Introduction
Ginny Reynolds, the seventeen-year-old heroine of The Camp Girl by Frank Anvic, discovers a new threshold of real life when she goes to a summer camp in the mountains. She is an innocent when she arrives, but an overwhelming series of events soon involve her in sexual discoveries that change the direction of her life forever.
Ginny's parents, Gilbert and Priscilla Reynolds, are sufficiently well-to-do to be able to devote most of their time to world travelling, and they have diverted a minimum of their interest from pleasure-seeking to the upbringing of their only daughter. As the story opens, Ginny is a naive but voluptuous girl who has led a rather sheltered life in religious schools.
Ginny has begged her parents to let her go to the summer camp with her best friend, Andrea Cornwell, a girl only a year older but considerably more sophisticated. Her father has given in to her request only because Andrea is the daughter of his closest friend and most valued business associate. Her mother, in turn, has consented only after she has investigated the camp, checked all of its references, and found everything about it to be entirely in keeping with the family's so-called station in life.
Ginny, although intelligent, is only vaguely aware of all these motivating forces. All her life, as an only child, she has been protected from life. She knows that Andrea has her own car, goes on dates with practically any boy she chooses, and does the kind of things that Ginny herself can only dream about. With her, it has always been a case of the right school, the right friends, the right hours, the approved dances and always with utterly dependable chaperones. Ginny wants to be free, happy, and unfettered-like Andrea.
But what does such a girl find, in cold hard actuality, at a summer camp?
For a partial answer, we might consider the experiences of Ellen Bilgore, a freelance writer who specializes in studies of the youth culture. In a recent survey conducted for The Saturday Review of Education, Ms. Bilgore presented the following interesting findings:
"Camping is a uniquely American institution. The germ of the idea is probably directly attributable to the drama and romance that pioneering has always had for the people in this country. In fact, the birth of camping in roughly 1900 postdates the closing of the frontier in 1890 by only ten years.
"The modern result is a kaleidoscope melange of summer camps for children, ranging from the original man-against-the-wilderness concept to kiddie country clubs; places to learn Romanian, Russian, or Greek; dance camps; riding camps; ice hockey, basketball, and football camps; farm camps; and others even more varied and eccentric. Of course, camps, like schools, do more than provide summer education; they establish very clear patterns of class stratification. There are ritzy rich-kid places, middle-middle, lower-middle, lower-upper, and just plain no-income camps....
"What actually happens to children in their summertime civilizations? Do they learn anything? Or could they achieve the same ends by having fresh-air respirators wheeled into their bedrooms at home?
"What they're supposed to be doing is developing character and skills. Camp directors never tire of talking about their development of the 'whole child.'....
"Now that many schools have begun to pursue more seriously the notion of developing the 'whole child' by extending learning experiences beyond the classroom walls, camp directors and school people are coming into sharp conflict. There is even a national coalition of camp directors who have vowed to fight the trend toward year-round school on the grounds that it would lead to the demise of camping.
"If schools continue to reexamine their basic goals and provide more experience in the 'real' world, this conflict can only grow sharper. But schools will probably never be able to develop a substitute for one of the basics of the camp experience: the opportunity for a child to find out what he or she is like as a person, reflected in the eyes of his peers rather than his parents. And then there's always the fresh air."
As mentioned above, this is, of necessity, only a partial answer. Ms. Bilgore has studied summer camps as an impartial, objective observer, but her experience has necessarily been limited. Frank Anvic, author of The Camp Girl, has worked in various capacities, from swimming instructor to director, in summer camps every year for the past decade and a half. We know he is capable of letting in the "fresh air" in more than one sense. And we know he is more capable than anyone else of telling the story of a girl like Ginny Reynolds.
Lest anyone be misled, we will state at the outset that the main thing Ginny learns about at Camp Wood Dell is sex. Sex, obviously, is not one of the things any summer camp for young girls advertises, but it is one of the things a girl is likely to encounter for the first time at such an institution.
Ginny Reynolds, indeed, finds out what she is like as a sexual person in this sometimes shocking but always enlightening novel. It is a novel that every married couple with female children should read and discuss frankly; it is a novel for anyone who wants a clearer picture of a facet of today's society that is too frequently taken for granted to learn important lessons from.
-The Publishers Chatsworth, Cal. March, 1973