In the summer of 1958, after lying about my age—not quite 18—I'd been hired as a counselor at a Girl Scout Camp in eastern Pennsylvania. Most of the not-particularly-friendly staff came from rural small towns. They reminded me of my gym teachers at Shawnee-Mission High School in Kansas City who'd favored certain girls and ignored everyone else.
My family's communism had always been a secret. In 1956, after we moved back to Philly, my parents had quit the Party. Within months, and against their wishes, I had joined with my friends. Although politics had always set me apart from society in general, I felt particularly unsafe at this camp, where every possible thing about me seemed to rub the other counselors and administration the wrong way. Mostly, they steered away from the big city radical Jew from Philadelphia, so I focused on the campers who I genuinely enjoyed. And the girls liked me, in part because, as an active folkie, I played guitar and knew plenty of songs we all loved to sing.
One afternoon, not for the first time, the director called me into her office. I tread the familiar route leading up to her desk where she sat with the usual unpleasant look on her face. 'Lexy,' she declared, 'you are to stop singing any songs that don't appear in The Girl Scout Handbook.' How about the ones they already know? I asked. Nope, she said, not any. 'Not even 'Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore?'' No, she said, it was 'inappropriate.' I noticed that her nails were bitten down further than mine.
'But the kids LOVE that song!' She didn't care about the kids, only about Girl Scout rules. The only possible real reason had to be that I was the outsider, that she hated folk music, and that she hated me. Well, I hated her back, and my group leader, and the Girl Scouts in general, but I kept a low profile, held my tongue, tried to be agreeable, and counted the days. From then on we only sang songs like, 'Do Your Ears Hang Low,' and 'Green Grow the Rashes-O.' Decent enough, but when the kids asked me for 'The Erie Canal' or 'Away With Rum, By Gum,' they instead got an earful about censorship. Pretty soon they stopped asking, and the hot days crept by even more slowly.
There were 'tipsy tests' in the pool with a canoe and overnights on the small rocky lakefront. The girls and I sat on our 'rollups' around the campfire, for rounds of ghost stories and tired renditions of 'White Coral Bells.' I longed for 'Irene Goodnight' and the African 'Wimoweh' that Pete Seeger had first taught to Hootenanny audiences at Town Hall concerts in New York. And I wished to sail away like the candles we lit and set adrift on little paper boats gliding across the dark, still surface of the lake.
Everyone worshiped Jesus but me, and my tent mates attended colleges with unfamiliar names, like Wheaton and Grinnell. One morning I mentioned the Swarthmore Folk Festival. 'I hear Swarthmore College is a hotbed of communism,' stated one. Dumbfounded, I pressed her for details. 'Oh, it's just something I heard,' she said, shrugging it off, her blue eyes shifting sideways. What did she know about Communists? I had noticed no one but students and folkies on my trips to Swarthmore. Only the flimsiest of threads connected me to her or the rest of the staff, none of whom had a clue either about communists or the extraordinary community of folk musicians who gathered each spring in the Philadelphia suburb for a long, jamming weekend.
It was clear that no matter how I tried to fit in, I'd be considered a maverick. Mutual dislike intensified during the week Camp ended, and on my birthday, I flung caution to the winds and revealed that I was just 17. With yet another reason to be angry with me, the director scolded, 'If we weren't so close to the end of the season, I'd ask you to leave ... you can finish up the week or go now.' Of course I'd WANTED to leave since the second day of camp, and even though my departure would have pleased everyone, I couldn't give them the satisfaction of calling me a quitter, which they'd certainly do. So I stayed and suffered and then, with my full salary, left the Girl Scouts forever and bought my first car.
