The Adventures of Jack and Billy Joe

by A. Jeff Tisdale

  “Now that he knows our names,” groused Billy Joe, “we’ll catch everything.”

  “Jack and Billy Joe will give each of you a ham and cheese sandwich,” the coach announced. “These sandwiches are courtesy of the ladies of the junior college kitchen.”

  Then Jack and Billy Joe handed out RC Colas to each boy and the coach announced, “The RCs are courtesy of the Nehi Bottling Works. When you finish your drink, bring your bottles to the back and put them in the wooden drink crates. I’ll take those back to Mr. Putnam at the plant.”

  The bus arrived at Roosevelt Park with most of the boys asleep, but they quickly awoke when the coach walked up and down the aisle saying, “Rise and shine, boys. We’re here. End of the line. Everybody off.”

  The boys woke up with some yawning, some confusion and some already wishing they were back home in familiar surroundings. The coach knew how they were feeling from many years experience with boys. He knew that the answer was to keep them busy and to make them feel they were needed and wanted here.

  “Jack and Billy Joe,” the coach said, “you are not through yet. Roll up that tarp covering the luggage and haul it down here. The rest of you boys claim your luggage and stay with it until I can get us all checked in.” He walked in the camp office door to get that job done.

  Jack and Billy Joe climbed the ladder to the top of the bus and started handing down the luggage. “Now that he knows our names, we’ll catch all the dirty jobs,” Billy Joe complained again.

  “Yeah, you said that but what kind of ‘dirty jobs’ can he give us in two weeks?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know, but you’ll see.”

  The door to the office opened and the coach walked out. “Okay, guys, listen up,” he said. “Each group has to furnish two boys for KP every day. Does everybody know what a KP is?” He looked around the group and everybody was nodding their heads and several made groans of protest. “Since Jack and Billy Joe loaded and unloaded the bus, they will be on the KP list last. You will start tomorrow morning so Terry Watkins and Bob Kraft will report to that building”—he paused to point to the building next to the office—“at five AM. One of the staff will be up all night so if you will tell him where you are, he’ll get you up.”

  “Okay, let’s go to our hut.” And he turned to walk toward the other buildings.

  All the buildings except the office and the shower building were roofs held up by four corner posts, screens down halfway and masonite from the ground to four feet above the ground. They all had screen doors at each end. The buildings were obviously for summertime only and designed to keep the rain and mosquitoes out but to allow the air to circulate through.

  Inside the hut, canvas cots were lined up along each wall. On each cot, there were two blankets and a pillow. At the end of the cot, there was a wooden locker that opened from the top. The top had a hasp for a lock.

  “Okay boys, every day except Friday, you will make up your cot with both blankets spread evenly over it and the pillow under the top blanket at the head of the bed. You were each told to bring padlocks with two keys. Those are to lock your foot locker to secure your clothes, valuables or whatever. I will give each of you a tag with a string on it. You will write your name on the tag, tie one of your keys to the end of the string and give the tag with the key to me. I will hold on to them in case you lose the other key. We don’t have any special way for you to set up your foot locker like the army but we do want everything to be neat. You can decorate your area any way you want to as long as it’s neat. Anybody got any questions?”

  There was a chorus of “No, sir.”

  “Supper will start at five thirty and you can get in until six thirty. After that, you’re gonna be hungry until breakfast.” He turned and left the hut.

  “This is not too bad,” Jack said to Billy Joe.

  “It ain’t home,” Billy Joe said, being his normal complaining self.

  “Let’s make up our cots, stow our gear in our foot lockers and look around a bit before supper,” Jack proposed.

  They both got busy and had their areas shipshape in five minutes.

  “Which way we gonna go first?” Billy Joe asked.

  “I think I saw the lake down that way.” Jack pointed down the hill. “Let’s go down this path and see if it takes us there.”

  As they walked down the wide path, they began to see blue patches of water through the trees. When they rounded a curve in the path, there was the lake with boats tied up to four wooden docks that jutted out into the lake.

  As they got closer, they could see two floating wooden islands a few yards out from the docks that were obviously anchored to the bottom.

  “Those must be swimming docks,” Billy Joe observed.

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed, “and those boats are tied up but not locked. I wonder if you can use the boats or swim anytime you want to.”

  “I bet they have some really strict rules about when you can swim or boat and you probably have to get permission every time,” Billy Joe complained.

  The boys walked out on the dock to get a better look at the lake. It was not too big—bigger than any of the ponds at home but not as big as Bogue Homa Lake.

  “Look over there.” Billy Joe pointed to the opposite shoreline. “With all those trees hanging down in the water, there’s gotta be some good bream, white perch and shellcracker fishin’.”

  “Yeah, but I bet there’s not a fish hook in the whole camp,” Jack said.

  “What’cha think that is?” Billy Joe said, pointing to some buildings similar to their camp but on the other side of the lake.

  “I betcha that’s the girls’ camp. I heard there’s one over there,” Billy Joe said. “I heard the boys used to go over there and steal the girls’ panties.”

  “What’d they want with girls’ panties?”

  “I dunno but that’s what I heard.”

  “It feels like it’s gettin’ close to supper time,” Jack said. “Let’s go see if the mess hall is open.”

  They walked back up the hill and around to the mess hall. It was open so they went in. Coach Jackson was sitting at the front, obviously waiting for his boys. He checked Jack and Billy Joe off his list and said, “Just take a tray, some silverware and a bottle of milk and go on through the line. After you are served, sit at any table and eat.”

  “Thank you, sir,” they both said.

  They had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans, cornbread or white bread and a half pint box of ice cream. Two men dressed in white placed the food on their trays when the boys held them out. One of the men said, “You can have seconds on anything, boys. Just bring your tray back up to the line.”

  “I don’t much like string beans much but the rest of this looks pretty good—even the gravy on the taters,” Billy Joe said, being about as close to a compliment as he could ever manage.

  “It all looks good to me,” Jack said. “And I’m hungry.”

  The boys finished their supper—Billy Joe even ate all his string beans—and they walked back to their hut.

  Pinned to the door of the hut was a circular that said, “BIG BONFIRE POWWOW TONIGHT. Everybody meet at the CIRCLE at 8PM. The camp counselors will brief you on what’s new and on what’s planned. BE THERE.”

  “Where’s the Circle?” Billy Joe wondered.

  “I don’t know but we better find it pretty quick,” Jack pointed out.

  They knew it wasn’t down toward the lake so it had to be on the other side of the huts away from the lake. They walked past the shower building and through another row of huts to a driveway just like the one their hut was on. Since turning to the left would lead them into the woods, they turned right and walked up the road. At the same place the office building would have been on their road, there was an open grassy field with a big pile of firewood in its center.

  “This has got to be the Circle,” Jack decided.

  Billy Joe agreed and said, “I guess we’re very early. What we gonna do to kill time until the powwow?�
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  “Let’s just walk on around this road and see what there is to see,” Jack suggested.

  They followed the road up to a place where it turned right and they could see the office building.

  “I see,” Jack said. “This road comes in from the outside, goes all around the rows of huts with shower rooms in between them. The path to the lake goes off one corner and the Circle is on the opposite corner.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” Billy Joe agreed. “Let’s go on over to the office building and see what happens there.”

  The office building was closed but the boys found a bulletin board on the wall on the porch. They read all the notices. Most of them were for the counselors and the leaders like Mr. Martin and Coach Jackson. They did find out that “Lights out” was at 10 PM and all hut lights had to go off then. They also read the schedule of events for the next two weeks, saw the menu for every day, saw which adults were on duty each night and found that Mr. Martin and Coach Jackson were both on the list to stay up all night and watch the camp. The schedule of events was of the most interest to them. There was a lot of time for swimming and boating with the huts competing against each other. There were also competitive dry land games held on the Circle. One of the things that interested Jack and Billy Joe was the all-day hiking on the trails around the lake. That and the boating were right up their alley.

  The boys walked directly to their hut from the office building, completing the loop.

  On this entire walk, they had seen very few of the other boys walking around. They didn’t understand exactly why. When they entered their hut, they noticed that all the other boys were sitting or lying on their cots, either sleeping or talking.

  “Hey, Jerry,” Billy Joe said to one of the buys, “have you guys walked around to check the place out?”

  “Nah,” Jerry replied, “I don’t think they want us to do that. We’re waiting here for somebody to tell us what to do next.”

  “Did you see the piece of paper tellin’ about the powwow at the Circle?” Billy Joe asked.

  “Yeah, but we don’t know where the Circle is,” Jerry explained.

  Jack and Billy Joe looked at each other in disbelief. These guys planned to just sit here until some adult told them exactly what to do and where to do it.

  “Okay,” Jack said, “at about ten minutes to eight, we’ll take you to the Circle. What time is it now?” he asked Jerry who was wearing a watch.

  “It’s twenty minutes to eight,” he said.

  “Okay, all you guys get dressed to go to the Circle and we’ll show you where it is. You’ve got about ten minutes to get ready,” Billy Joe said loud enough for everybody in the hut to hear.

  Boys were scurrying around looking for their shoes and socks to put on.

  One boy even came to Jack and asked, “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said and in a louder tone, said, “Any of you guys who need to go to the bathroom, you had better go now.”

  Several of the boys left the hut to go to the “Shower Building,” which also contained the toilets and sinks.

  Billy Joe shook his head. “They gotta be told to go to the bathroom,” he muttered so nobody but Jack could hear.

  “You know it’s always been that way,” Jack said with a laugh.

  At ten to eight, they led the boys to the Circle.

  The Circle had changed. The lights that circled the field were on, a speaker’s stand had been placed at one end and there was a table loaded with cookies and a tub of chocolate milks in bottles covered with ice.

  “Okay, boys, gather around the speaker’s stand in a semicircle.”

  As they moved into a tighter semicircle, Jack could see that there were about 125 to 150 boys there. About 25 to a hut, he thought.

  All the adults were in folding chairs to the sides of the speaker’s stand and the man making the announcements was at a microphone on the stand. Jack didn’t know who he was.

  “I’m Mr. Harris, your camp director, and I want to welcome you all to Roosevelt Lake Park and our annual summer camp. We plan to make it interesting for you. We have a good group of camp counselors and leaders this year. You will be working with them on a daily basis and will probably only hear me on this PA system every day.”

  He continued, giving the overview of the camp and all the wonderful events that were planned. He also announced that there would be church and Sunday school on Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon would be a free time to do whatever they wanted to do.

  He then introduced Mr. Akins, his assistant, who went into the details of how the events would be scheduled and carried out. He told them that a schedule of events for each day would be posted in each hut by 3 PM every day except Sunday, the free day.

  Mr. Akins introduced all the leaders and counselors, who stood up as their names were called, smiled and waved.

  “It will be the responsibility of each of you to be at your scheduled place and on time for all events. A graph of how well each hut completes all the events, including being on time, will be posted on the bulletin board in front of the office. You are free to check it at any time you are not otherwise busy. At the end of the two weeks, the members of the winning hut will be given special achievement pins to be worn on your shirt or on your Boy Scout sash and it can be used toward qualifying for your citizenship merit badge.

  “Okay, let’s all have some cookies and chocolate milk and I’ll see you all here for your powwow tomorrow evening. Oh yes—I want each hut to elect a captain and tell your adult leader who that is. The leaders will tell the office and they’ll make a list. Enjoy yourselves.”

  The boys, their leaders and the counselors milled around for about an hour getting to know each other. Then somebody turned out half the lights, which seemed to mean, “Go to your hut and go to bed.” It was 9:30 PM so the hut lights had to be out in thirty minutes.

  Back in the hut, one of the boys said, “We need to elect a captain. How we gonna do it?”

  Another boy said, “Let’s just each write one name on a piece of paper and put it in a hat. Then we’ll just count the votes each person got and the one with the most will be our captain.”

  “What if somebody votes for himself?” another boy asked.

  “That’s okay, if he’s nuts enough to want that job, I say, let him have it.”

  They all laughed and scribbled a name on a piece of paper and put it in the baseball cap that was the official ballot box. Two of the boys counted the ballots and finally announced that five boys got one vote each, Billy Joe got eight votes and the winner was Jack with twelve.

  Jack tried to protest but they all yelled him down and some even called for a speech but Jack said, “Forget about it. I ain’t givin’ no speech.”

  Coach Jackson stuck his head in the door and said, “Okay, boys, it’s five to ten. Lights out in five minutes.”

  “Coach, we picked a captain. It’s Jack,” one of the boys said before the coach could get away.

  “Good. Does everybody agree with that?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused.

  “I’ll turn his name into the office tomorrow morning then,” he said. “Jack, I’ll talk to you in the morning about what your duties are. Get the lights out in the next couple minutes, boys.” He turned and walked away.

  “As captain, I guess you get to turn the lights out, Jack,” one of the boys said and the others laughed.

  “No,” Jack corrected, “I get to appoint the one nearest the light switch to turn them out, that’s you, Jerry.” He pointed to Jerry, who was the closest. Jack turned to get undressed to get in bed.

  As they always were, Jack and Billy Joe were awake and dressed by five thirty AM. Not knowing what time breakfast started, they walked over to the mess hall to check it out. There were already good smells in the air as the cooks pre-prepared breakfast as much as possible. That way, when the boys began to show up it would go faster.

  When they reached the mess hall, the
y could see the coach sitting at a table just inside the door drinking coffee. He saw them at the same time and waved them in.

  “Good morning, boys,” he said. “You’re up early.”

  “Yes, sir. We always get up between five and five thirty,” Jack said.

  “Good. I need to appoint one boy to wake up the camp every morning,” the coach said with a grin. “Which one of you is it gonna be?”

  “I’m already the hut captain,” Jack reminded him.

  “That’s right, you are.” He grinned even bigger. “That makes you ‘It,’ Billy Joe.”

  “Yes, sir. I guess so,” Billy Joe said in a hurt tone. “When do I wake them up every morning? I don’t have a watch.”

  “That’s okay. You just march right up here to the mess hall and look at that clock.” He pointed to the clock on the wall. “When it says five minutes to six, you start your rounds of all the huts. Just stick your head in the door, flip on the lights and yell, ‘Six o’clock. Time to get up.’ And go on to the next hut until you have done them all.”

  “What if they don’t get up?” Billy Joe asked.

  “That’s not your problem. After you give them their wake-up call, it’s up to the hut captain to see that they do get up.”

  “How do I know what all jobs a hut captain has gotta do?” Jack asked.

  “That’s why you have to go to a hut captains meeting at eight AM, to find out what you’re supposed to do,” the coach said.

  “Billy Joe, that clock says six minutes to six,” the coach pointed out. “Hadn’t you better start your rounds? And Jack, hadn’t you better be in your hut when Billy Joe gets there to make sure all your people get up?”

  They both said, “Yes, sir” and left the mess hall to perform their duties.

  After breakfast, both boys walked back to the hut to make sure their areas were in good shape. They didn’t know if there would be a military-type inspection or not but they knew they didn’t need the grief if there was.

  At five minutes to eight, Jack walked back to the office to attend the hut captains meeting. Mr. Akins, the assistant camp director, met them at the door and said, “Let’s go over to the mess hall where we can use a table and have plenty of room.” They all trooped next door to the mess hall, where Mr. Akins selected a table in the corner to stay out of the way of the cooks and KPs.