By Adam Kaplan
When Stephanie and I purchased camp in 2003, we knew we needed help. One of our first tasks was to find an Associate Director to start the journey with us. After speaking with a number of trusted alumni, one name surfaced time and time again…Adam Fornear.
For the past 19 years, Adam has served Camp Nebagamon in every way necessary to ensure the success of the place. He will be leaving us on October 10th to start a new career with the Duluth Parks and Recreation Department.
Adam has been a truly invaluable member of our team. In his role as Associate Director, he has been in charge of staff recruitment and hiring, served as our Program Director and Wilderness Tripping Director in the summers, been a part of the on the road reunion tours…and then all of those other things that are done behind the scenes to make camp work. These range from high level strategic planning to getting up at 5AM to unload food delivery trucks during the summer. Adam has been the quintessential CAMP PERSON (someone that does whatever it takes to make things work regardless of job description).
And while the work that Adam has done for Nebagamon has been crucial to its success over the past two decades, the truth is that’s not the biggest hole Adam’s departure will leave in the institution. Anyone that has been associated with Nebagamon for the past nearly 20 years knows Fornear. His easy smile, unmistakable belly laugh, wonderful sense of humor, and genuine warmth have been features of Camp Nebagamon since 2004 (not to mention the six years he spent as a summer staffer prior to coming on full time). His absence will be felt throughout the camp community.
On a personal note, I want to add that Fornear and I have probably driven 300,000 miles and spent nearly a full year of our lives together (if you add up all of the on-the-road days) travelling on camp reunion tours. Those trips together were some of the most enjoyable parts of this job. We visited the Statue of Liberty, spent a day at Disneyland, walked around Golden Gate Park, went to Ole Miss football games, played golf (until Fornear, one day, had had enough and literally walked off the course…never to return again!), watched random Georgia high school football playoff tournament games, and fished an unnamed and freezing river in West Virginia. We argued, we laughed, and I listened to him talk in his sleep as I drove. (Yeah, not only do I have a bit of a control issue in that I insist on driving all the time, but that guy can fall asleep in a car on a dime…and the sounds that follow are hilarious!)
I’ll share just one definitional story about Fornear from our time on the road. We were doing a “New Boy” presentation in Chicago. The family that invited us over for the presentation had decided to include several other families, as they had sons interested in Nebagamon as well. Our routine way back then was that Fornear and I would do a slideshow presentation, and then Fornear would take the kid(s) for a while to show them some more photos and talk more about camp, while I stayed with the parents and allowed them to ask questions of me that they might not want to ask with kid ears around. About two minutes after we had split up, I realized that Fornear had something I wanted to share with the parents in his bag. So I headed to the basement playroom where he had taken the kids. When I opened the door, there was Adam Fornear, standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by five boys whacking him with their toy light sabers with a reckless abandon. Fornear was wearing that patented huge grin and emitting that classic Fornear belly laugh. He was having the time of his life…and we got several new kids to sign up for camp that day.
In the off-season, Adam Fornear worked out of our house in Minneapolis every weekday for almost seven years and then moved with us to Boise to spend another seven years working from our basement before he moved to Duluth. He has played a significant part in our children’s lives too, attending some of their sporting events and even changing a diaper or two.
Simply put, Adam Fornear is family…and while he won’t be working at camp anymore, he will still be family to all of us. As I tell the graduating campers at the end of their final Council Fire, once you are in the camp family, you are always in the camp family.
Good luck Fornear. We will all miss you, but know you will be around.
