- Introduction time at the parents potluck meal before camp started. I introduced
Bob Wienke
as my grandfather, after which he was always known as Grandpa Wienke
- Russ Reimer and I talking on the porch of our cabin, and discovering we had taken Wood Badge
together at Philmont 20 years before, and ridden back on the train together!
- The wonderful fireball observed on a star hike
- Troop 6 from Rockford, and the professional clown they had in the early 1980’s as Scoutmaster!
- The turkey vulture roost in the pines upstream from the swimming area
- The Nature Area song written to the tune of the Marsellaise on July 14
- The Nature Area Christmas Song, and all the Christmases in July, and the days when we drew names
and made special gifts for them
- The many wonderful young men whom with I served on staff
- The several times that I was priviledged to serve as Allowat Sakima for Vigil Ceremonies
- The Wednesday night that it started to rain before the OA calling-out. I prayed in Sioux for the
rain to hold off. It stopped, then the skies opened up as I walked into my cabin afterwards.
- While telling Indian stories one night, I did a dance step or two, then apologized (it always rains
if I dance in costume!) and said it would rain that night, but only a little bit, as I’d only done
a couple of steps. The next morning, as I walked into the Dining Hall, everyone was looking at me
strangely. On inquiring what was wrong they said it had rained for five minutes that night! Of
course, being in a cabin, I did not know about it.
- Camping School—two as student, and two as staff
- The Scout who told me he didn’t like sweet potatoes, and gobbled up the sweet potato pie—he thought
it was pumpkin!
- Two of my brother’s nephews at camp one year called me Uncle Dan. It caught on and ever after I
was known as Uncle Dan.
- How thrilled I was when, that same year, a little black Scout called me Uncle Dan.
- One time a boy asked me if I was the Uncle Dan in the Scout Handbook! [Dan Beard]
- I was surprised at how many Scouts did not know that Uncle Dan was Wetochwink Chweli, Daniel-Jacques,
and Professor Gedankenheimer.
- One of my students at National Camping School, Tiffany Rose, turned up a couple of years later at
Tiffany Geraghty, the wife of Jon Geraghty, our new ranger. We became good friends, and in 1993 she
gave me a two-month old puppy. Patch, a Husky mix and who looked like a wolf, was born at Camp Lowden
and had never been anywhere else until she came home with me at the age of four months. She is my almost
constant companion, and can’t wait for me to vacate my recliner at night so she can sleep in it.
[Patch passed away on 12/18/2007.]
- Every year at Lowden I found something new, whether tree, flower, mushroom, insect, or whatever—
sometimes even a bird.
- One evening I tried to count the number of successive whippoorwill calls. I quit at 200, but he didn’t!
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