How you can help happy campers stay that way
Saturday, February 26, 2005
By Dennis Roddy
Harry Kramer -- that's him over there standing on the table making children laugh --
turned an unfulfilled mission into an undying dream. We should all fail so gloriously.
Thirty-four years ago, the YMCA sent him to close down a dilapidated summer camp on
300 unwanted acres of Beaver County hillside. He smiled, offered to do his best,
promptly winterized the buildings, planted new lodges, built a dining hall worthy
of a ski resort, and turned an unwanted camp into one of the top destinations for kids
with special needs. Those unwanted 300 acres are now 500 indispensable ones.
The YMCA might as easily have assigned Harry Kramer to cut out his own heart as close Kon-O-Kwee.
In the 1950s, he was a fatherless boy with undiagnosed dyslexia, a jackhammer stutter and a loneliness
that bled him like some incurable wound. For two years he didn't even speak. His refuge was the
wooden-floored tents that dotted the woodlands near the town of Fombell, where, two weeks every year,
he escaped the suffocating belief that he could do nothing. Yeah, Harry, we want you to drive out there
and close that place.
"Look at this," and now Kramer, safely off the dining hall table, shows his visitor a photograph. A
little boy is climbing a rock wall. "Double amputee. Made it all the way up to the top. He said,
'Uncle Harry, I can do anything.' "
Uncle Harry -- and there is no use trying any other name around the man -- knows that feeling.
Nobody knew what dyslexia was when he was in school. They just moved him in with the mentally challenged students.
Somehow, he chewed his way through college, married a woman named Barbara, fathered two children,
and went to work for the YMCA. When Kon-O-Kwee fell into disuse, he volunteered to handle the closing.
"He said, 'We'll tell them we're going to close it, but that's not what we're going to do,
' " Barbara Kramer said. "He always said this was his piece of heaven on earth."
Kramer went out in search of campers who reminded him of himself. Blind campers, amputee campers, campers
with heart ailments or horrible burns or mental retardation -- everybody gets a hug in this place.
Along with the Indian Princess tribes and father-son outings, Kramer has built a place for children like Adam.
I sat next to him at lunch yesterday. He is 7 years old, has marginal eyesight, and wants to attend a camp
where Uncle Harry lets kids fire arrows at targets made of balloons so they know they've hit one, or sets
up baseball games with beepers. There are hundreds of these children. They show up from 48 states.
Kramer took me to Creekside Lodge, the place he specially equipped for disabled kids. It has a ramp up to the doorway,
another to a terrace overlooking the creek. Kids in wheelchairs can fish there. They can canoe from there. Well,
they used to be able to do that.
In September, the second of two floods pushed Creekside Lodge two feet off its foundation, ripped up the insides,
and made it little more than a husk.
Harry Kramer has one month to get started on a new lodge for the kind of campers who already have the odds against them.
"We specialize in miracles here," he said. An architect donated plans. Kramer picked a spot on the hillside away from the water.
Somehow, he said. Somehow.
This, of course, is where you figure into Harry Kramer's story. He needs $150,000 for building materials. He needs
human bodies to erect the lodge.
"We can't start any later than March if we're going to have the place finished by June," he said. He said that with the
confidence of the man who drove from Pittsburgh 34 years ago with instructions to close the camp where, come June, Adam, a little boy we moved to the front of the lunchroom yesterday so he could catch, however blurry, the presentation on camping, will have a roof under which to dream.
To donate: Camp Kon-O-Kwee Building Fund, YMCA Camp Kon-O-Kwee, 126 Nagel Road, Fombell, PA 16123.
To volunteer a day's work: phone 412-391-3328.
