Backwards Day

My parents sent my brother and me to a summer day camp for several years during the 1970’s that stood out to me as more and more unusual in my memories while I was raising Sarah. Camp Elbanobscot was run by liberal Jews like my parents, and it was religiously and racially integrated, but evenmore so it also accepted children with all sorts of disabilities, which was very rare if not unheard of during this era. This was before the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in November 1975 and way before the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1991. Nevertheless, there were kids with cerebral palsy, kids with what we called “mental retardation,” and kids on the autism spectrum who were referred to as “emotionally disturbed” in the parlance of the day. There were also kids who relied on hearing aids and canes and so forth.

To my recollection, there was no “sitting down moment” where I was told I was going to camp with kids with disabilities by my parents or by the counselors; kids with disabilities were in my cabin and in my carpool, and that was that. It was simply part of camp. Some days it seemed to work better than others. There was one particularly awful day when the camp celebrated “Backwards Day” and the schedule ran backwards chronologically and we all wore our clothes backward, to the delight of everyone but “George,” the emotionally disturbed (autistic) boy in my carpool, who had to be picked up early by his mother after an epic meltdown. It was not a good recipe for a kid with a lot of rigidity issues.

Mostly I thought of the kids as individuals, not diagnoses. There was Debbie, who was “mentally retarded,” and her older sister Susan, who were in my carpool. Susan spent a lot of her time explaining things to Debbie and monitoring her. There was Linda, who was in my cabin, who had CP, and liked to walk next to one of the other girls, holding hands. She also liked to have one of us come into the port-a-potties with her. Some days we partnered with Linda as if it were a badge of honor to help her, and some days we found her annoying. There was a deaf girl, Anna, who had cool hearing aids strapped to her chest that sometimes needed recalibrating by the head counselor.

There were also swimming tests, canoeing, overnights, mosquitos, badges, arts and crafts, cookouts, braiding keychains with plastic threads, and the usual camp stuff. I guess I would probably not have thought much about my years at Camp Elbanobscot if I had not had a child with disabilities. It seems very unusual to me now that I had this experience growing up in the 1970’s, and I’m frankly glad I did. There seems to be a tendency among adults these days to think that there is, very suddenly, a huge influx of disabled children in the United States, and that these children have just popped up out of nowhere, or are being overdiagnosed. But such children definitely existed in the 1970s. They just weren’t accepted at regular schools and summer camps and you didn’t see them at your friend’s houses. And of course, rather than being called “autistic” or “disabled,” they were called “emotionally disturbed” and “mentally retarded.” (Side note: I think until I was about 20, and seriously studying Developmental Psychology, I thought that the term “emotionally disturbed” was an actual psych diagnosis or term that was used by clinicians. “Is she emotionally disturbed?” I would ask, for example, about someone’s sister if they sounded on the Spectrum. It made for some odd conversations.)

Sarah did go to an excellent inclusive day camp that accepted a small number of children with disabilities for which it could provide one-to-one aides and for which we were on a waiting list for a long time, and had to provide reams of documentation. She loved Camp JCC and had some great times there. I’m glad we both went to camp.