Remembering a Giver and a Doer

Another in a series of positive influences in my life. I like to call them the shrapnel-mitigators:

He was one of my earliest role models, though I didn’t know it at the time. How could I have been aware of all those aspirational attributes at age of four? But they would unfold and be revealed over the years as I got to know Dan. All I knew at the time was, my father placed a tremendous amount of trust in him. I still recall our official first meeting when my father introduced me to Dan Koenig - the new head counselor at Timlo. Camp Timlo was the Adirondack summer camp for boys my parents operated. The scenic Shangri-La lay on the shores of Trout Lake near Bolton Landing, N.Y. My father may have been the camp director, but day-to-day operations couldn’t be carried out without a right-hand man.

Head counselors, I learned later in life, weren’t all that easy to keep year after year. Job duties revolved around running not just a tight ship, but a mammoth one. The camp was laden with boys ages 5 through 16 from around the country and South America. The 70 or so campers were shepherded by counselors who weren’t much older. It was the summer of 1968, and Dan’s age didn’t even meet the quarter-century mark. My father discovered Dan after sending out summer job recruitment feelers to Indiana University at Bloomington where Dan was an undergrad. He spent two summers at Timlo as a counselor before being promoted to the top spot.

I watched as my father ushered Dan into his office for the season’s first meeting. An hour or so later, Dan lumbered back into our living room with massive pieces of cardboard in tow. In addition to his impending duties as head counselor, my father had just saddled Dan with the project of completing construction of my new dollhouse, a 3D cardboard creation, complete with painted on windows and flower boxes. Seemed like a simple project, but it wasn’t. Somewhere at about the point where the cardboard roof was to be affixed to the cardboard walls, Dan hit a wall and was stumped. When he stopped to reassess, I hit a wall and threw a tantrum. I stomped, wailed, then stomped some more, waiting for the magic to kick in. Tantrums quickly wore my father down, but Dan remained curiously unmoved.

He looked me squarely in the eye and declared his intention to rise from the floor where he was seated and leave without completing project dollhouse if I continued behaving in such a way. I stared back in astonishment. As Dan assessed my next move with a stoic poker face, I knew in my pre-school gut there was no room for negotiation. Instantaneously, I shelved the tantrum and settled down to witness Dan resume the architectural puzzle until he solved it. That’s how our bond began. And cobbling that cardboard house together was a cakewalk compared to the nine weeks spent as commander in chief of a boys’ camp.

It wasn’t an easy ride: days began pre-dawn and sometimes didn’t end until well into the night. There were kitchen, maintenance, counselor and infirmary staff schedules to coordinate, conflicts to resolve, late food deliveries to remedy, rambunctious kids to protect, and the occasional wayward counselors (with a penchant for spending off hours at the town watering holes) to discipline. Dan, not being of especially muscle-bound stature, made up for it with iron-fisted integrity. He often found himself in the position of laying down the law with guys twice his girth, never flinching at the prospective consequences. Like that unfortunate day when a couple of the less-than-stellar employees paid a towny to rough Dan up after he refused to give them the night off to go drinking. His nose bloodied and his pride a bit hurt, Dan got right back on the horse and kept towing the line. Not only did he stick it out, Dan set a service record with five summers as Timlo’s head counselor.

My father said he never had to worry when Dan was in charge. His presence was a steady, calming one, and I know for a fact this made my parents’ lives infinitely easier. Chronologically, Dan may have been 24, but he was wise and reliable beyond his years. When he wasn’t at the lodge troubleshooting, he walked the property to check on operations. Dan took those responsibilities seriously and handled everything that came at him without delegation or excuses.

Dan Koenig came of age when standards were vastly different, and expectations commensurately high. Dan was hardly the only 20-something of his generation who earned himself an early ticket to resiliency and maturity, but even for that golden era of responsibility, he was a stand-out. When my grandfather, who founded Camp Timlo in 1935, passed away in July of 1976, Dan stepped into the center of the circle during evening flag-lowering ceremonies, surrounded by dozens of campers and counselors, and gave an impromptu and heartfelt eulogy.

“He had a calming demeanor and earned our respect as counselors,” said Steve Hessberg, who worked at Timlo as a counselor during the late 60s and early 70s.

“Wisdom, temperance, justice, courage...all great traits of Dan's. He was an impressive leader. In some ways we feared him, which was a good thing at a camp with a 100+ young lunatics,” remembered Tom Lonergan, who began attending Timlo in 1969 at the age of 14, and went on to be a counselor. “After a meal, when Dan stood up at the head table, all campers went quiet. He had a silent way of commanding respect and certainly left his mark on the years he ran the camp.”

Somehow, it seems a stretch that today’s 24-year-old would sign up for what Dan excelled at for five summers. For starters, how would they tear themselves away from the selfie stick and forego separation from Black Myth: Wukong at the Play Station?

Josh Goldman and Robert Latour, who attended Timlo as campers in the late 60s both recalled their head counselor’s fondness of imparting wisdom through anecdotes. A favorite: Dan’s retelling of ‘the parachute story,’ and the importance of preparedness vis-à-vis packing one’s own parachute before a skydiving adventure. “Basically, he was telling us to be responsible for yourself and your own wellbeing,” remembered Goldman.

Dan’s pursuit of a master’s degree in education media (and later a doctorate) precluded him from continuing his summer career at Camp Timlo. In 1977, he took a position at Piedmont Technical College in South Carolina, where he remained until 2010, retiring as Dean of General Education.

After losing touch, my parents received a Christmas card from Dan in the early aughts, out of the blue. The cover was a photo of him with his mother in front of the tree, Dan’s arms wrapped lovingly around her. Several years later, social media reconnected Dan and me in a more cohesive way. By this time, my father was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, but Dan’s passion for camp nostalgia renewed my resolve to delve into my father’s legacy. Being proficient at web design and an ace researcher, he constructed a Timlo website and began to talk reunions.

Soon Dan had canvassed enough interest to make it happen. About 30 alumni (from Timlo and its sister camp, Pine Log) gathered on the shores of Trout Lake in June of 2014. We barbecued, sat around the evening campfire and reminisced, marveling at how fresh 50-year-old memories suddenly became when we gathered to remember things like swim competitions, the perils of incorrectly rigging a sailboat, and the handwritten letters we wrote home to the parents each week.

Dan made commemorative T-shirts for everyone and passed out memorabilia-laden gift bags to attendees. He was generous to a fault, perhaps too much so. He later shared with me on one of our subsequent Florida winter get-togethers his sadness at being taken advantage of by those of a somewhat, shall we say, less than-reciprocal nature. But the disappointments didn’t embitter him. He only seemed to get kinder with the passage of time.

A massive stroke six years ago robbed Dan of the ability to speak or walk, but Timlo alumni Mike Rush and Robert Latour got the fantastic idea to have monthly camp reunions via zoom, which brightened Dan’s world, to say the least. Those were beautiful, full-circle moments that made me especially thankful for the unifying powers of technology. The man who gave so much of himself all those years ago to the campers was now being given a price-above-rubies kind of gift when he needed it the most.

Dan was 80 when he passed away on Dec. 11^th. His life was long and impactful. He was a positive role model to legions of campers, counselors, and no doubt, to his college students over the decades. From that memorable dollhouse dust-up, Dan enforced upon me the concept of consequence. Limits and boundaries unavoidably shape human character for the better – a distant and antiquated concept nowadays. But Dan dropped that little moral gem into my psyche early and effectively. And my gratitude for him is eternal.

Rest well, Uncle Dan. You’ve more than earned it.