Tales of summer camp life as told by Jim Gibbons
“The first draft of anything is shit.”—Ernest Hemingway Thankfully, that’s not exactly what this is. When I launched this blog way back when, I wanted to put my memories into storage. I didn’t want to forget all of these crazy stories. I wanted to save them so that, one day, when I had the skill, […]
Posted in 1995, 1999, Interviews on Jun 30th, 2011
In the midst of our running email chain of camp reminiscence, Dan decided to loop in David (for a reason he’ll explain below) not knowing I’d already been interviewing his former cabinmate. It seemed only logical to do a post where the interviews overlapped a bit. There’s not a whole lot of back-and-forth, but man, […]
Posted in 1995, 2001, Interviews on Jun 28th, 2011
Around the same time I began interviewing my brother Dan, I sent along some questions to our buddy—the real, live grandson of William T. Will himself—David Will. Having spent time up at Shewahmegon for many—if not every—summer of his life, David has many more years of sharing camp stories under his belt than most can […]
In my last post, I put out the call for Shewahmegon Song Sheets. A day later, the illustrious Brent Parker (Former Waterfront Director extraordinaire!) reminded me that he’d already posted a few on Facebook. Excellent! While the men of Shewahmegon had flexed our vocal chords with many more songs than the ones featured here around […]
Posted in 1995 on Jul 13th, 2010
This picture is from Dan and my first year at camp: 1995. I’d be 11-years-old here and Dan would have been 9 or 10. The photo features my cousin Ryan and my cousin Tim. (Who are cousins to each other as well, not brothers.) Ryan, Tim, Dan and I were all second generation campers at […]
Posted in 1995 on Jul 13th, 2010
I think I’m 11-years-old in this picture. Clearly, at the time, I was an extremely impressive dresser, as are all my compatriots here. Our counselor Andrew Porter was from the Isle of Man in the UK and I consider him to be one of the first truly cool people I have ever known—a title that, […]
Posted in 1995, Random Recollections on May 10th, 2009
I’ll kick things off with this little comic strip illustrating this memory and then delve into the story behind it… When your 11 years old, the brain doesn’t foresee a number of things, especially when it comes to events that will later make for embarrassing stories. In this case, my noggin didn’t really work when […]