Camp Mowglis -Summer, 1922
John Schreiber was the camp doctor in 1922 while between semesters at Harvard Medical School.
In the narrative that follows, John shares his experiences at camp, and in doing so, offers us a rare opportunity to peer into the Mowglis of the early 1920's.
This story was written by my stepfather, John Schreiber, May 4, 1940. I found it when I was going through his things after his death. He was at Mowglis during summer vacation from Harvard Med School. He was in the class of 1924. He used to talk about Mowglis all the time and even kept the pin and patch from there. I have no idea of what happened to his photo books of pictures from that summer. Some of the pictures were just boys being boys at that age on a hot day and skinny dipping. I think he and my mother stopped by camp in the 60's or early 70's when they were up in New England on vacation.
Gosh, all fishhooks: My oldest boy isn't any farther than the lukewarm stage in my endeavors to warm him up to the incomparable advantages of going to Summer Camp. Like an underexposed film in cold developer, he needs both teasing and praying. In a mature, and probably a clumsy fashion I have been telling him of the summer I spent at Camp Mowglis in the White Mountains of New Hampshire only to have him interrupt me with a well put conclusion: "Aw, go write a story and read it down to the Museum!" Which rather squelched me as he slammed the back door and went off to the nearest Hart's store to collect orange crates for a shack in the back yard. I was very likely the same way when I was nearly thirteen. Only the Summer Camp Movement never existed in those ays, Boy Scouts were unheard of though Dan Beard had written a book or two on life in the open. Besides the stretches of miles in all directions that began at a five minutes walk from my old home beckoned to the great outdoors far more invitingly than any Catalogue or reel of colored movies. Was I lucky, or was I! But to get back to Mowglis, it all came about this way. The assignment as Camp Physician had already been allotted to my classmate, John Steidl, a swell lad who limped all through his classes at Harvard Medical School because of an old polio.
Camp Mowglis
