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LOOKING BACK
I attended Viking for only one summer (1964), and have many fond memories
of the experience. I went to Viking primarily because my uncle, the late
Hugh Parrish (then of Devon, PA) had loved it when he attended a couple of
times as a boy back in the 1930's. My uncle went on to become a US Marine
who fought at Okinawa and Iwo Jima during WWII, then became a B-47 bomber
pilot for the Air Force in Korea before retiring as a Major in 1967. Most
pertinent to this forum, my uncle was a life-long sailer, no doubt because
of his time at Viking. For many years Hugh raced locally around New
Castle, NH and later did some ocean racing out of Maine and Maryland.
Ironically, in the 1950s, Tom Lincoln, who later ran Viking, was a
next-door neighbor friend when I used to visit my grandparents in Devon,
though "Tommy" as he was known at the time, wasn't at Viking the year I
attended.
Fast forward (while also looking back), in the fall of 1984 I happened to
be on the Cape for the first time since my summer at Viking, and decided
to find the camp, see if it still existed/or had changed, etc. I drove
into Orleans on the main road (route # ?), and sure enough, came across
the familiar Camp Viking sign at the main entrance. Filled with curiosity,
I drove in slowly, parked under the pine trees just across deep center
field from the baseball field, and walked immediately down to my old Cabin
9. The one thing I was dying to know was whether or not the list of '64
residents I'd written in black magic marker on the wall on our last day at
camp had somehow managed to survive. Indeed they had, which, while I
thought it neat, was also not too surprising, considering...
...on that final day of camp in '64, while waiting a couple of
way-too-quiet hours after most kids had left (in order to share a taxi up
to Logan Airport with a few of the longer-distance campers, the brothers
Paxton from Texas come to mind), I took the time to actually read some of
the many signatures of previous Cabin 9 residents that had been scribbled
onto the wall over the years. The wall was to the right as you entered
into the campers' bunk area from the counselors' quarters. And whose
signature did I discover I'd been walking past for two solid months that
entire summer of '64? Of course, that of my uncle, in pencil if you
can believe it, dated 1937 I believe. With the camp buildings torn down
now, I won't see it again, but I'll never forget that fitting, final day
of my one summer at Viking, not to mention seeing those signatures again
twenty years later, still intact.
-- Andy Black |
