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Ev Worrell

Ev Worrell Everett Worrell, Rockford educator and volunteer Scouter from Potawatomi District, had been the first director for camping on the Scout side at Northwoods and then came as assistant for Camp Lowden for a year before becoming camp director in 1965 and 1966. He recalls that Lowden staff members were often tossed in the pool on their birthday.

He recalls that it took most of the staff and a great deal of effort to accomplish the job on the camp director (himself!)

[Nevertheless, fellow staffer Ed Bates reports that it was accomplished!]
 
The year 1965 was the silver anniversary for Camp Lowden and this sparked a desire to have some form of written history of the camp. One of the annual attempts to clean out the Quartermaster building brought a plaque to the surface. No one could figure out where the plaque belonged and thus started a digging into the history of Camp Lowden.

Mr. Worrell began to write letters to a number of people who might have some knowledge of things. Those people included Florence Miller, the daughter of Governor Lowden; Stanley Worrell, a district executive at the time camp opened and a staff member the previous year at Delevan; several volunteer leaders from years past, and professional Scouters. Letters came back with bits and pieces. Meanwhile staff members made notes of all the plaques that were posted throughout camp. As the summer wore on, Scout leaders coming to camp put in their recollections and history. Men like Larry Thomas, Ed McCarthy, Bob McCarthy, Dick Mulford, Ev Gaston, Bill Incontro, Ed Vorisek, Howard Fox, Ben Phelps, Don Albright, Dana Dawes, and Snuffy Whitaker were very helpful.

All of this information was noted, categorized, and laid aside by Mr. Worrell with the intention of writing a twenty-five year history. Twenty-five years later the task was begun anew and the initial edition of the camp's history was published in 1990 for the 50th Anniversary of Camp Lowden.

Steve Sarver recalls,
I always hoped that one day the history of Camp Lowden would be written, and in 1990 it was, with the first edition of the Living Legends of Camp Lowden, which was written by Mr. Worrell. I found this publication fascinating and read it many times over.

After awhile I realized that this was a great history of the first 35 years or so, but that it essentially came to a halt in the late 1970s. People who had made critical contributions to the success of the camp were not even mentioned. Since I was a Scout and later a staff member during the 1980’s, I felt that I could write a history of that time period.

In 2000 I met Mr. Worrell and expressed my interest in working with him to update and revise the history. He indicated that the published text did not exist electronically; therefore it would have to either be retyped. That fall I typed in the entire history as he wrote it and then began to catalog it by year.

My initial thought was to keep the history as written intact, and that I would pick up where it left off and write it from 1979 to the present time. However the original history had prompted a lot of questions. For example, where was the “H” building located? What was the cause of the fire? Other questions later rose. Was there really a time capsule buried at the flagpole or was that just an urban legend? I also wanted to include photographs, staff listings, etc. The original history was great, but there were a lot of things that had not been covered. In talking with others it became clear that there were a lot of untapped resources, and plenty of people who had a lot of information to offer.

Due largely to the high visibility of the camp Web site, as well as the highly successful staff reunion in 2005, the information kept pouring in, faster than I could process it. Things got absolutely wild. The stacks of memorabilia that came in was absolutely staggering, at one point filling an entire room. Mr. Worrell provided me access to his collection of Lowden files, including his personal notes, working papers for the original history, and staff listings from nearly every year from the 1940s through the 1980s. It took many months to plow through all of this information. But in December 2006 the updated and revised Living Legends of Camp Lowden was published.

I have often said that putting together the camp history was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without having all of the pieces in hand, or knowing what the final product is supposed to look like. (Or to put it another way, like playing “connect the dots” without knowing the numbers on the dots.) Mr. Worrell provided the outline and structure for the camp history as well as a tremendous amount of background information. There is no way that I would have even attempted the project without that information. Without Mr. Worrell's endeavors over more than 40 years, the camp history would not be as complete as it is today.