares 14-year-old Kenny Hearne of Webster, N.Y.

And, of course, teenagers in the Ranger cabins have been known on more than one occasion to don camouflage clothing and sneak silently through the woods to spy on unsuspecting Chimney Corners. ''It's something the government knows about but officially denies,'' is the way one camper puts it. (Memo to Rangers: Counselors at Chimney Corners say their campers do the same thing.)

As they grow older, the sons of Camp Becket can enter such teenage links as its International Camper Exchange Program or its minimum-impact camping Odyssey Program. (There's even a Camp Becket Dads' Association.) But any camper will tell you that ultimate status is conveyed upon the camp's aides, a select group of 19 teenage former campers who are paying $830 this summer for the privilege of doing grunt work no one else wants to do. Aides are cool. They get to ride around camp in a truck that's 28 years old and looks it. They get to live in a house that doesn't have to undergo daily inspections. They get to travel via mountain bike. ''And they get to drink soda,'' effuses Sam Musen, 13, of Newton.

The Becket Way would seem capable of enduring forever, although full-time director David DeLuca admits that competition from specialized camps is so stiff that he must stage a series of promotional events for prospective campers over the winter. (DeLuca is not a Camp Becket alumnus, but at least partially made up for this by holding his wedding reception in the camp dining hall.) ''Our biggest competition is from sports camps,'' says DeLuca, who likes to add that you're better off sending your son elsewhere if you want him to win Wimbledon.

Of course, if he goes somewhere else, he won't experience Cabin Chat. This ritual takes place here each summer night, with campers hunkered down in their built-in wooden bunks and a single candle flickering on each cabin floor. Each of the eight kids in a cabin relates his high point of the day (''I caught a fish!'') and well as the low point (''The scrambled eggs were like mush!''). Then a question is posed by a counselor - example: what is friendship? - and chewed over for a while. Finally, one of the campers is chosen to blow out the candle, and the only sound that can be heard through Becket-in-the-Berkshires is the rustling of the trees.

That, and maybe the footsteps of the One-Armed Brakeman.

Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.