Hey there everyone! Sorry for the slowness on the updates, things have been hectic this week during staff training and its thrown me out of my “rhythm” for updating.

Staff training has been going on all week and this morning, campers will start officially registering for Culver Summer Camps 2006. Very exciting. Here are some fun facts I’ve heard this week:

• After a thorough search, Company One gained a Sr. Counselor on Thursday, Mr. Karamon, perhaps known by some as the Assistant Military Activities coordinator from summer 2005.
• Enrollment is way up this summer with approx. 1352 campers attending. Last summer involved roughly 1298 campers.
• 38% of this year’s Culver Summer Campers hail from outside the United States down from 40% last summer.  There are 26 internationals on staff this year.
• Aviation A and B have been combined this summer into one unit, “Aviation” and will join the Troop in all athletic competitions to compete against the naval companies as the “Air-Cav.” Aviation contains around 40 campers this year and Troop is up over 60 this summer (!) which means this new unit could be quite a force.
• The main upper camp SOP has seen substantial revision this summer as predicted on this very site. The TUXIS program has indeed been tied into rank for all upper campers. In order to gain any sort of rank promotion at the end of the summer, a camper must have earned his or her Tuxis.
• The Tuxis banner is also making a return to Upper Camp, going to the boys and girls units who showed the most participation in Tuxis each week.
• The girls are adding two new naval events to their competition each week, a wherry race (single pull) and a kayak race (double sprint). As these two “events” have long been a part of the Great Race it seemed only sensible to have the ladies race them throughout the summer to build of more experience.
• Boys intramural sailing will now include a 420 class sailing race on Tuesday’s.

Those are some of the interesting changes/developments we’ve been hearing about this week. We’ll keep you posted as things develop. Stay tuned. Our first camper just turned up in Naval 2!

Discuss

The Tuxis Program has long been a crucial part of Culver Summer Camps, providing every Culver Upper Camper the opportunity to earn a medal to wear with his or her dress A by completing a series of merit-badge style accomplishments as set forth by their Culver Summer Camps Tuxis Director. Third classmen may earn their bronze tuxis medal, second classmen have their silver to work towards, while first classmen set their sights on the gold tuxis. Each of these medals is progressively more difficult to earn with the understanding that moving up in rank at Culver means you have to perform at a higher level.

But how hard is it to earn you Tuxis medal? And how have the Tuxis standards fared over the years? Should there be more testing involved? less testing? more sports? less? What about those pesky Tuxis essays people work on, or their Tuxis collages.

I’m curious to hear what you think about the general level of challenge to the TUXIS program. In fact I’m starting a new poll on the front page about it, so weigh in with a vote there and your comments in the thread in Main Guard.

Finally to adress the questions about changing Tuxis standards I present to you an honest goodness 1920 Silver Tuxis Sheet that I tracked down using our new Ebay section just last week. What do you think of the point requirements? Any of them stand out? Let’s take a look…

…Read the rest of this entry…

As the date draws nearer for camp to start this summer, I know that I — and my nearly 3-year-old son, if he only knew it! — am looking forward to Sunday afternoon parades starting….as well as Saturday night Council Fires, seeing the Ledbetter out on the water more often, the Moonlight Serenade, the sailboats on the lake each afternoon…Culver in the summer!

Presented here is an early 1960s postcard from the collection of Pete Trone, who himself was involved in Culver Summer Camps for years, has some great stories, and is one of our great local resources as a fount of historical knowledge. As always, click to enlarge the image. The Woodcraft camp, of course, had not long been re-created on the east side of SR 117 (East Shore Drive), where today it remains, and the cabins in this photo look new and shiny to me!

Browsing around our Summer Camp photos to find this one, another one caught my attention, relating also to the Black Horse Troop, or at least to horsemanship, so I’m throwing it in here. I don’t know the specific origin of this photo, but it comes from the collection of beloved, longtime Culver barber (retired) Verl Shaffer, and depicts a very early scene of the “rougher, tougher” days of Troop, when campers marched all day at times, camped in the field at night, carried canons by horseback, etc., etc. It would be interesting to know exactly where they’re riding in this picture, and exactly when, but I found this an interesting photo…

Had a happy moment just today when Culver resident Sandra Wakefield (who is also head of our Friends of the Library organization) dropped off a bag of old Academy Roll Call yearbooks from the 1950s. To be exact, 1953, 54, 56, 57, and 58! I realize these are winter school books, but they were so beautifully photographed and give such a good peek into the students and campus of the day, they’re wonderful to see. They’re also a real treasure, from my point of view, as I know they’re collectable and rare. We MIGHT own one or two earlier Roll Call’s in our history collection, but they don’t tend to come our way very often, so this is great. Sandy’s husband, Rudy, worked for years for the Culver Press (located then in what is today’s Town Hall building on Plymouth Sreet in Culver), which did much of the Academy’s printing in those days, so occasionally we get some nice donations to our collection from Sandy and Rudy.

The point is: there are some old Roll Calls in addition to other neat Culver history items (like Summer School catalogs and the like) here at the library, and any of you who are in Culver this summer (or any time!) are welcome and encouraged to drop by and spend some time in our history area browsing the collection. You’re free to bring a scanner or digital camera, too, if you’d like to digitize a favorite image or two.

Incidentally, I’ll be doing a presentation here at the library this month on Culver history: “Daniel McDonald, the Railroad, and the Origins of Culver as We Know It” on Saturday, June 24 at 10am for the Antiquarian and Historical Society of Culver’s annual meeting. The meeting and my talk — which includes a Power Point full of photos — is open to everyone, and there should be coffee and refreshments. So drop by and take a listen, come up and say hi, have some coffee and relax! And hey, think about siging up as a member of the Antiquarian Society…they’re a great group that does a lot of good relating to Culver history…

DISCUSS IN FORUMS