History of Dining
Camp's first dining room, for children only, was in the Social Hall.
Sarah Suchman was kitchen manager.
Camp's second dining room (also theater/Casino), a wooden building near the
sports field was across the road from the camp store and what was at that time
the adult camp office. It was shared by children and adults. In 1937, it was the
theater in which Kinderland kids performed Perets's vos di levone dertseylt --
What The Moon Relates. It was in that theater that Jules ("Julie") Dassin was reputedly "discovered" (mid-late 30s) by Margaret Webster, the
legendary Broadway producer of Shakespeare and other dramas. Julie was reciting
the monologue, "The Bishop of Muenster," an anti-Nazi reading that was based, I
believe, on the famous speech of Pastor Niemuller. ("First they came for the
Communists, and because I wasn't a Communist, I remained silent..."). This
structure burned down between the 1939 and 1940 season.
Does anyone have a picture of the this building?
Camp's third dining room was a large wooden building, shared by children and
for the first time adults. It was at the same site that the later cinderblock U-shaped building.
Picture #1
Picture #2
It stood on the same ground as the later U-shaped dining room; it burned between
the 1944 and
1945 seasons.
Adults and campers came in at different entrance. The fire also destroyed a
remarkable art work: a mural by camper Marx Wartofsky(Yackle #13), later Prof. of Philosophy
at Boston University and CUNY. (It was Marx, in the summer of
1944, who came dashing into the dining room waving that day's Daily Worker and
shouting: "Look -- A Gershwin headline!" The banner on the front page read:
"Americans in Paris!"
Both of these fires, according to camp legend, were the work of the "local KKK."
Camp's fourth dining room was the cinderblock U shaped building built in 1945.
A picture
