Campfire Stories

Campfire Stories

The call of the fire comes every Sunday evening at camp.  A pensive time of storytelling and song when campers and counselors reflect on the week – trips taken, challenges overcome, unexpected laughter, and thoughts to keep in mind for the coming days.  Please gather around the campfire, listen to our alumni remember the life changing nature of camp and tell your story.

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Each campfire lights anew, a flame of friendships true, the joys we’ve had in knowing you, will last our whole life through. And as the embers die away, we wish that we might ever stay, but since we can not have our way, we’ll come again another day.

- Green Cove's Campfire Song
Alumni Spotlight

“At camp we figured out what matters. Are you going to be a good citizen? Are you going to take care of yourself and look out for your friends?”

Scott Reed

Scott Reed was the fourth child born into a family that was well known in the small town where he grew up, Tupelo, MS. “We had the largest store in town,” he says. “So everybody knew who we were.” He had plenty of friends, but from his earliest memories, he wondered whether they liked him for who he was, or because of his family. 

At 12, Scott spent his first summer at Mondamin. “I did not know a soul when I went up there,” he remembers. A guy named Doug Deaton picked him up from the airport, and he jumped in the back of a cattle truck with about 20 other kids. Scott was a tennis player, but most camp activities were new to him. He learned how to paddle and how to pitch a tent. Even more important, Scott learned he could make his own friends.”That was a huge thing for me,” he says. “I just had to learn to fend for myself. I had to learn to figure out what I was worth as a person.” 

Scott spent a decade’s worth of summers at camp, first as a camper and then as a counselor. After that, he stopped in for a couple weeks every summer to offer tennis clinics and paddle the rivers. During that time, Scott learned to embrace the community values that have stood him well in life. “At camp we figured out what matters,” he says. “Are you going to be a good citizen? Are you going to take care of yourself and look out for your friends?” 

Today, Scott still resides in Tupelo, where he helps run the investment firm he co-founded, Hardy Reed. The community values he honed at Mondamin have followed him into adulthood, and he now sits on more than a dozen boards, helping steward causes he cares about. Scott was one of the founding board members of the Chief and Calla Bell Scholarship Foundation in 1992, served for ten years and continues to be generous with his time. “I think one of the biggest challenges in the world today is figuring out how to become a positive part of your community,” says Scott. That’s what camp helped instill in him, and what he now hopes to instill in others.

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Dori Luke
Parent

“My boys still talk about certain smells and memories from camp, as well as some of the staff that were especially impactful. We are forever grateful for C+CBSF’s scholarship to our family…. Camp Mondamin is now in their bones, in their muscle memory and is a part of who they are.”

Pharr Smith
Mondamin Camper/Staff Alum + Green Cove Staff + Parent

"Though my adult life took me far from the mountains of western North Carolina, I have always felt that my camp experiences were at the core of my being. I support C+CBSF so that others might benefit from similar enduring adventures."

Aza Downs Bowlin
Green Cove Camper/Staff Alum + Parent

"Without a pre-set daily schedule, I had to make a plan for each day and follow through to reach my activity goals. I reflected with my cabin counselor nightly on how well that plan did or did not work and how to adjust. This helped me focus my week to work towards goals I had set at the beginning of the summer. Starting at age 7, mapping out my goals, charting my progress and making decisions about what activities to do each day taught me valuable lessons. As a result, I had a tremendous sense of ownership of my success or lack thereof. Opportunities like this for kids are increasingly rare in an over-scheduled competitive world."

Carter Ramsay
Mondamin Camper/Staff Alum + Parent

"To this day, Lake Summit is a home base and I am fortunate to have a few places to call home imbued with love. Camp is a place where those memories echo with pure clarity, and I can hear the voices of those I revered and those who challenged me. There is no one spot on a dock, in a cabin or field; the feeling is encompassing. When I enter the Back 40, I am immediately grounded by the tranquil lush nature. The music of the Back 40 is a constant from the breeze to the birds. Anyone can take a deep breath to navigate a moment, and I (like many before me) have been fortunate to find a place where I can visit, walk into those woods, take that deep breath, and everything is immediately ‘ok’."

Eric Revels
Mondamin Alum

"The camp experience changed my entire career and my entire life. I don’t know what I would have done without it.”

The Summer Camp Effect
Blue Ridge Outdoors
5/12/2018

Lecky Haller
Mondamin Alum + Parent

"The reward was what you did, the trips you took,” he says. “There were no awards or ribbons and that’s still the way it is at Camp Mondamin. That’s a pretty good lesson. You don’t need something outside of that, something dangling in front of you. The adventure is the reward.”

The Summer Camp Effect
Blue Ridge Outdoors
5/12/2018

Katherine Skinner
Green Cove Alum

“I didn’t know what I was looking at at that age, but looking back on it, you saw women running things at Green Cove. Women were not in leadership positions in the town I grew up in or generally in the outside world,” she says. “My generation sorta broke through that but still, you were encouraged to learn, but in subtle ways you were shown your place. You weren’t shown your place in summer camp. You were taught that the world is your oyster and you are a pearl and you could do whatever you set your mind to do.”

The Summer Camp Effect
Blue Ridge Outdoors
5/12/2018

Sabrina Gatlin Tandon
Green Cove Staff Alum

"Camp was my first experience leading a team (I was an activity head) and I learned some very important lessons (some the hard way) in how to make every member of a team feel valued/heard, how to have difficult conversations (not everyone can go on the trips they want - staff and campers alike) and how to create an aspirational vision for the team (I wanted GC mountaineering to be all women led rather than us relying on Mondamin staff to take the "advanced" trips - we accomplished this and I remain forever proud of that) and what it meant to be accountable for what you commit to doing. These skills I learned being an activity head directly translated to my first "real" jobs after graduation where I was a people manager within my first couple of years. And in my current role at Coca-Cola, I am leading all kinds of teams on various projects as well as directly managing a team of five people. The leadership skills I learned at camp enabled me to step into my first professional role with much more confidence. And it also gave me really robust examples to use in job interviews that helped me stand out among my peers."

We would love to hear from you about how camp has had an impact on your life!  

Share Your Campfire Stories and Alumni Photos

info@chiefandcalla.org

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