By Nardie Stein
This remembrance has been excerpted from Chapter 29 of Keeping the Fires Burning: A History of Camp Nebagamon, which can be purchased here.
On the occasion of my seventieth birthday, I was honored at a wonderful party given by Sally and the kids. My entire family and a number of friends gathered, including some really unexpected dear friends from out of town. After the skits, roasts, and toasts had died down, I finally got the floor, thanked everyone, and showcased the award I had just bestowed upon myself: the World’s Luckiest Guy medal. This simple three-by-five-inch piece of fiberboard, which I had made and inscribed with the letters “WLG,” was hanging inside my shirt, waiting for this moment!
In reflecting on my life, I feel many of the truly wonderful events came about as a matter of pure luck rather than by design. I grew up in a happy, wonderful family in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and lived a comfortable middle-class life. I can recall taking hikes with my mom in wooded areas and parks in Fort Smith, and occasionally our family would “go up the mountains” north of Fort Smith because my dad’s only recreational interest was fishing in the streams of the Boston Mountain Range. While he tried to interest me in fishing, I was too restless, always wanting to go hiking and exploring in the abundant beauty of those areas.
My first real taste of camping came at age twelve at the Boy Scout Camp near Rudy, Arkansas. I was a member of Troop 15 of the First Methodist Church along with my older cousins, Benno Friedman and Fred Braht. We swam, hiked, passed merit badges, and had the challenge of sweeping our tents daily to remove the many tarantulas that enjoyed visiting our sleeping quarters.
I was also aware that two families who lived down our street sent their sons away to some fancy camp up north for eight weeks. And, yes, Buddy Rogers and Randy and Jerry Ney were indeed at Camp Nebagamon. I didn’t know them well because they were not my age.
The rest of my summers were spent at my father’s business, Stein Wholesale Dry Goods Company, where I worked from age ten on through my college summers. I stocked shelves, packed outgoing orders, swept the floors, and drove packages to the post office. I was happy, learning how to work with some fine people and earning a minimum wage (forty cents an hour) salary. In high school I was active in many organizations and was an officer in most of them.
Looking back on my high school years in Arkansas, I realized also that I was unaware of the realities of living in the segregated South. As part of the small Jewish minority in Fort Smith (sixty families), my parents were not motivated to work for social change. In fact they were wary of “rocking the boat,” being fearful of the Klan, anti-Semitism, and social rejection. I regret my own inaction in those days and my parents’ lack of involvement in social justice issues, but I partially understand their lack of involvement—this was the South in the 1930s and 1940s.
Another great chapter of my early years was getting to go with Boy Scout Troop 15 to the National Boy Scout base, Philmont, near Taos, New Mexico, for two weeks in the summers of 1945 and 1946. We hiked, climbed mountains, and had rugged adventures in the desert and mountains of the Southwest.
As high school days were ending I felt confident that my good grades, numerous extracurricular activities, and leadership records, plus where I lived, would give me a leg up in the college application process. Yale, Washington University, and Vanderbilt, in that order, were my choices. I was confident that all three would want me, so it came as a shock when Yale turned me down, but the other two sent acceptance letters.
So there was a tipping point in my life: had I gone to Yale, I think I would have hated it, and I would never have met Sally Lorber or Camp Nebagamon. Need I say more?
Washington University in St. Louis was a fine choice, and I enjoyed my new friends in college and in Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. My mother’s family, who all lived nearby, were hospitable, providing free meals and loaner cars for weekend dates. My social life was never better. My fraternity brothers were friendly, helpful, and marvelous at fixing us “out of town” guys with dates. Bud Pollak, one of the older guys in the frat house and a Nebagamon counselor, suggested I call Sally Lorber, which I did in December 1949. And so, as they say, “The rest is history!” I thought Sally was one of the nicest, cutest, and smartest people in the world. And I still do! Muggs, Janet, and Maggie were nice to me and were also a source of Sunday meals when our frat house closed its kitchen.
Muggs offered me a job at his camp during those early college years, but I didn’t think going to work at a place where I was dating the boss’s daughter sounded like a good idea. So I continued working at Stein Wholesale in the summer.
While Washington University turned out to be a good choice for me, I quickly discovered that the education I received in Fort Smith had not prepared me for rigorous studying and real academic challenge, and I really struggled at first. Although I entered college thinking I’d like to be a doctor, I dropped that dream and studied what I liked with the professors I liked, feeling that eventually I would find my way. People chuckle when I reveal I was a medieval literature major with a minor in psychology and a lot of classical art and archaeology courses.
Another reason I qualified for the WLG award is that I was drafted as a sophomore, during the Korean War, but Congress changed the draft laws a few months later and allowed college students to be deferred as long as we kept our grades up. As a result, I graduated in 1953 and was inducted the very day the Korean armistice was signed in July of that year. And the good luck continued. At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, one week after induction, I noticed an ad seeking foreign language translators. I, of course, signed up for French, as I had had three years in high school and two more in college, and I stayed behind when my unit was shipped out, so that I could take the test. I took it, discovering how inadequate my French skills were, and did not qualify as a translator. I was then placed with a unit that was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for basic training, where by luck I got an interview with another Washington University graduate, who let me select my Signal Corps specialty job: cryptography.
Although Sally and I had dated quite a bit as she finished the last year and a half of high school, we “broke up” after she graduated and went off to the University of Michigan. Upon completing my army training, I visited old friends and family in St. Louis at Christmastime in 1953, and lo and behold, there was Sally again. We saw each other briefly and realized our relationship was not really over. We said goodbye at Union Station in St. Louis, and I boarded the train back to Georgia, once again dazzled by young Sally Lorber.
We saw each other again a few months later in Florida, as I knew I was going overseas and wanted to say goodbye. She was visiting her parents, who had by then moved to Miami Beach. This time we knew we were in love, but I had one and a half more years of overseas army duty, and she had one and a half more years at the University of Michigan. We decided to quietly make plans for a future together and shared this decision only with our immediate families. So Sally returned to Ann Arbor, and I headed to Seattle, then to Japan, where I again had the good luck to be stationed near Yokohama at Camp Zama, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Far East Command. My duty as a cryptographer was reasonably interesting, and I had ample time for travel and learning about Japan and its rich culture.
In summer 1954, I received a letter from Muggs that shocked me. In it he explained that he and Janet wanted to plan for their retirement, and he wanted to know if I was interested in a career in camping. This was truly a bolt out of the blue! I had welcomed my two years of required army service, as it gave me a cushion of time to consider possible careers. I only knew the three business offers I had received failed to interest me. These were small family businesses, and eight years later they had all disappeared. Again, a lucky decision!
I responded cautiously to the offer of directing Camp Nebagamon and began corresponding about this possibility with Sally and Muggs. I was excited about this opportunity, but it loomed as a frightening unknown. Muggs and Janet felt they could train Sally and me and decided that my best training would be “on the job” in carefully measured steps.
I was discharged from the army in late May 1955 and went to Wisconsin in mid-June to meet Nebagamon and start counselor training, a big transition for this mustered-out soldier in a short period of time. The first step was serving as a senior counselor in Swamper One with a junior counselor and six wonderful first-year ten-year-old campers. It was a summer fraught with conflicting agendas. Sally and I were busy trying to plan our October wedding and our future and had many big issues to deal with, while each of us had to get used to each other again. We were also trying to envision careers as camp directors of a large, successful boys’ camp.
In retrospection, it is safe to say I also was terrified (or at least I should have been!). Here was this huge business dominated by a larger-than-life hero figure—Muggs Lorber—dynamic, brilliant, super-athlete, gifted, a personality-plus guy . . . and I was contemplating filling his shoes!
Somehow we got through the summer of 1955. After our small wedding in the Big House, we were off on a wonderful three-week cross-country drive ending in Miami Beach. We then had a ten-day honeymoon in Nassau, paid for with my army savings. What a great start to our marriage!