Camp Namanu campers walk along the Sandy River in the 1920s.
Courtesy of Camp Namanu
Camp Namanu, a camp that has been a summertime idyll for Oregonians since 1924, was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. The historic district includes lodges, cabins, and community buildings which were designed to complement and blend in with the Pacific Northwest forest environment. Nancy King, a board member of Camp Namanu, joins us to talk about what this camp has meant to generations of Oregonians.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer: Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Camp Namanu, a camp that’s been a summertime idol for young Oregonians since 1924 was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. The historic district includes lodges, cabins, and community buildings that were designed to complement and blend in with the forest. As part of its centennial celebration, there’s an exhibit about the camp at the Oregon Historical Society that runs through June 9th. Nancy King joins us now. She was a camper, then a counselor in training, then a counselor, then years later, a historian for the camp. Now she serves on the board. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Nancy King: Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with a voicemail. We asked folks yesterday and this morning for their memories from camp and we got a lot of calls. This is Deb Schultz who called in from Portland.
[Voicemail]: I had attended Camp Namanu as a Camp Fire Girl back in the 1960s and my favorite memory was sitting around the campfire singing campfire songs. Then in the eighties, I had two kids of my own and I became a Camp Fire leader. I took them to Camp Namanu and we sat around the campfire and sang campfire songs together. And it was a full circle moment and it was wonderful.
Miller: Nancy, how old were you when you went to camp for the first time?
King: I was eight years old in 1965.
Miller: What do you remember about your arrival?
King: Oh, it was just such a wonderful place. It’s a beautiful spot in the forest and there’s magic streams and flowers and a duck pond and it was just such a safe place. It was wonderful to be in a place where adults cared about you and listened to you. And you’re having friends, new friends, fun, crafts, all those things.
Miller: But being in a safe place, it stood out to you then?
King: Yes, my home was not a safe place. So it was wonderful to go to Camp Namanu and be safe and have the freedom to have fun and laugh and sing and play.
Miller: So you went that first year and then you just kept going?
King: Yes, absolutely. I went every year. I waited for it every year. After one year was over, I waited through the next 51 weeks waiting for the next summer to start.
Miller: Why? I mean, what kept you coming back?
King: I think if you ask that question, you hear the word magic a lot. It’s just a place that feels magic and you go back there and you can learn about yourself and you can reinvent yourself and you can have the freedom to try on different things. There’s a lot of singing, there’s a lot of writing of songs. It’s just, I think the freedom really strikes me.
Miller: Did you feel like a different person at camp than you were for the other 51 weeks?
King: I think I was a much less serious person at camp than I was everywhere else.
Miller: I want to play another voicemail. This is Lisa who called in from Gresham.
[Voicemail]: I went to camp Namanu in the early seventies. I’ve just been going through all my memorabilia and I, and part of it is my songbook, which includes one of my favorite memories that I’ll sing to you, which is: [Singing] “Here under skies of blue stands Camp Namanu. Love it. You bet we do. We’re telling you. And in our memories, dear to our hearts will be Camp Namanu, sure to shine all of the time.” Woohoo. Thank you.
Miller: Listeners will not be surprised to know that you were basically singing along as we played that. Is that one of the classic songs?
King: Yes. It’s like the camp song. Every unit of kids has their own verse and they sing their own verse of that song. And then there’s a verse for the counselors and a verse for the helpers. And then everybody sings the last verse together.
Miller: You became a counselor, I mentioned. So you were a counselor in training and then a full fledged counselor. Why did you want to take on that leadership role?
King: I really wanted to spend more time at camp and I wanted to give the kids that were coming to camp the same experience I had. I wanted them to come into that place and feel seen and heard and have new opportunities, new experiences, learn how to get along with other people, meet people that were not the same as them. I met kids of different economic statuses and different religions and we all learned how to get along together.
Miller: What was it like being a counselor? And was it what you thought it would be when you were nine or 10 or 11?
King: Oh, when, when you’re a camper there, you think your counselors are just the most wonderful people in the world.
Miller: Goddesses and gods.
King: You idolize them. Yeah, they’re way up on a pedestal. So I hope that I was worthy of that when I got to be a counselor. But mainly it was just fun. I loved every cabin of kids I ever had. I loved singing them to sleep at night and giving them new experiences, taking them down to the river. Everything about being a counselor was wonderful.
Miller: What did you learn about leadership from being a counselor?
King: My experience at Namanu and in camp, our girls gave me a lot of opportunity to be a leader and I think that’s something that you learn by doing, which was really nice. It gave me confidence in myself, my ability to lead. It gave me a place to practice new things.
Miller: Let’s hear some more voicemails. This is Sally Greer.
[Voicemail]: I first started going to Camp Namanu when I was in second grade which would have been about 1957 or 58. It was the first time I got to sleep outside in a bunk bed, open air cabin. It was one time where I could be with lots of girls and no boys from school. I looked forward to this week at camp every single year. It was, I felt like I was my own person out there. Camp Namanu has always been in my heart.
[Voicemail]: My name is Elizabeth and I’m calling from Portland, Oregon. I was a camp counselor in 1979 at Camp Namanu. My grandmother was a camp counselor at Namanu in the twenties, after being a camper for several years. I have to say that it was a life changing experience for me. It was the last year that it was pretty much all girls and the strong women and the messages of Camp Fire, of independence, personal development, loving, respecting, and participating in nature. At my age, it was exactly what I needed and I will forever love and be grateful to Camp Namanu. And may it live forever.
Miller: So, Nancy, both Sally and Elizabeth there talked about the significance of being among other girls or women, and that changed in 1979. As we heard from Elizabeth, it became coed from 1979 on, it still is. Do you remember what you thought about that change at the time?
King: I think myself, like many people, we struggled with it because it had been such a special place during that time when it was an all girl camp. And a lot of times during those years, women were not afforded the same things that they could do out in the world, that they could do at Camp Namanu.
Miller: So it was a kind of enclave.
King: Yes, it was kind of a set-aside place where you could do things you couldn’t do out in the world. But I understand that as time went by, it became harder to keep that just for females. It needed to open up. Particularly now, in kind of a post gender world, it’s an all gender camp now. It isn’t just a coed camp. It’s an all gender camp. And I would hope that everybody who had that experience that we had when we were little, as females, would want that experience for everybody.
Miller: We asked folks on Facebook for their memories. Emily Melcher Miller wrote this:
“My grandma camped at Namanu at the very beginning. My mom camped in the 1940s, my sister in the 1970s, me in the 1980s. I was a counselor in the 1990s. My kids camped there in the 2010s. And last summer, my son was a lifeguard at Namanu.”
She went on to write this, “It’s been a treasure for our family, the camp of our dreams and the shared history of four generations plus cousins, nieces, neighbors, and friends, National Historic Place and familial historic place.”
I don’t know if you have the same set of generations, but my opinion is that your kids and grandkids also attended the camp. Is that right?
King: Yes.
Miller: So what has it meant to you to have that intergenerational connection?
King: It’s just so special to know that when I send my kids to camp or when now I send my grandkids to camp, that they’re having that same experience. That, first of all, I can trust that they’re going to be safe there and they’re going to be cared for there, but they’re going to have that same sense of freedom and belonging that every child should have somewhere in their life. And they can have it at Camp Namanu, which is so special to me. So it’s like doubly special to have that for first, my kids and now for my grandkids.
Miller: Why did the organization want to have parts of the camp included in the National Register of Historic Places? What was at stake?
King: I think when we first started talking about it, we have four buildings at camp that were… the architect is Pietro Belluschi, who’s a famous architect in Portland and did the art museum downtown. So we were hoping to preserve those buildings. And then we got to talking to Restore Oregon, who have been really helpful through this whole thing. And they suggested that we try to get an application on the National Historic Registry, kind of on the basis of our historic buildings and on the basis of our social progressive policies.
Miller: Oh, so it was both – it wasn’t just about architecture. It was also about human impact?
King: Yes.
Miller: What did you have to put together for the folks in D.C.?
King: The application is 85 pages long. And we hired a company, MIG, who helped us through that whole process because they had done it before. But we cataloged every building in camp, we cataloged campfire rings. We did a lot of writing about the history, about the social history and different milestones in camp, in the Camp Fire world, like when we first had an inclusion policy for kids of different races. And when we first had a gender inclusion policy, so it included like everything.
Miller: So for that first part, when you first had a policy of inclusion for different races, meaning, when it started, it was only white girls?
King: Yes, I think at the very beginning, Camp Fire had a policy of being inclusive, but it just, in practice, was not carried out as much. So in 1948, they stated that all girls of every race should be able to come to camp. And then it became more inclusive after that.
Miller: What is the significance of some of the specific buildings to you or at this point to the National Register? I mean, what’s a building that stands out to you?
King: There’s a huge meadow in the middle of Camp Namanu, that’s kind of the living room, the playroom of camp. So right on the edge, there’s a building that’s called Uncle Toby’s Story House and it’s built on top of a creek. So the creek goes underneath it and it is open on two sides, to the open air. So it’s almost like being outside and there’s a stage. So that’s where we have plays and groups get up to sing and there’s two huge fireplaces in the building so you can cook in the fireplaces.
Miller: It’s over the river?
King: It’s over a creek. There’s a creek that literally goes underneath the building.
Miller: And you can hear that?
King: And you can hear it when you’re standing in the building and it’s perfect. The architecture is beautiful and fits perfectly into the space it’s in, so you’re indoors, but outdoors at the same time.
Miller: That’s Uncle Toby’s Cabin. I also read about Mr. Squiggle Boggle’s house. What is that?
King: We have an elf at Camp Namanu and his name is Squiggle Boggle. And he lives in the top of the tallest fir tree, which is the guardian fir. And at the bottom of the fir tree, there’s a mailbox and kids can write letters or ask questions of Squiggle Boggle and bring it up and put it in the mailbox and he comes down at night and gets the questions and answers them and puts their answer in the box, so kids can come back and get their answer.
Miller: Will it mean anything in practice for the functioning of the camp that it’s now on the National Register? Does it change or restrict what you can do?
King: The restrictions are not onerous. They have to do with our historic buildings and keeping them to a certain aesthetic. We’re hoping to have a lot more grant money available because of the prestige of being on the National Historic Registry. So we have more grants available to take care of those historic buildings.
Miller: We got a lot of messages from people who attended camp decades ago. We played some of those. We may have time for some more in just a bit, but we also got one from a recent camper. I want to play that one. Now, this is from Aliyah in Portland.
[Voicemail]: Just last summer, I went to Camp Namanu summer camp. One of the more vivid memories I had was like cookout meals. My favorite one was cookout pancakes. How it works was we would go to Raker, the dining hall, and grab our supplies in the milk carton. So there’d be like a griddle, propane tanks, batter bowls, spoons, knives, etcetera. We grab it, bring it back down to the bend where my age group was staying and we would make dinner from there. So pancakes, you would warm the griddle, get it going, make up the batter and each student would make their own pancake.
Miller: What has changed since you were a camper? And what is the same?
King: Well, we’ve talked about one thing, in that it was an all girls camp back then. So that might be the biggest thing that has changed and there’s new buildings and new codes as far as what you can do and can’t do, cooking, those kinds of things. But what I’ve always said to people, when people come to me and they’re worried about things changing at Camp Namanu…
Miller: Meaning, people of your generation?
King: Yes, when people come and say, oh my goodness, it’s these things that are changing. It’s not like it used to be. What I always say is, what’s important is that when a child comes into camp, they have the same feelings, they can leave there feeling that this is their place, that they belong there, that they have new friends that they were cared about. So the feelings are the same; the outside trappings have changed to a certain degree, but the feelings are the same.
Miller: Let’s listen to another voicemail. This is Karen Shabatal who went to the camp from age six through eighth grade.
[Voicemail]: I really enjoyed Camp Namanu. It was all girls back then. My favorite unit was ballagin and we got to sleep in open cabins that were built over the Sandy River so you could fall asleep to the river at night. It was wonderful. I am a little disappointed that they no longer have any references to the Native American culture which I thought were respectful and, but they’ve kind of wiped all that out. So it’s kind of sad.
Miller: Nancy, can you tell us about what went through the camp’s decision to remove references to Native American culture?
King: Yes. Our organization, Camp Fire Girls, had a lot of trappings of Native American culture put into its programming along with Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, all of those. We’ve just come to see that that was not really honoring. We thought at the time that it was honoring to Native American people, but if they aren’t feeling honored, then it’s not honoring them. And they weren’t feeling honored. They were being taken away from their homes and the kids were being sent to schools and having their hair cut off and all those things that we know about. So you can’t honor someone who doesn’t want that, if it doesn’t feel honoring to them. So it’s important that we work with the tribes and find out how they want us to interact with them and get rid of the things that are offensive to them because it’s not OK.
Miller: Let’s listen to one more voicemail. This is Mary Swandis.
[Voicemail]: I started there in 1959. I was a fifth grader and I then went every year after that and a couple of summers ago, I was volunteering in the camp store and there was a little boy who was probably nine or 10 and I’m helping him find a t-shirt. You know, I was saying, oh, did you know that Camp Namanu is going to be 100 years old? And he looked up at me and was just all smiles. He was so excited. He said, “Were you there?” I will never forget that. He thought I had to be more than 100. But anyway, Camp Namanu the best thing I ever did in my life.
Miller: Nancy King, thanks very much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
King: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Nancy King is on the board of Camp Namanu. The summer camp in the foothills of Mt. Hood has been in operation for 100 years. There is an exhibition about it right now at the Oregon Historical Society. It was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places.
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