At our June 1997 class reunion, some of us discovered that the summer of 1952, when we had gone to European work camps, had been a defining experience of our adult lives. Part of its power lay in the fact that we did it for free and for fun long before the Peace Corps became an official program or community work earned you academic credit. But also, as Nell Goldstein Stern '52 wrote me, as adults we have applied "the great lesson of working in the Friends' way: with, not for, others."
During our college years, we at-tended the weekend work camps in Philadelphia, started in 1947 by Dave Richie and his wife, Mary, and sponsored by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Dave recruited by word of mouth (at Swarthmore, Professor Willis Weatherford was his main contact), and he published a mimeo-graphed newsletter, Fresh Paint, which was distributed to Philadelphia churches and schools to find families who needed help. Work campers stayed at a church or school from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. On Saturdays we worked, and on Sundays we went first to Quaker meeting.
The summer of 1950 Nell Stern went to a work camp at Valle de Brava, Mexico; in 1951 Elspeth Monro Reagan '52 went to one on a Navajo reservation run by Mam and Uncle Bert Baily from Westtown School; and in 1950 Amy Blatchford Hecht '52 was a "snake pit aide" with the American Friends Service Committee's Institutional Service Unit at Columbus State Hospital and then in 1951 worked at Illinois' Dixon State School for the mentally retarded. Pam Taylor Wetzels '52 went to a New Hampshire work camp for kids from Harlem, where they rebuilt and painted the old farmhouse's foundation and evenings read aloud to the kids. My roommate Sally Grinnell Metzger '52 spent the 1950 summer (as I did) in Austria with the Experiment in International Living, which had "opened my eyes to the effect of World War II on people [there] ... five years after the war."
These experiences led us to sign up with the American Friends Service Committee's Quaker International Voluntary Service (QIV). The QIVers from our class were Esther Fiske Doherty, Amy Blatchford Hecht, Nell Goldstein Stern, Nancy Cliffe Vernon, Elspeth Monro Reagan, Jennifer Lee, and me. None of us was a birthright Quaker, but as Esther Doherty wrote, Swarthmore's Quaker attitude made us eager to spend our last "free" summer rebuilding bombed houses and clearing fields for refugees.
Esther Doherty's parents were filled with "mixed pride and apprehension" at the idea, but Nell Stern and her parents already knew "that living my values was for me invaluable," and Nancy Vernon's father had been a classmate of QIV director Ed Wright. Elspeth Reagan's parents "knew [and approved] of her interests," whereas my parents probably preferred for me to take the State Department job I was offered but never said so.
We all felt that being "tourists" in war-torn Europe was wrong, though with Swarthmore still filled with World War II vets and commanding officers as well as classmates called up for the Korean War, we also understood the wish for an alternative to the draft. Amy Hecht summed it up by writing that the summer "fit my family's priorities and beliefs ... and seemed like a logical and very interesting step.... I was really taken with what AFSC was doing ... the state of the world, pacificism and ... the continuing reconstruction of Europe.... And going to Europe was glamorous to a kid who had never been out of the country."
Overseas work-camp assignments were handled by QIV director Ed Wright, the husband of Professor Elizabeth Wright, whose seminars Esther Doherty and I had taken. About half of us paid our way over and back; some were given the trip by parents or grandparents. Elspeth Reagan had "saved for two years ... [and] the AFSC paid part of [the] costs."
At camp we earned our room and board in return for work, but as Amy Hecht wrote, "money was tight." She added that "there are some funny references in my letters home about how frugal I was being. I remember buying bread, cheese, and red wine to take on the train to Finland; in 24 hours the bread was as hard as a rock. We all learned to hitchhike, too, but did not write home to say so!"
Each group had a short orientation at Pendle Hill, where we spent mornings discussing dealing with different cultures and afternoons weeding the garden. We were warned to expect questions about American race relations, but no one told me that a Finnish camper would ask me why Americans were sandblasting Adolf Hitler's name off German monuments.
We crossed the Atlantic in two groups on crowded converted troop ships with triple-decker bunk beds. Hecht, Reagan, Stern, and I sailed from Montreal on the Arosa Kulm. Bayard Rustin, the black civil rights leader, was on board and spoke to us over the intercom, and I had spirited breakfast conversations with a Jewish rabbi about Israel. The second group sailed on the Groote Beer with Christine Rosenblatt Downing '52, who was heading for an international student meeting.
After landing at Le Havre, France, my group took the boat train to AFSC headquarters in Paris, past sidewalks painted with slogans like "Ridgway go home!" AFSC put us up in the Montmartre youth hostel until we left for camp. The second group landed at Rotterdam and left for camp from Amsterdam. Heading for Switzerland, Esther Doherty saw heavily bombed Cologne, where the cathedral stood in a sea of brickbats.
We quickly learned to catch trains and find strange places on our own, but QIVer Jo Sage and I spent half a day in a Finnish station because we could not read the train schedule, in which 1,300 hours equaled 1 p.m. We arrived at Rovaniemi, Finland, at dusk on Midsummer's Night Eve (about 10 p.m.), sleeping on the floor of an office. The next day Jo took one bus and I another. At a crossroads in the pine forest, the bus driver pointed up a forest trail, and I got off and soon found myself at a Swedish camp where the campers sang "Waltzing Matilda" to welcome me.
My work camp was housed in two abandoned army barracks, and our camp joke was that camp would be over the day the floor fell in. The only other American was Buddy Siegel, who spoke less Finnish, French, or German than I. My chum was Esther, a hitchhiking young Swiss pianist who later became a harpsichord professor at Bern.
Our Finnish camp leader had been left for dead as a teenager on a Russian battlefield, but he hated Swedes more than Russians and barely spoke to our young Swedish leader. Camp meetings were held in Finnish but required translations to Swedish, German, French, and, finally, English. We argued about work hours but took long coffee breaks when our farmers loved to tease me if a Russian beat an American at the (off-limits) Helsinki Olympics. One day in the fields, where we dug drainage ditches or pried out tree roots, a Finnish farmer's wife said that I worked like a "true Finn." I drank coffee like one, too. After camp ended I went to Helsinki, where Jo Sage's camp friends kindly took me in. When we left they gave each of us a single sweet pea, as costly there as a dozen roses.
Nell Stern's time was spent in an Italian camp near San Nicola da Crissa, south of Rome. She stayed in an unfinished school house, eating "cement dust." The work campers had to carry their water from the town well, and many, including Nell, contracted hepatitis. They built a wash house so the village women would not freeze while doing laundry, terraced fields so the hills could be farmed better, and taught canning "so it wouldn't be summer feast and winter famine."
She became good friends with one of the villagers and her daughter, later sending her packages, and was photographed wearing her party dress, but she suspects it was Sam Slie, an African American who spoke fluent Italian, who fascinated the villagers the most.
Elspeth Reagan was the only American in a Swedish work camp in Beunchinbuhl, near Nuremberg, Germany. They built new housing for young couples, bombed-out families, and Czech refugees, and everyone eligible for housing helped with the work. Elspeth wrote that she had "an intense and useful learning experience in community living and in getting on with people of other backgrounds and languages." She also had a proposal of marriage from the Danish camp leader and remembers watching wood carvers making replicas of the medieval woodwork destroyed by American bombing.
About half of us ended up in the countries we were assigned to, but Amy Hecht, Nancy Vernon, and Esther Doherty went to more than one camp. In France Amy Hecht first went to a refugee center in Sucy-en-Brie run by a Protestant organization called "La Cimade." It housed displaced persons from Eastern Europe and raised Angora rabbits, vegetables, and pigs. The work campers went to Paris on Bastille Day, and Amy even helped run a Sunday service in French. Later she went to a camp near Nantes, where they built houses. She found that women were supposed to do the cooking and laundry (my Finnish camp just took turns cooking oatmeal or boiling potatoes), but after Amy and fellow QIVer Nan Gouinlock tie-dyed the camp laundry, they got to unload red-roof tiles from railroad cars instead. The campers also hitchhiked in pairs to Rennes, Saint-Malo, and Mont-Saint-Michel. Amy was impressed because such "wonderful people had so little money ... as well as by the strange feeling that Americans were not universally liked." Americans had bombed Nantes' submarine pens on school holidays when children were outside playing.
At her first camp at Bern, Switzerland, Esther Doherty worked long days building roads by crushing rock and clearing land. At Esther's second Swiss camp at Canton Wallis, they cleared out a building for next summer's work camp; then at her third in Austria, they built a schoolhouse.
Nancy Vernon went to camps in Sweden, Germany, and Wales and remembers that "Sweden was beautiful and much cushier than Germany." At Ludwigshafen, Germany, she met Penn student Martha Ono Uyeki, who had sailed with her group. They built homes for refugees, living in a new youth hostel and traveling to the work sites by streetcar. Marty Uyeki writes that compared with her Austrian camp, Ludwigshafen had a lively group spirit, held discussions, had speakers from the community, went to local fairs, and took weekend trips together.
When camp ended Nancy and Marty went to Zurich, where I met them and Nell Stern at the youth hostel. Then Nancy and I hitchhiked over the Alps to Venice to meet Esther Doherty and a friend of mine from Chicago on September 1, just as we had planned months ago in Worth's K Section.
Everyone except me soon went home to a job or school. I wanted to be an expatriate writer, but after hanging about London that fall with classmate Marie deKiewiet Hemphill, who was attending the University of London, I changed my mind and headed home. Like the rest, I remember best the shock of seeing how very rich America was. n
Mary Alzina Stone Dale '52 is the author of 10 books, the latest of which is the Mystery Reader's Walking Guide to Washington, D.C. (NTC/Contemporary Publishing, 1998).
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