What I Learned

Summer camp can be an educational experience, but not necessarily as the organizers intended. My first time was in 1943 at Camp Airy in Thurmont, Maryland. (It is still in operation today.) I was nine years old. World War II was still on. I went together with my best friend, Nathan Mensh, whose family lived just across the alley from mine in Washington, D.C. We went by train – and that in itself was a big adventure.

At camp I learned to recognize the different bugle calls, for getting up (“Reveille”), for meals (“Come and Get your Beans, Boys”), and for lowering the flag at night (“Taps”). But the main and lingering lesson I learned was a sad one: Be careful whom you trust – even your best friend can let you down.

For the background to this story, I must tell you another, about my names. The two I was given at birth were “Ashleigh Ellwood.” But they were never used. My mother, for some reason – although my father’s name was Victor – thought it would be cute to call me her own little “Junior.” And so she did – and, as a result, so did everyone else. And I went through my entire childhood being known as “Junior Brilliant,” in consequence hating my “real names,” and signing my name, when necessary, as “JBrilliant.” Only a few people knew my secret, one of whom was Nathan Mensh.

In the different atmosphere of Camp, Nathan somehow lost any sense of loyalty he might have felt to me, and, to exert some kind power he might have had over me, started threatening to tell my names to other kids. I had to write to my parents to write to Nathan and tell him to stop doing this.

Somehow our friendship survived all this, but I had learned my lesson about trusting. The saga of my name stretched on until I got to college. In the interim, I adopted the not very satisfactory expedient of saying that the “J” stood for John, a name I never felt comfortable with. Finally, when I had turned the traditional coming-of-age of 21 and was already in my first year at University College London, I made what was for me the momentous decision to come out of the Name Closet and go public. 

On the bulletin board In the Student Lounge, I put up a notice announcing that the real name of the person they knew as John Brilliant was Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant, and that, in future, he wished to be known as such. I felt I had been very brave – but some of the drama of this occasion was spoiled for me when I went back the next day. My notice was still there, but some wickedly witty person had put quotation marks around the word “such.”

My only other summer camp experience occurred many years later, when I was not a camper, but a Counsellor, at a camp outside Glendale, California for underprivileged boys. It was sponsored by the Jewish Big Brothers of Los Angeles and was called Camp Max Straus. Each Counsellor was responsible for one cabin, containing 12 boys. My happiest memory was of telling bedtime stories, which I made up, after the campers had gone to bed and all the lights were out – except for a flashlight I held and just directed upwards.

Unfortunately, none of those stories got written down, or recorded. But they had their effect of putting the boys to sleep. (The only other time I felt called upon to use this talent was when my wife Dorothy was ill, and already in bed, while I was still up. Those stories I did preserve. I based them on things I knew Dorothy was interested in, like figure-skating (“The Skater Who Couldn’t Fall”), plumbing (“The Magic Plumber”), and animals (“The Elephant Who Forgot”).

Something else I learned at Summer Camp were the songs we sang. One that lingers in my memory was about a great true disaster – the sinking of theTitanic. But what impressed me was how joyfully the chorus seemed to be sung by those kids:

Oh, it was sad, so sad,
It was sad when the great ship went down –
All the husbands and wives – even children lost their lives,
It was sad when the great ship went down.

Inevitably, this eventually inspired a thought of my own:

“If we were totally prepared for every disaster,
what would be the point of having disasters?”