Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [9]
Mary began sending her boys away to camp during the summer, to get them out of the city. Carlin spent eight weeks each July and August at Camp Notre Dame, a Catholic boys’ retreat on Spofford Lake in southwestern New Hampshire. Opened by a group of New York area priests in 1900 as Camp Namaschaug, the compound of cabins and cottages was purchased in 1939 by John E. Cullum, a grammar school principal from North Bergen, New Jersey. Known as “Uncle Jack” to a succession of nephews who attended Camp Notre Dame, Cullum was a devout Catholic who expected the boys—200 or so of them each summer—to climb out of their cots at sunrise every morning to attend mass, before breakfast. The camp was run with military precision, with regular bugle calls—“Reveille” at sunup, a mess call at mealtime, and “Taps” at day’s end.
Athletics were strongly emphasized, with the campers playing baseball, basketball, volleyball, and other organized sports. They swam every afternoon and took part in track and swim meets on the weekends. They rowed, canoed, and hiked; at night, they sat around bonfires. Saturday nights were reserved for a talent show, with campers concocting singing groups, playlets, magic acts, and other amateur performances. At the end of each season boys were honored for excellence in various categories, including drama. Dave Wilson, a camper from Hoboken who was four years older than Carlin, was the perennial drama winner as the director of comic skits, which earned him the nickname “Wacky.” Carlin, meanwhile, opted to go it alone, delivering comic monologues and shaggy-dog stories. “I don’t know whether he got them from radio, or what,” recalls Leo Cullum, a nephew of Uncle Jack’s who attended the camp from 1948-1959. “But he was very good. He had your attention. He was known around the camp as a funny guy. You’d hear his name dropped around the camp—‘George Carlin, George Carlin.’”
A sense of humor was imperative at the camp, says Cullum, a longtime New Yorker cartoonist who began his career as a gag writer for the black-humor illustrator Charles Addams. “There were a lot of funny people, a lot of mocking and jibing. It was kind of a survival mechanism—being a good ‘ragger,’ we called it.” After a few summers, Carlin finally unseated Wacky Wilson, winning the drama award, for which he received a medal embossed with the masks of comedy and tragedy. Throughout his life the medal remained one of his two most treasured possessions. (The other was an autograph he got from the saxophonist Charlie Parker, outside the New York nightclub called Birdland, when Carlin was fifteen.) For Carlin, the medal affirmed his strongest instinct—that he belonged on the stage.
Whether or not he belonged in Catholic camp was another question. An aspiring shutterbug, Carlin was caught shoplifting film for his camera at a grocery store in town. “He left under a cloud,” recalls Cullum. “My uncle packed him up on a bus and sent him back to the city.” True to form, however, Carlin did not begrudge the camp director. In later years, after he’d made a name for himself, he sometimes returned to Camp Notre Dame to visit John Cullum.
In New York the boy found himself increasingly attracted to trouble. Though Catholic school and summer camp had been Mary’s idea of instilling structure and discipline in her mischievous son, it was becoming abundantly clear they weren’t the solution—that there might be no solution. “That was her big thing—‘the boy has no male supervision at home,’” Carlin remembered. “As if that’s gonna help.” At ages twelve and thirteen he was hanging around the parks, drinking beer, talking about girls—“debs”—and running with classmates in would-be street gangs. They had jackets