And no, I don’t mean that you can sue your parents for never coming through with a pony. (You can’t. I checked.) I’m talking about the safety hazards and irresponsible in loco parentis-ing of your yesteryears, as inspired by this Boston Globe piece from Thursday, “The ‘Fyre Fest’ of overnight camps closed after 6 days.”
One Quinebarge dad quoted in the Globe piece felt like there “may be a disconnect between what a rustic overnight camp is actually like and what parents in this highly connected era expect it to be,” and I’m not saying counselors should be stoned constantly or that camp food is enjoyable, but…they are, it isn’t, and I kind of feel like the “Kamp Krusty” aspects of the summer-camp experience are neither a secret nor a scandal.
Then again, my camp years were before helmets and cell phones, and “Quinebargegate” DOES have all the elements of a Fyre Fest doc, namely 1) inept planning that 2) screws over people we don’t particularly mind seeing made uncomfortable, i.e., high-strung parents. Do you have a Fyre Fest/Quinebarge in your childhood? Rickety amusement parks, sketchy homeroom teachers who smelled like Popov and just stopped showing up one day, a summer camp that suggested “Hello Muddah” was a murder ballad, a babysitter who robbed a bank? More scandalous than scurrilous, but still good for three episodes on Hulu? — SDB
I loved the A&P Shows in New Zealand- think country fair - as a child. But beyond the wholesome baby animals and best jam awards were some terrifying-ass carnival rides which definitely had tasted human blood.
When I was 11 I worked on a school project where we made a movie, and the girl who starred in it was cast as a witness to a murder. Next year her father killed her mother (!!!!!!), and she and her sister had to leave the country and change their names to hide from him.
Oh and there was a murder on my school grounds when I was a teen.
I remember the disappearance of the witch's hat merry-go-round sometime in the four-year time period I lived on CFB Borden. I think that's the same place where we had to watch a reel-to-reel film on why you shouldn't play with unexploded ordinances, but that could also have been CFB Shilo the year later. I also managed to open the door to the basement in PMQs in Calgary and my Mom found me crying on the landing in my walker thing which are definitely banned in North America now.
I don't know if military bases in the 70s-80s were especially dangerous or them being restricted entry gave parents a greater feeling of safety and, therefore, gave us more permission to roam.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the rate of rabies infections, the bat that flew around the gym in daytime during summer camp and the MPs coming out to take down the drunken skunk in our playground one summer day. (Dad was slightly offended by how many bullets they took to take it down. Considered it unprofessional.)
My freshman year I was in the chorus of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. The senior who played Snoopy (who was the object of attraction of many underclasswomen) blew himself up with a pipe bomb at the end of his senior year. He did it at a friend’s house, and while the friend was not injured, Snoopy ended up with shrapnel in his hand and brain. (He thought it was dead and went to cut the wire, and that’s when it went off. However, the majority of the explosion went down into the easy chair it was sitting on.) He lived near me so I took two friends to visit him, and he had a zipper of staples in his head.
When I was training at the public library, the first news article I looked up in the local newspaper’s archive was the one on the pipe bomb. I don’t recall if they were criminally charged, but if they were, neither served hard time. The DA may have declined to bring charges because they were white and presumably learned their lesson.
Sadly all I have is finding out in college that one of my sunday school teachers as a kid was convicted of child molestation. And then my parents asking carefully and worriedly if he had ever touched me (he had not).
I had a 7th grade science teacher with a dog named Reefer. He made us all try chewing tobacco so we could see how gross it was. This was Catholic school! Better than a dodgy priest, am I right?
In fourth grade, our school bus driver drove us the opposite way of school, up an actual mountain. I remember asking him where we were headed. We eventually ended up at school by like 10 am with completely freaked out parents. Turns out he was "into drugs but from a good family" and not surprisingly for our tight knit (polite term for somewhat inbred New England town) my parents knew him from as his parents were close with my grandparents blah blah... they were amazed he was hired as a school bus driver. it was the talk of school! And even high school.. we were still giggling over the tour up the mountain.
This isn't nearly on the level of a Fyre Fest/Quinebarge story in terms of whimsical true crime fun, but my six siblings and I went to Catholic schools in Omaha, NE in the 70s and 80s. A few years ago when the local paper printed a list of priests, brothers, and deacons who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors from the 60s through the present, I started counting the ones we'd crossed paths with and ran out of fingers.
I loved the A&P Shows in New Zealand- think country fair - as a child. But beyond the wholesome baby animals and best jam awards were some terrifying-ass carnival rides which definitely had tasted human blood.
When I was 11 I worked on a school project where we made a movie, and the girl who starred in it was cast as a witness to a murder. Next year her father killed her mother (!!!!!!), and she and her sister had to leave the country and change their names to hide from him.
Oh and there was a murder on my school grounds when I was a teen.
I remember the disappearance of the witch's hat merry-go-round sometime in the four-year time period I lived on CFB Borden. I think that's the same place where we had to watch a reel-to-reel film on why you shouldn't play with unexploded ordinances, but that could also have been CFB Shilo the year later. I also managed to open the door to the basement in PMQs in Calgary and my Mom found me crying on the landing in my walker thing which are definitely banned in North America now.
I don't know if military bases in the 70s-80s were especially dangerous or them being restricted entry gave parents a greater feeling of safety and, therefore, gave us more permission to roam.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the rate of rabies infections, the bat that flew around the gym in daytime during summer camp and the MPs coming out to take down the drunken skunk in our playground one summer day. (Dad was slightly offended by how many bullets they took to take it down. Considered it unprofessional.)
My freshman year I was in the chorus of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. The senior who played Snoopy (who was the object of attraction of many underclasswomen) blew himself up with a pipe bomb at the end of his senior year. He did it at a friend’s house, and while the friend was not injured, Snoopy ended up with shrapnel in his hand and brain. (He thought it was dead and went to cut the wire, and that’s when it went off. However, the majority of the explosion went down into the easy chair it was sitting on.) He lived near me so I took two friends to visit him, and he had a zipper of staples in his head.
When I was training at the public library, the first news article I looked up in the local newspaper’s archive was the one on the pipe bomb. I don’t recall if they were criminally charged, but if they were, neither served hard time. The DA may have declined to bring charges because they were white and presumably learned their lesson.
Sadly all I have is finding out in college that one of my sunday school teachers as a kid was convicted of child molestation. And then my parents asking carefully and worriedly if he had ever touched me (he had not).
I had a 7th grade science teacher with a dog named Reefer. He made us all try chewing tobacco so we could see how gross it was. This was Catholic school! Better than a dodgy priest, am I right?
In fourth grade, our school bus driver drove us the opposite way of school, up an actual mountain. I remember asking him where we were headed. We eventually ended up at school by like 10 am with completely freaked out parents. Turns out he was "into drugs but from a good family" and not surprisingly for our tight knit (polite term for somewhat inbred New England town) my parents knew him from as his parents were close with my grandparents blah blah... they were amazed he was hired as a school bus driver. it was the talk of school! And even high school.. we were still giggling over the tour up the mountain.
This isn't nearly on the level of a Fyre Fest/Quinebarge story in terms of whimsical true crime fun, but my six siblings and I went to Catholic schools in Omaha, NE in the 70s and 80s. A few years ago when the local paper printed a list of priests, brothers, and deacons who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors from the 60s through the present, I started counting the ones we'd crossed paths with and ran out of fingers.