Tag Archives: summer camp

Summer Camp Customs and Lore: The Announcements Song

Nationality: Scandinavian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Performance Date: March 28, 2013
Primary Language: English

Informant: “So I went to camp cedars every summer. The weekend after fathers day since the time I was about eleven until um… maybe about fifteen or so was the year I decided that I should be a camp counselor at camp cedars. Great time. I spent the whole summer out there, I was actually going to go to a camp-out one week, uh when the rest of my troop was, but I decided it would be more fun just working again for that week. It was a very enjoyable time. One of the… I guess, every day for every meal of the day, there would be a couple of announcements that um the staff would have to share with all of the campers, but they couldn’t say that. ‘Announcements’ was a bad word at camp cedars. It’s been a bad word as long as anyone has known. It’s such a bad word that the moment anyone says the word announcement no matter who it is or what context, they are immediately surrounded by all of the staff members in the area and this happened about once a week, sometimes more, um one time three days in a row the same guy uttered it while giving the announcements. So, uh when someone said announcements they were ridiculed for the next five minutes or so and um everyone else sang the announcements song. Which um I don’t remember all of the verses but it started something like:

(to the tune of the farmer in the dell)

Announcements, announcements, annoouuuncements!

A wonderful way to die, a wonderful way to die

A wonderful way to start the day, a wonderful way to die!

Announcements, announcements, annoouuncements!

 

(unknown)

We sold our cow

We sold our cow

We have no use

For your bull now.

 

(to the tune of the more we get together)

Have you ever seen a windbag, a windbag, a windbag?

Have you ever seen a windbag? well there’s one right now.

Blows this way and that way and this way and that way

Have you ever seen a windbag? well there’s one right now.

 

(To the tune of London bridge is falling down)

Words of wisdom, words of wisdom,

Here they come, here they come:

More words of wisdom, more words of wisdom:

Dumb dumb dumb, dumb dumb dumb

 

The informant, a Caucasian male, was born in Spokane, Washington and then moved to Omaha. He is currently a student at USC and studies computer science.

The informant learned the song when he was about eleven years old “the first time we went to camp cedars so the very first summer.”Camp Cedars is a Boy Scout summer camp. The informant attended the camp for about five or six years and was a counselor for one year. As a camper, he didn’t really worry about saying the taboo word because it was usually just the staff that ended up saying it when giving announcements. In addition, the informant “was never really giving announcements, so I never had to worry about saying the word.” Because announcements were a daily thing, they usually had to be referred to as A-words or some other euphemism.

The informant felt that the traditions were around to raise morale, keep the counselors from getting bored, and build a rapport between all of the members of the camp. The informant said that there were “many, many, many traditions” at this camp. Additionally, these traditions were just a fun thing.

He first learned the words of the song from watching the counselors perform the song; he especially recalls this song because he thought, “it was ridiculous and it happened all the time.” The informant said “I encountered it probably over a dozen times being a camper plus the summer when I worked there maybe another dozen or two times, so very repeated and it’s a lot of fun too – being the staffer and being the one who is singing the song, making fun of whoever happened to inadvertently say the word or intentionally… like I’m sure the guy who said it three times in a row was not entirely accidental”

In a way, this song and folk tradition appears to be a parody of tabooistic discourse because the camp tradition turned an ordinary word into something taboo, forcing camp members to find euphemisms for an otherwise innocuous word.

Summer Camp Folksong: Mr. Johnny Verbeck

Nationality: Scandinavian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Performance Date: March 28, 2013
Primary Language: English

Informant: Once every week at camp cedars the dining hall would serve sausages for breakfast, little sausage patties, and uh there was a certain song that went along with the sausages about a man named Johnny Verbeck. Uh, it went a little something like:

Oh Mister, Mister Johnny Verbeck, how could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

Now all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen

For they’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine!

 

Oh once there was a Dutchman, his name was Johnny Verbeck

He made the finest sausages and sauerkraut and speck.

Till one day he invented a sausage-making machine,

Now all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen.

 

Oh Mister, Mister Johnny Verbeck, how could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

Now all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen

For they’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine!

 

One day a boy came walkin’, a-walkin’ through the door.

He bought a pound of sausages, and laid them on the floor.

The boy began to whistle, a-whistle up a tune

And all the little sausages went dancin’ round the room!

 

Oh Mister, Mister Johnny Verbeck, how could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

Now all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen

For they’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine!

 

One day the machine got busted, the darn thing wouldn’t go

So Johnny Verbeck he climbed inside to see what made it so.

His wife she had a nightmare, went walkin’ in her sleep.

She gave the crank a heck of a yank and Johnny Verbeck was meat!

 

Oh Mister, Mister Johnny Verbeck, how could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

Now all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen

For they’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine!

 

The informant, a Caucasian male, was born in Spokane, Washington and then moved to Omaha. He is currently a student at USC and studies computer science.

The informant learned the song when he was about eleven years old “the first time we went to camp cedars so the very first summer,” and “sometime within the first week.” Camp Cedars is a Boy Scout summer camp. The informant attended the camp for about five or six years and was a counselor for one year.

When asked about the performance, the informant said “So um, everyone would know that it was time for the sausage song because before everyone even got their food, the staff members would be walking around with a sausage on their fork, like holding it in the air above their heads and during the song, at first the staff members would stand by their tables and just sing the song, but on the line ‘all the little sausages went dancing round the room’ they would do so, and just kind of skip around the room and circle all of the campers at their tables.”

The informant liked this tradition and song because it was “just something fun that would bring everyone together, and it helped build a community among the campers.”

In addition to being an entertaining song that everyone at the camp would sing, I feel it also serves other purposes. First, the song jokes about the contents of sausages. Sausages are not clearly related to whatever meat they originally came from, so they can incite parody about their contents, which in this case are cats, dogs, and even human. There is also a hint at the fear of being killed in a traumatic way such as being ground up into a meat sausage.

WATAHOTAHO

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: St. Louis, Missouri
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

WATAHOTAHO

Camp shwayder

Item: A story from camp, called WATAHOTAHO

 

Transcribed from our interview:

My informant’s explanation:

“First day of every camp session,  which is in the mountains, they take everybody to this like opening in the mountains, yeah I’m not going to remember this well but, they oh I know I remember now, there was randomly in this mountains there was a stack of rocks that was unexplainable, not from an avalanche, either some natural thing or man made, it was kind of weird. It looked like a cave with some weird rocks out fornt. This camp direct has this big walking stick and he goes up there with all the campers and every time he tells this story on Watahotaho.

 

It is a story of an Indian tribe in which there was a chief and there are three sons and one is hunting, one grows things,a nd one herds, idk, but they get ina  huge fight and they all go and their land used to be very beautiful and when they got in a fight they all left and they didn’t do well making tribes, and their old tribe didn’t do well. So chief tried to have them come back, he turns to each one and tells them they need to work together.  The cave was where it all happened. You all yell watahotaho together because the spirit is still around, and the legend is that if everybody says it in unison, you can hear a spirit calling back. They send some counselor away, and they do a delayed echo so it sounds like a sprit is calling back.

Little kids really bought into it, so it was funny by the time I was older. Every year you come he changes his story a little bit, so you realize how stupid it is. “

 

What it meant to my informant: “Well it was a good way to entertain these kids, to get them introduced to camp and get them to interact with eachother. The shouting thing was just sort of fun. I would just run around camp and to make fun of it I would just yell watahotaho because I thought it was so stupid, but the kids loved it.”

There are several key elements to this tradition, like when this happens and the interactive portion of the story. The story’s theme is teamwork and community, and since this is the first day of a summer camp for kids, this encourages the children to be more outgoing and embrace each other as a community. The interactive portion supports this, forcing the kids to work together. Moreover, by yelling WATAHOTAHO, the kids are almost performing enactive speech, their shouts in unison symbolizing the bonds they create. My informant said it was most effective for smaller children, which makes sense: they are most gullible, so the counselor’s trickery would be more effective. Regardless, Justin Elliot grasped the “silliness” of the word, which is also effective for small children; letting young children speak in a different language at the top of their lungs is exciting and liberating for them, especially because they are normally a disempowered community that must follow rules like maintain “inside voices.” Thus, immediately the campers are introduced to a new community and set of rules that sets the tone for the rest of their stay at the camp.

Friendship Bracelets

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/4/12
Primary Language: English

The informant is a sophomore at the University of Southern California. She is twenty years old. She is also the Jr. Helenes chair for the USC Helenes, which means she works closely with the girls at 32nd Street School and other Helenes to create a mentoring system.

The informant let me interview her about a friendship bracelet making activity that took place between the Jr. Helenes and the USC Helenes:

“Some Helenes and Jr. Helenes were at our regular meeting place, at 32nd Street School. I taught them how to make the bracelets. It’s fun to teach other people to make the bracelets and it’s just a good way to bond. I don’t know why friendship bracelets are popular but they’re symbolic and meaningful. And simply making the bracelet together is a good bonding experience…For me, it’s my way of showing someone that they’re important to me—but it’s not like everyone who’s important to me has a bracelet; it just depends who I have that tradition with. I guess I also like the idea that other people can see them and ask who it’s from. With the Jr. Helenes, it’s nice to have a sort of bonding exercise so we can become really close. That way we’re more than mentors—we’re friends. I got started with friendship bracelets when I went on a month long trip to Hawaii during high school. We were making so many new friends, it was a good way to celebrate that, I guess. I ended the trip with like 7 bracelets. I also like giving them to people because they know I care about them. I like to let them choose the colors and have them hold on to the end while I make it so that it’s a process we’re doing together, and the finished product is something that will make them think of our friendship whenever they see it. I also am kind of superstitious, and I like to have them make a wish on the bracelet, because supposedly the wish comes true when the bracelet falls off.”

I agree with most of what the informant says about friendship bracelets. They are definitely symbolic of a friendship and a way to celebrate that relationship. She also made a good point about the process of making the bracelet serving as a time of bonding. What really struck me about my informant’s experience with friendship bracelets was the superstition tied to them. This was new to me, but it really adds another element to the bracelets, making them even more of a shared experience between two people.

Annotation:

Friendship bracelets can be found in the movie Napoleon Dynamite (2004). In this movie, one character goes door to door selling the bracelets and later, Napoleon and his friend Pedro hand them out when Pedro is running for class president. Instead of being made from thread, these bracelets are made from plastic.

Napoleon Dynamite. Dir. Jared Hess. Perf. Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, and Jon Gries. Fox Searchlight, 2004. Film.

Legend – Beckett, Massachusetts

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Scarsdale, NY
Performance Date: April 11, 2008
Primary Language: English
Language: French

Legend—USA

“At Camp Greylock, a summer sleep-away camp in Beckett Massachusetts, counselors dressed up as clowns and terrorized boys in the middle of the night.”

David informed me that he first heard this legend when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock during the Summer of 2007.  He decided to build a campfire with his co-counselor and tell the kids in their bunk ghost stories,  Though most of the stories were fictional, his co-counselor did tell one extremely alarming tale, which he swore was true, or at least is believed to be true.  Apparently in the 70s (the camp was founded in 1916), a group of sick and twisted counselors decided that it would be funny to torture children.  They decided that the best way for them to this was to dress up in complete clown costumes; white faces, colored wigs—and scare 11 and 12-year-old boys.  After they put on the costumes, a bunch of them would go into a bunk and sit in the center of the main room, staring into space.  When one or more of the kids would wake up, they would be terrified as they would see a group of frightening clowns, not moving, just sitting on the floor staring off into space, or worse, at the children.

Though we will likely never know if this is a true story or not (the current owners of the camp say it’s false, but the events allegedly happened 2 or 3 owners before them).  Clowns must be a common fear amongst people, because I have heard several legends involving clowns.  The most notable is an urban legend that I heard while here at school in L.A.; apparently a girl is house sitting for her neighbors when she sees a statue of a clown and calls the owners of the house to ask about it.  They say that they don’t have a statue of a clown, and the idea is that some random guy dressed as a clown was terrorizing her.  Whether or not the two are somehow related—one somehow being a variation of the other, or one coming after the other, we will never know for sure.  This is why such urban legends are so fascinating, not only are we unsure as to whether or not it is true, but we also wonder what relationship it has to other legends.