The Camp Clovis Chronicles 1969 by M. Chris Polo Audio Version Sample/Narratd by M. Chris Polo

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SUMMARY

1969 was considered one of the most important years of the last century. Back then riots and protests broke out over the Vietnam War, the draft, and civil rights issues—while somewhere in the mountains of California a group of zany characters spent that summer in isolation working at a camp called Clovis. This story is alive with the often hilarious and sometimes tragic Americana of that time.

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Transcript

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Chapter 1. The Journey Begins In 1969, I was 18. Gas was 35 cents a gallon, and you could rent a home for about $135 a month. Many people still watch television in black and white, and Monsanto had raked in record profits for their new insecticide DDT. The Beatles had just released what would be their final album, an obscure police action some 8,000 miles away from America, known as the Vietnam War, had reached a fever pitch as over 540,000 U.S. troops were now involved. That summer I graduated high school. I received from my uncle a decorated World War II vet, a graduation present of an old 1951 Willie's Jeep, along with a stern warning. That Vietnam War is another Korean war. They're calling it a police action, which means they're not committed. We're in the middle of a crazy civil war that won't end well. A lot of good American boys are dying there, and many of us aren't sure why. So, he paused for a few seconds, then concluded his lecture. If you have to go to Nam, try to get into the Navy is my best advice. I had no desire to be one of the lucky lottery winners drafted to fight in that war, nor was I particularly excited about volunteering. That meant going to college and staying enrolled. If drafted, at least I would get a deferment from going until I finished college. I needed to work that summer because my family was too poor to pay for my college tuition. I would have to earn enough to get myself through the following school year. I had looked into several possible means of summer employment. One was spending the summer digging ditches for a neighbor who installed swimming pools. The other was working at a summer camp. A Christian camp recruiter at a job fair showed me a brochure depicting a magnificent California mountain wilderness with pristine mountain lakes and a forest filled with dense stands of pine trees. The recruiter promised me a summer of adventure along with a lot of hard work and plenty of exercise working as a camp counselor, monitoring a cabin of eight boys. He presented other photos depicting the many camp activities the campers participated in. They shot bows and arrows, rode horses, swam and canoeed in a lake, repelled down mountainsides, backpacked and sat by campfires and sang. My girlfriend from high school was going to tour Europe for most of that summer with three of her girlfriends, so my summer was wide open. This camp appeared to present an opportunity to have a pretty fascinating summer, or at least a pretty busy summer. All the college protests, the confusion of Vietnam, and the civil rights riots had made 1968 and early 1969 seem chaotic. After all that, summer at a remote camp in the mountains sounded pretty enticing. It took me approximately 10 seconds of serious thought, and I was ready to commit to a summer of work at this summer camp known as Camp Clovis.