Friday, July 26, 1974 Catholic Telegraph Sister Wears a Ft. Scott Tee Shirt by Anne Bingham Catholic Telegraph Sister Mary Morley though her camping days were over when she took the veil. She was wrong. Her first summer at Ft. Scott, the summer camp of youngsters managed by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, was in 1948 as a gradeschooler. She returned every year though high school as a camper and through college as a counselor. After her graduation from St. Mary of the Woods college, she taught for a year in Indiana and then entered the Sisters of Providence, convinced she'd never see the cabins near New Baltimore, Ohio, again. But through her years in teaching and pastoral ministry, she never forgot her experiences there, and when her community first permitted overnight visits away from a convent, she headed back for the camp on the banks of the Great Miami river. That was 1969, and from that Christmastime visit developed summer jobs first as counselor, then as assistant director and finally as director of the girls' camp. During the year she teaches first grade at St. Luke's in Indianapolis, and finds the change from the classroom to campfire not only personally refreshing but good for her young charges as well. Silver Whistle "They need to know there's another side to Sister besides the authority figure with a whip," she said last week as we walked the path from her office to the girls' mess hall for a breakfast interview. Her camp uniform was an Indiana university sweatshirt (she has a master's degree in guidance and counseling from there), a Ft. Scott tee shirt, blue jeans, sneakers, and a silver whistle that dismisses assemblies, dispatches campers to their cabins for clean-up, signals the end of one activity and the beginning of another and quiets down the rambunctious mess hall for grace before meals. "Most of my administrative work is pre-camp," she explained over coffee and the babble of 200 youngsters discovering Sugar Pops and cinnamon toast. "I interview and hire the staff (many of the counselors are themselves former campers), see that registrations are in order, things like that." After camp begins in early June she frequently visits other camps in the area - that afternoon she was to visit a YMCA camp north of Hamilton, Ohio - to check out their program and to exchange ideas with other directors. When she's at Ft. Scott she goes on programs with the kids, "not to spy, just to make sure everything's going o.k." And she gets to know most of the campers by name, especially the little ones who get homesick, because they seem to instinctively trust her. At camp she works out of her office-home, a white clapboard house set in a semi-circle of campers' cabins. She has two assistants who help ride herd on the youngsters: Janis Dugle, who taught at Norwood junior high this past year, and Sandy Hudson, who works at St. Joseph orphanage, Cincinnati, from September to June. They're both friends from the Indiana university days. 'I Wake Up the Bugler' Sister Mary's day begins at 7:45 a.m., when she "crawls out of bed to wake up the bugler." Reveille at 8 is echoed by the bugle from the nearby boys' camp, and one by one the campers trudge through the morning damp to the mess hall. After breakfast, there's time to clean up cabins before roll call and flag-raising, and then the day's activities begin - horseback riding, crafts, canoeing on the river practicing for the swim show or Indiana program. Sundays are special, with Mass in the camp chapel and brunch with people from the boys' camp. Being a nun has conferred "no special power" on her position Sister Mary says, although she knows the kids are aware of her religious commitment. She'll overhead several pointing her out to their parents as "our director. She's a nun." Everyone accepts her blue jeans and sneakers as totally appropriate for the hills and dales, and she feels the campers are getting an important lesson in religious life: "It's who you are, not what you wear, that counts," she said. In many ways, today's children are different from the campers of her own generation, Sister Mary observed. "When I was young, Ft. Scott accepted campers until they were 18. Now, the cutoff age is 16, because at 17 they're just too old for summer camp," she explained. Backyard swimming pools, Little League and the boom in family camping have contributed to the sophistication of city kids. "But that's good, because it makes it more of a challenge for us to entertain them for two weeks," she observed. Canoe trips on the river, cookouts over an open fire, sleeping out in the woods, feeding the animals at the farm and "the invaluable experience of living with your peer group" are memories that have been drawing campers back to Ft. Scott for over 50 years. Some of the youngsters today are the third generation in their family to camp there. At the end of breakfast, after a rousing round of "old camp songs" sung lustily in the sunsplashed air, the campers scrambled back over the hill to clean up their cabins. On the way one of them tugged at Sister Mary's sweatshirt and asked: "Do you like singing in the morning?" "Of course I do. Doesn't everybody?" the nun asked. "Snoopy doesn't" the little girl said, and modeled her own shirt, which showed the comic strip dog lying on his doghouse complaining: "I hate people who sing in the morning." "Oh you!" laughed Sister Mary, as the two of them went down the path arm in arm discussing grumpy beagles and other concerns of ten-year- olds.