Next month on June 4, 2009, Nettie Amdurer will be 90 years young.  Once again she will be at Camp Monroe for the start of another summer season, tending to the needs of both campers and staff, and overseeing the other camp mothers.  Camp Monroe is lucky to have the world’s most beloved and capable Camp Grandmother.


08/27/2004

The Last Hug Of Summer
by Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor, NY Jewish Week

In the autumn of her life, she still has summer camp.

It was the last night of the season at Camp Monroe and Nettie Amdurer, 85, camp grandmother, was packing like everyone else. One more August was getting cooler in the evenings and the children were going home.

Nettie had decided to leave some items at the camp for the next summer that always comes. She’d been coming to Camp Monroe since 1948 when it was the family business and she came to help her sister, an owner of the nondenominational kosher camp that carried the name of its town.

“It was really a family affair,” Nettie recalls of that long ago summer. “All the mothers in the family were working here, cleaning chickens on Thursdays, making sure all the feathers were plucked.”

A camp grandmother’s job is to be, well, a grandmother. Every July, and this year was no different, she would brush away a tear from a homesick child’s cheek and say, just wait, everything was going to be all right. Just you wait, everyone will be crying in August when it was time to go home. And every August, like on Sunday night, as sure as the half-moon glowed in the night sky over the hills of Orange County, even some of the older kids were crying when a ceremonial “2004” made of rope slowly burned on the far side of the lake.

“I was a camp mother for maybe 10 years,” until the end of the Eisenhower years, Nettie says in the twilight before the evening’s farewell banquet and rope burning. “I went on to be a division head and then girls’ head counselor.”

After a few years away, “Stanley [Felsinger, the camp director] called me up and asked if I could help break in some new camp mothers, so I came back in 1984 for what I thought was to be two weeks. I’m still here.”

With the passing years, the camp mother became known as the camp grandmother. Children she tucked into bed 30 years ago were now sending children of their own to Camp Monroe.

Nettie was the constant.

Even some of the staff needed a grandma.

“At the beginning it was hard for some of the counselors, too,” she says. “A few of them came from England and Israel; they didn’t know anyone. It was a new situation for them.”

Have children changed since 1948?

“They’re not more homesick,” Nettie says, “but nowadays some aren’t used to making their beds, but they have to. They’re fussier about foods, and their parents are, too. We try to do what the parents request, getting special foods, looking after special needs and diets.”

Nettie walks through the dining room every day making sure that everyone is eating.

“We go by all the tables, looking at the children, speaking to the counselors,” she says.

Camper Amanda Fogel, 13, remembers how earlier in the summer, “Nettie brought me into the kitchen and got me food” when a phone call from “the city” kept Amanda from being on time for a meal.

“I enjoy seeing the kids having a good time, and of course I enjoy seeing them healthy,” Nettie says. “I’m over at the health center most every day.” When the kids have to stay overnight in the infirmary, “I give them encouragement,” she says.

Each day Nettie and the two camp mothers give out close to 100 vitamins, per requests from parents or doctors.

Her energy impresses the campers. Shira Telushkin, 13, recalls Nettie running a 2K race this summer, the day after Lazy Day. “She always runs and always finishes,” Shira marvels.

After night activity, Nettie peeks into the bunks.

“I usually don’t get very far,” she says. “I try to see the youngest, anyway. I manage to get through the youngest bunks of the girls and of the boys. As camp goes on they get acclimated; less of a need for a ‘grandmother.’ But we’ll sometimes give out cookies at night.”

She used to give out hugs, if the children needed them, or even shampoo. Not anymore, says Nettie; no private hugs and no hair washing in these litigious times. Camp Monroe brought in a lawyer to brief the camp mothers and counselors. If a child needs a hug, it better be in public. If a bed wetter needs to be taken to the bathroom before bedtime, he’d better go alone.

“OK,” says Nettie, but one thing that can still happen in private is a confidence.

“I’ll tell the counselors to keep it quiet,” she says. “When no one’s in the bunk we’ll go in and change the bedding.”

Nettie speaks in the present tense, even as a bugle blows retreat on the public address system and the flag is about to be lowered.

The campers’ duffle bags and steamer trunks, fully packed for the trip home, are alphabetically sorted and covered with a brightly colored tarp to protect them from a rain. All is well.
Nettie is headed home, to Danville, Pa.

“I was living in New Jersey, but I developed lymphoma,” she says. “I have my own place, but my daughter lives there. My son-in-law is a pharmacist in a hospital there.”

Winter’s coming, when even the camp grandma could use some looking after, and a few good hugs until the leaves turn green.