Rant #2,641: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

Good morning, everyone!
 
Wake up! It’s time to wake up!
 
And if you don’t know that it is time to get up out of bed to start your day, I will play "Revele" on my bugle to alert you that it’s time!
 
What am I talking about here?
 
Let me tell you.
 
We are in the middle of spring—although temperatures around these parts have been frigid lately—and summer is right around the corner.
 
And with the pandemic lessening up to a certain degree, maybe we can have a real summer, unlike what we had last year when we were right in the thick of everything.
 
And that means that if you have younger kids, camp might be right around the corner.
 
As a kid, I went to day camp, so I was out of my mother’s hair from about 8 am in the morning until maybe 3 or 4 pm most weekdays during the summers of the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
We did lots of great things during camp, and I really loved the experience. All my friends went to camp, and whether it was going to the beach or an amusement park, or playing ball, or whatever, I had the time of my life in our camp, which was called, appropriately, Rochdale Village Day Camp, named after our neighborhood in South Jamaica, Queens, New York.
 
My sister went, too, and you can just imagine the sigh of relief my mother must have had when we were both out the door and headed to camp during those hot summer days.
 
And I guess that is why I was drawn to a TV show that was all about camp, albeit sleep away camp, an NBC show called “Camp Runamuck” that aired for just one season—1965-1966—and for just 26 episodes.
 
The show’s basic premise--which was very loosely based on some elements of Allan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" hit song--was that a long-established boys’ camp run by a drill sergeant of a camp director was suddenly infiltrated by a girls’ camp that situated itself right across the lake from the boys’ camp.
 
The Interaction of the two camps was the focus of the comedy, and that not only was the interaction of the boys and girls in the two camps, but of the camp counselors, who often got into ridiculously funny situations between each other.
 
The stars of the show were classic second- and third-banana actors of the time period, and if you didn’t know their names, you certainly knew their faces from numerous TV and movie appearances.

 
Arch Johnson played the boys’ camp director, and this guy was probably on just about every show there was in the mid to late 1960s. Other male camp counselors included Dave Ketchum--of numerous commercials. movies and TV shows--Dave Madden—s few years before he became a somewhat big third-banana star on shows like “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” and in particular, “The Partridge Family—and Leonard Stone—who later was a semi-regular bad guy on the updated “Dragnet” TV series.
 
On the female counselors’ side was the chief counselor, played by Alice Nunn, Hermione Baddeley—later on “Maude”--and Nina Wayne.
 
And if you blink, you might miss some very young campers who went on to bigger and better things, including Maureen McCormick, who a few years later would be one of the kid stars of “The Brady Bunch.”
 
Anyway, as a kid, I found the show a must-see, and I remember watching the sitcom each and every week while it was on. I guess one of the draws was that being that the show was on during the fall and winter, it made me think of my upcoming time in camp during the summer, and I am suire that is what the producers—chief among them David Swift, the show’s creator—thought would be a big draw of the show for younger viewers, which it was directed at to begin with.
 
However, running up against “The Wild Wild West” and “The Flintstones” didn’t help the show, and I guess I was one of the few people who actually watched “Camp Runamuck,” because it was canceled after just one season.
 
Anyway, why do I bring all of this up more than 50 years after the fact?
 
Being semi-retired gives me the chance to do things that I wouldn’t normally have the time to do, and one day, I was searching through YouTube for one thing or another, and lo and behold, I found the first episode of “”Camp Runamuck” just sitting there waiting for me to watch it … and watch it I did.
 
It was the pilot episode, and it basically set the premise for the show, where the boys’ camp thought they had the full run of their area somewhere in the forest that they were in, but their world was changed forever when the girls’ camp set up shop just across the lake from them.
 
The acting is over the top, which is perfect for this type of show, which was almost like a cartoon brought to life.
 
And I remembered so much from the show that I thought I forgot—primarily the relationship between camp counselors played by Dave Madden and Nina Wayne.

 
Madden played the innocent camp counselor who liked girls but never had too many encounters with them, and Wayne played the curvaceous, sexy counselor from across the lake with maximum sex appeal no matter what she was doing.
 
I mean her name was “Caprice,” so she dripped sensuality in a G-rated kind of way.
 
Every time Madden saw Wayne, he would get frazzled and shake, with the sound effects to match.

 
When I saw the first scene of the interaction I just described, it brought the show back home to me. I mean, when the show was on, I was eight years old, and I probably didn’t fully understand what was going on, but the show all came back to me when I witnessed that scene for this first time in more than 50 years.
 
After watching the first episode and completely enjoying it as I did all those years ago, I searched YouTube some more, and lo and behold, all of the show’s episodes—the full run—are there for the taking.
 
If you want to watch the show yourself, the first episode can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAG03NhtycQ, and you can find the rest of the episodes pretty easily afterward.
 
Once I heard the camp-oriented theme song, I knew I was back in another place and another time, and when I saw that interaction between Madden and Wayne—the sister of Carol Wayne, by the way—I knew that I had hit a home run by actually finding this long-forgotten show.
 
And by the way, Nina Wayne, who fit the part she was playing to a “T,” like they say, is on Facebook, so if you want to interact with her, she can be found at https://www.facebook.com/nina.wayne.56. She is as nice as she can be on her site.
 
Seeing “Camp Runamuck” again after all these years really brought me back to a different time and place in my life … I could never have believed that I would be where I am today if you told me all those years ago about my future life, but whatever the case, it is nice to be able to find footnotes to your childhood like this, things you thought only you remembered but later found out that you are just one of many who remember things like this.
 
Now, my mission is to get through the entire series, and I know that I will laugh, laugh and laugh some more, making me think back to my own time in day camp.
 
Have a great weekend. I will be out of pocket on Monday—no, I am not going back to camp on that day--but I will speak to you again on Tuesday.