Wiggins Ozark Camp (Part One of Two)

Many of you have been hounding me to write a little about Wiggins Ozark Camp, where I went for eight weeks for two summer, when I was about 12 and 13 (or so).

Wiggins Ozark Camp was located just outside of Lesterville, Missouri, population 164. My memory (all of this is from my memory) says that Lesterville is in Reynolds County, the county which adjoins Iron County, whose county seat is Ironton, about twenty miles away and the local big city. There were two other camps in the vicinity that kids from St. Louis attended, Taum Sauk and Zoe.

I am not sure how I go to Wiggins, except that my then best friend, Danny, went there, and I assume between my parents and his, this was a package deal. Danny was my best friend in 4th and 5th grade, before we moved from Clayton to Ladue. Then we drifted apart, and his mother died of leukemia (I think it was leukemia) and his father, Charles, whom everyone called Chili, closed their children's clothing store in Clayton, sold the house with the deep pile shag rugs, and moved with Danny and his sister(s) back to Texas, where he was from. I have no idea what happened to Danny.

I think Lesterville was about 3 hours southwest of St. Louis. The ride, on two lane highways, was a pretty one, but the highlight was stopping in Potosi for jellly donuts. How we discovered jelly donuts in Potosi, whether they really were the world's best jelly donuts, and whether anyone but us stopped there, I am not sure. But I reallly looked forward to the jelly donuts in Potosi.

After you drove though Lesterville (on the road that would take you to Johnson's Shut-In State Park), you saw a mailbox on the right by a dirt road, which said "C.R. Burroughs". Farmer Burroughs (who had no burros, and none that he wanted you to see) shared the entrance road with the camp. The road to the camp went back about, maybe half a mile or so, a typical one lane dirt road with a grass strip in the middle, and then you went through a wooden gate that at one time had been painted white.

The camp was not large, and it was pretty rustic, I think. There was the boys section and the girls section. The boys section had four cabins, each of which probably held about twenty boys. The cabins were The Guillotine, The Gallows, Grant's Tomb, and Lee's Tomb. I don't know if the girls cabins had equally evocative names; I think not.

When you drove into the camp, you saw a field in front of you and to the right, and a hillside rising to the left. In the field at the far end was the swimming pool. You drove by the pool up a hill, and you were in another open space. Here was the lower lake, which I think was a man made lake, with a small dock, and a lot of canoes. The hill still rose to the left. After you went past the lake the road split in three directions. To the right were the boys cabins. Straight ahead was another gate, in back of which was a larger field. To the immediate right was the building where you did arts and crafts (so to speak), and the horse barn was at the far end of the field. If you took the road to the left at the split, you would swing around and wind up at the top of the hill. There you would find the main lodge, which is where the camp offices were, and where we ate. In back of the main lodge were the girls' cabins.

That was the physical layout.

The camp was owned by Emil Wiggins (known as Wig) and his wife, known as Wiglet. Wig was a coach (teacher?) at Kirkwood High School, in suburban St. Louis; I don't know what Wiglet did. Wig was sort of a big guy, and Wiglet was probably about 4 foot 8 inches tall, and walked with a limp. Their daughter Sue was a counsellor; she was quite attractive. Jerry was my first counseller. He had very big muscles, and looked extraordinarily. Eventually, he married Sue and took over the camp. But now the camp is long gone. I don't know what happened to Sue and Jerry.

My assistant counseler was Steve, who somehow I knew, maybe. He did not have big muscles. He was sort of a stocky guy, and he liked to have his back rubbed. He decided that I should be the back rubber, something which I hated doing, but he was the boss, and I had to do that on a regular basis. I don't remember the other counselers. There was a guy whose last name might have been Schneider. He was mainly interested in the girls, I think. We had all sorts of stories about what happened on the counsellors' nights off. The campers got no nights off.

A lot of the kids came from St. Louis, but not everyone. I remember kids from Chicago, and from Evansville, Indiana. They were impressed because our St. Louis newspaper had daily comics in color. Even Chicago did not have that!

I remember getting the newspaper every day. (I don't think kids at camp today do that.). There were also no laundry facilities at camp, and we mailed our laundry home in metal laundry boxes every month. That really seems weird to me; it seemed equally weird to me then. I was always worried about running out of clothes, and about the laundry not coming. So, I think I wore the same clothes day after day after day.

The food was OK, I recall. Each meal was accompanied by different flavor "bug juice", which I think was cool aid. There was also milk, but I never liked milk. At home, I would drink chocolate milk (or Ovaltine) some times, but never white milk. Wiglet wanted to get me to eat milk, and one morning at breakfast she said to me: "If you don't want to drink milk, that is OK. I never drank milk when I was young and I turned out OK". That convinced me. Wiglet, who looked pretty old to me, and walked with this limp. If I did not drink milk, I would wind up like her. Her limp was due to not drinking milk. I started drinking milk.