Page 180 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
and immediately evacuate the bunk from the dining room. Of course, there was no busboy in sight, not that that would have mattered, and I was left to deal with the problem alone.
But waiting on the kids, which was thereafter without that kind of incident, was nothing compared with waiting on their parents. There were two visiting weekends during the summer, and it fell to the co-ops to serve the visiting parents, not family-style but individually. Now a fair number of the parents were very wealthy, flashy people the large majority of whom were from Long Island. They seemed to be people who were used to getting their way, and the fact that most of the kids who were serving them had been campers at Kee-Wah for years, and therefore hailed from the same households as did the current campers, meant zero. (Nor should it have, I hasten to add.) It was quite a life les- son to have to deal with this group of incredibly demanding, impolite, and unappreciative people. I could not imagine treating people as these parents did. My parents certainly would not have.
As I said in an earlier chapter, Kee-Wah styled itself a “progressive camp.” What this meant was that it did not have Color War. But it did have “Tribe War.” In Tribe War there were four teams, not two, known as, you guessed it, tribes (Apache, Sioux, Seminole, and Chippewa). The tribes had “Tribe Chiefs,” who were counselors, and “Young Chiefs,” who were co-ops, which, of course, was yet another set of facts that proved conclusively that Kee-Wah was progressive. After all, in Color War there were generals, who were counselors, and captains, who were senior campers. The tribes competed in athletic events every Wednes- day and in various games at campfires that were held every Sunday night throughout the first seven weeks of the summer. Inspection in the bunks and comportment after taps did not count for points. Sportsman- ship, or the lack of it, could result in deductions, however. Tribe War ended with the “Tribal Sing,” in which each tribe would display its orig- inal cheer and then sing a fight song, a song of parodies, and an alma mater. (When I was a counselor, I would inevitably get involved in the song writing, with “You’re Up to Par When You’re on the Golf Course”
• 162 •