Alumni Events

Hope to see all of you at both Camp's 85th birthday on August 22, 2020 as well as on August 24, 2019.  More details on both of these events will be shared as they become available.

Flashback to 1981and Beyond With Betsy Candler Harvey

Camp Thunderbird Alumni Blog Post

Betsy Candler Harvey

On the first day of 3^rdsession of 1977, I arrived for the first time at Camp Thunderbird as a rather shy, bookish just-turned-13-year-old camper. Although my younger sister and older cousins were also campers that session, I otherwise didn’t know a soul and was horribly homesick, despite my cabinmates and counselors being fun and friendly. My senior counselor, in particular, was kind and patient and spent significant one-on-one time listening to and advising me. Nevertheless, I remained very homesick and recall retreating to my cabin to be alone in the middle of a Saturday night camp dance, triggering a “lost camper” search. I’ll never forget the evident relief on the face of my counselor when she tore through the cabin door to find me lying on my bunk reading a Tiger Beat magazine my mother had sent in a care package.

Despite this inauspicious start to my camp career, something happened to me after those three weeks in the summer of 1977. My camp experience had changed me. It made me more confident. It made me more outgoing. It made me more willing to take risks. After having been a camper again in 1978 and 1979 and a CIT in 1980, I worked as a junior counselor in a cabin with the littlest campers (6-7 years old) and on the sailing staff the summer of 1981. As much as I loved and was passionate about camp, fostering friendships with people with whom I keep in touch to this day, I wasn’t a particularly effective first-year counselor. After I returned to school, I received a letter from Camp Director Bill Climer asking to meet with me during the off-season to talk about how I could “up my game” for the coming summer. Boy, did that correspondence light a fire under me and make me determined to prove what a good counselor I could be!

Fast forward to the end of summer 1985: I had just finished my 9^thand final summer at Thunderbird, this time as the Girls’ Camp Head Counselor. I had spent three years on the sailing staff from 1981-83, and I served as a Head Counselor Assistant the summer of 1984, all as a cabin counselor for the older girls in Cabin 33 (coincidentally, the same cabin in which my counselor found me during the lost camper search in 1977). 

Camp continued to mold me as a person during my years on the staff. I continued to become more outgoing, developing leadership and team-building skills as I worked and played with my fellow counselors. Over my five years as a TBird staff member, I made literally lifelong friends with whom I laughed (and laughed and laughed) and cried and played and goofed off and worked (and yes, misbehaved, from time to time). To this day, my best friends from my high school and college years are not necessarily my schoolmates, but my camp friends, with whom I:

1.    Sat in the dining hall on Friday nights writing newsy letters to campers’ parents,

2.    grilled burgers on Wednesday nights so the dining hall ladies could have the night off, 

3.    made runs to Cav’s (the convenience store across the street from camp) on “short nights” off to eat sub sandwiches at 10 p.m., 

4.    went to the laundromat in Charlotte on days off,

5.    cruised in “tenders” around campers in Sunfish when there wasn’t a breeze to be had on Lake Wylie, 

6.    administered eardrops at “flagpole”, 

7.    wrote and performed silly skits (which we thought were brilliant), 

8.    policed the cedar trees surrounding the Older Girls’ Camp on the way back to the cabin after evening program to make sure no would-be Romeos were lurking,

9.    watched fireworks over Lake Wylie on the 4^thof July, 

10.  skied in the pre-dawn hours before Reveille, when the lake was placid and glassy,

11.  ate those wonderful sweet rolls on Sunday mornings at breakfast,

12.  delivered cleaning supplies and inspected cabins as Head Counselor Assistants,

13.  sat on the banks of the athletic fields outside our cabins after Taps to decompress after a busy camp day,

14.  chaperoned a bunch of sweaty, sticky campers on excursions to Carowinds, 

15.  danced to James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” at the end of every camp dance in Johnson Hall, and

16.  experienced hundreds of small, special moments that I’ve long ago forgotten but which nevertheless molded me as a person.

My own children, now grown, were never campers at Thunderbird, although we enjoyed going to Labor Day Family Camp for many years when they were young. However, my 17-year-old niece, Grace Williams, has been spending her summers at camp since she was the age of those littlest campers I counseled in 1981. She was a CIT last year, and will be a first year junior counselor - on the sailing staff, no less, like her aunt - the summer of 2019. 

In my 55 years, no place on earth has been more special to me than Camp Thunderbird. I can honestly say that I would not be the same person I am today if it weren’t for my camp experiences and my camp friendships. My hope for Grace, which I am certain will come true, is that she will make lifelong friends and memories as a Thunderbird counselor – just like her Aunt Betsy. 

Heartland...Written by Alumni Staffer, Ben Gross

As summer approaches, it is often difficult to put into words the impact camp can have on staff.  Following summer 2008,  Ben Gross shared the impact camp had had on his life...

27 August 2008

My Heartland

            As the sun sets on a Carolina lake, I take a moment to examine my position. Children laugh and joke, begging for one more story or a few more minutes with their friends. I find myself surrounded by my closest friends, old and new, who all share the same mission of growing, teaching, and touching lives. I am a fortunate person, because I have a heartland. 

            For the past nine years of my life, I have had the privilege of attending YMCA Camp Thunderbird at Lake Wylie, South Carolina; I was a camper for seven years and a counselor for two. I did most of my growing under the heavy Carolina air; days were spent in the lake or at the pool, and nights were filled with the chirp of crickets and the swanky steel styling of an acoustic guitar. Camp is beautiful, an oasis of peace and nature among an ever-pressing onslaught of development. I will never forget the sight of a Lake Wylie sunset or the sound of the waves lapping against the shores, but it is the people, the relationships, which store the magic of summer in the deepest corners of my soul.  The land is near to my heart, but the people are the heart of the land. 

            Camp is a place where spirits grow, friendships form, and youth of all walks of life realize the deepest of love. Camp is home. Where else in the world can a seventeen-year-old kid be mistakenly called “dad” by his eight-year-old camper? Where else is it acceptable, even encouraged, to be as messy, dirty, loud, and immature as possible? Where else is it possible to understand the deepest meanings of dependence, acceptance, and love just by staring hard enough into someone’s eyes? 

            I may not be from South Carolina, but my heartland is the place that is dearest to me. I once consoled a fellow counselor about departing from this place. She was new to the camp experience, and devastated that she had to leave the friends, the people, and the love that she had just come to accept. She was afraid of the emptiness, the void it would leave in her life. I explained it simply: “this place can never leave you; you’ll never be empty again.” My heartland will never leave me.  Carolina has cast a spell on me that cannot be broken. 

Zach Wilder, Who Knew....

   I hope you will enjoy reading about Zach's transition from a camp counselor to college mascot.

Hello everyone! My name is Zach Wilder, and this is the story of how going to Camp Thunderbird led to me becoming an NCAA mascot. 

When I was 12 years old, I started my camp journey at YMCA Camp Thunderbird. I grew up in Charlotte, and I had friends who had been to camp. The way they described it made it seem like an awesome place. I could go kayaking, wakeboarding, and mountainboarding all in the same day?! Consider me sold! I spent three out of my next four summers as a camper at Camp Thunderbird. I became a CIT, a junior counselor, senior counselor, and even an activity chief. Camp Thunderbird was my very first job, and I absolutely loved it!

As a counselor, I tended to work predominantly with campers in the 12-15 year old range. The older campers were great. Generally speaking, they were responsible, independent, and cooperative. The one thing that stunk about working with them was the occasional “I’m too cool to have fun” attitude. I hated this.

To me, camp was always about acting like a goofball and trying new things. So whenever I saw a kid who was “too cool” or too shy or too nervous to let loose and dance around in the dining hall, I’d do everything I could to break them out of their shell. (Usually by dancing so terribly that all my campers would make fun of my dancing, thus diverting any potential shame from nervous campers)

Eventually however, there comes a time when every counselor must move on from the camp life. I stopped working at camp midway through college, but I missed it like crazy. I was a sophomore at Syracuse University. I was living in upstate New York. It was insanely cold. I missed the warmth of summer. I missed camp. I found myself sitting quietly in my classes, longing to act like my crazy counselor self once more. That being said, I couldn’t exactly stand up on my chair in class and start dancing to Cascade’s “Every Time we Touch.” I would need to find another, more socially acceptable, outlet.

That November, as I was watching DeShaun Watson lead the Clemson tigers to dismantle the Cuse football team by scoring three touchdowns in the first quarter, I looked to my right and there he was. I found my outlet. Otto the Orange in all his round fuzzy glory. Immediately, lightbulbs went off in my brain. Otto was the goofiest mascot I had ever seen; he’s always dancing around like crazy and getting others to have fun. In that moment, I knew that camp had shaped me into the perfect candidate to be the Syracuse University mascot.

A month later, I was accepted to the Syracuse University mascot program.

Over the course of the next three years, I would dress up and use my camp counselor inspired goofiness to pump up crowds of 35,000 people. I would dance with the parents of new students as they moved their child into their freshmen dorms. (embarrassing the heck out of the recent high school grads) And above all, I would try to get students to let loose and have fun.

Being a mascot was my favorite part about college. It was three years filled with tremendous joy, unyielding school spirit, and lots and lots of sweat. Some of my favorite memories were: 

·      Watching Syracuse football defeat the #2 nationally ranked Clemson Tigers in 2017. (sweet payback!)

·      Traveling to Omaha, Nebraska to cheer on the Syracuse men’s basketball team as they took on Duke in the Sweet 16 

·      Spending two hours in Target doing whatever I wanted. (like riding around in the motorized shopping carts and using a pool noodle to joust with shoppers)

·      Volunteering at the Orlando Children’s Hospital as part of the ACC football tournament community outreach initiative

My time at Camp Thunderbird led to me becoming a more outgoing individual, and the love that I had for camp led to me becoming a mascot. Camp affects our lives in many ways, some of which are unforeseen until after our time on the sunny shores of Lake Wylie have come to an end. However, for every individual who has called camp home, a life of adventures and new experiences awaits.

     - Submitted by Zach Wilder