When I was seven years old (41 years ago) I attended a small charity camp called Camp Sidney Cohen. It cost $5 for two weeks if you could afford it, and it was a tiny 12 acre site with seven cabins, a small lodge, and hardly any equipment. By most standards it was a lousy camp, but I loved it with all my heart, and at the end of my first year at camp, I had a dream to someday own and direct my own camp based on the type of love and affection that I had found at Camp Sidney Cohen.

I attended camp for nine years, and moved up the ranks until I reached 16 years of age. I then became a junior counselor until I graduated high school. This was still at a time when the second World War was going on, so after graduation from high school, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served two years in a radar program. I then went on to college, but each summer I returned to Camp SIdney Cohen and became a senior counselor, then the waterfront director and eventually the program and assistant director of the camp. Upon completion of college, however, the Korean War was going on and I was recalled into the Navy since I had a Commission and served two years as a Naval Officer on the Island of Guam.

In 1954, I went to the University of Wisconsin and got my Masters degree in both Recreation and Education, for I felt that the best way to achieve my dream was to become a teacher and to have my summers free to pursue my camp work. Near the end of graduation I met my future wife, Sharon, and we got married during my last semester of graduate work.

I then worked in private summer camps for four years, and ended up being the assistant director of a large camp for 140 boys. My dream was getting closer to fulfillment, and in 1959 and 1960, I went into partnership with another person to form a camp called Sidney Hill Camp for Boys. However, it really wasn’t my own camp, and I wasn’t free to do the things I really wanted to do, so in the summer of 1960, I looked all over the northern area until I drove through the driveway of one of the most beautiful spots I’d found, and that is where Camp Timberlane was created.

The camp we now live on was a small fishing resort consisting of seven cabins, a home and no open land. The waterfront had a little swimming area, and nothing else-but the first year we were able to cut down trees, bulldoze the stumps, and clear an area for a lodge, a small athletic field, two tennis courts, and a basketball court. We even managed to clear for a small riding ring. And with this as a begining, Camp Timberlane was born, and each year we continue to grow and expand. We started with 32 boys, and a staff of 17 people. But the essential idea of Timberlane has never changed. It was created to provide a place for every boy, and staff member to express himself in the manner best suited for himself, and to give him a chance to learn to live with and to respect other people. An above all, it was created as a place for him to come back to all the days of his life. I had a dream.