John Spooner is a Casowasco legend. Many will remember him from his campfire ukulele strumming silly songs, his waterfront antics, his Venture 21 sailboat, Pegasus, and his wife, Clair, his son, Larry, and daughter, Louise. John was a second-career elementary school teacher from Barea, Ohio.
John’s first career was as a bachelor ship mate on Great Lake freighters, homeported out of Cleveland. He plied their magnificent waters from Duluth to Montreal, learning navigation and weather, lighthouse and reefs like the back of his hand. He recalled to me once that he enjoyed a day in port, showering and air-drying buck naked on the open hold of his ship, just as a tourist boat slowly chugged past, its rail filled with gasping sightseers.
It is unknown to me how Captain John came upon Casowasco, but he was a fixture when I arrived in 1979. It offered him a free dock to berth the Pegasus, and for the small price of teaching sailing on the camps Sunfish and Phantoms, and shifts lifeguarding nippers, the good Captain was free to fix and polish his beloved sailboat. Summers were grand, for John I’m sure, a restorative respite from elementary school life.
Each evening Captain John would join the rest of the summer staff rotating among campfires with his ukulele, singing songs that remain rooted in my memory. “All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir.” John was singing and practicing inclusion generations before it was being maligned as woke. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” was one of my favorites, for it painted a picture of what the kingdom of God would look like, complete with the buzzing of the bees and the bubblegum trees.
His wife Clair, volunteered in the office. Larry, in high school at the time, was the camp Romeo. He was always on the prowl for members of the opposite sex. He was good looking and knew all the best places around camp to sneak away and swap spit. Louise was Cosmopolitan as fully as a teenage girl can be, blow drying her hair and painting here nails before that was a thing. I took her on an Adirondack canoe trip once. She assured us she could live without a blow dryer for a week. When it came time to drive home, she was a long time in the Pizza Hut’s women’s room. She said that she made work each day as she disappeared into the woods with a shovel, but her agony and groans said otherwise.
One evening at dinner, Captain John asked me if I wanted to go sailing that night. “In the dark?” I asked. “It will be perfect,” John assured me. “The moon will be full and the wind is expected to be brisk.” “Sure,” I agreed. This should be fun. It was just John and I tacking Owasco Lake at midnight. Other than red and green running lights, we were sailing like lightning, healed up until both our butts were soaked.
“I got something to show you,” John told me, with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ve been working on this all week.” What could it possibly be, I wondered? John slipped into the cabin and I heard a cassette tape sucked into a player. High on the two stays off the main mast, newly installed Radio Shack speakers came to life. Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries woke the waves with a hundred decibels of pure exuberance. I stood, as if at attention, and directed the imaginary orchestra like a conductor, sans a wand. Wind and waves, speed and angels, sound and fury expanded my conception of God’s magnificent kingdom and the potential it is waiting to reveal.
Watch. Wait patiently. Expect the movement of the Holy Spirit. Lessons taught to me by Captain John. Thank you, Captain, my Captain.
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Lane choice was no choice this morning. The only lane not occupied by two swimmers was lane 6, the outside lane of the aging pool. “Okay, then,” I thought as I slipped on my goggles and began my laps.
Lane 6 is the road less traveled for multiple reasons. At one end, entry stairs crowd the wall. A Hoyer lift held belts and pullies overhead, making for a cramped approach and turn. At the other end is a chrome ladder into the deep end. Catch a hand on that and, yikes! All of which to say, the sandpaper textured edge of the pool ran its length. Careful positioning avoided stubbed toes and jammed fingers, but also distracted my glide induced meditation. When in Rome, they say.
As I pulled my sorry butt and wrinkled body out of the pool, I saw a cue of three waiting for a lane to swim. I was ashamed to think to myself how I was mentally grumbling about swimming lane 6 all to myself while others were waiting just to begin their laps.
I’m not proud of how selfish and shallow I can be. It’s a character defect that I’ve worked a lifetime to perfect, and a lifetime to correct. Some days are better than others. Sigh. Forgive me, Lord.
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United Methodist Clergy frequently made their way to Casowasco for meetings, retreats, visits, and to direct one of the many summer camps for children. I practiced this rhythm throughout my pastoral ministry, at times more frequently than others. Driving down to camp has always been like finding respite from the anxieties of the world, a chance to breathe deeply, to claim a bit of serenity, if even for a time before reentry into the storm tossed world.
Other than exposure to my dad, who ended up serving 19 years in the parish before dying young, and, Bob Stoppert, the Director / Manager, my perception of Methodist ministers was they were a bunch of conservative, straight laced, black suit kind of humorless Oxford wing tipped preachers, who wore protective rubbers at the first sight of rain.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Harry came to our staff table Sunday afternoon and reported in a booming voice that he needed “two gigantic red balls” for his camp. We about knocked ourselves out laughing so hard. Harry, in his naivety, had no idea why we were all laughing. Another preacher stopped if he saw any of us loafing and told us to give him ten pushups. He was also known to tell my buddy Clint to retrieve a flash light that fell through the hole landing on top of the pile in one of the Highland’s outhouses. Um, no thank you.
Gordon woke his camp every morning at 6 am clad only in a bathing suit and flip flops, blowing a tuba, sans a polished bell. He probably bought it at auction. He also had a habit of driving his boat right onto shore instead of taking a regular mooring like everyone else; fuel leak and scratches be damned. One night Gordon and his wife startled my gal and I down by the waterfront. He was pushing her in a stolen shopping cart on Galilee’s south lawn, testing it out for his camp “M*A*S*H.”
Sam was a socially awkward, lovable pastor, and academic who did his seminary work at the University of Chicago at the foot of Paul Tillich. His boney chicken dance broke the nose of one senior high girl on the south porch. His eye filled with tears over his guilt and remorse. Sam would eat his sugar donuts like a mad man, coving himself in powdered sugar, looking at us staring, asking, “What? What did I do now?”
Les, considered Casowasco a second home, without the taxes. He was frequently there on his day off. He showed up when the Bishop met with his cabinet of District Superintendents when it was appointment season. He could be found sulking in the hedges under a cracked window or outside a door hoping to catch a snippet of information about who was being sent where. As soon as he caught a whiff of information, he’d hit the telephone and get the rumor mill started. Les was a fly fisherman who taught me, along with others, to tie flies and fly fish lake, pond, and stream.
One morning, Les was marching his camp of older elementary campers down to the waterfront for a polar bear swim. We had been building a hip roof on the staff house and the building was draped with ladders and tarps, the grounds with stacks of shingles and pails of nails. As was his practice, Les called his gaggle to halt, threw open the door and began to sing at the top of his lungs, “Good morning to you! Good morning to you! You look kind of sleepy, in fact, you look creepy. Good morning to you!” At 6 am every morning, his camp’s chorus was not welcomed.
We prepared the ambush for his Friday morning arrival the evening before. We filled buckets full of water balloons and hoisted them to the roof. We ran hoses inside the staff house and charged them at the ready. We populated ourselves in the bushes and on the hillside fully ammo-ed up with hundreds of water filled projectiles. As soon as Les flung open the door and took a deep breath we sprung the trap. He was soaked with streams of water. The kids were bombed with water balloons, such they were dancing, laughing, and begging us to take aim for them. It was a slaughter. Everyone loved it. We still talk about it today, nearly fifty years later.
Lessons from a diverse community of Clergy men and women still guide me to this day. “Never fish from your own dock,” one mysteriously told me. He was in his second marriage with six children. “What?” I wondered. “It cost just as much to keep a full tank of gas as an empty one,” my future father-in-law told me before I went on a date. Pastors were a diverse bunch of folks. What I learned was that every one of them had a passion for Christ and a deep reservoir of faith.
Casowasco, where the butterflies fly and the bluebirds sing, at the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Breaking Yokes 