Jeff Gundy is a poet, writer, and part of a long-line of Gundys who have been part of the Camp Friedenswald story. He shares this reflection as part of a collection of stories in honor of Camp’s 75th anniversary. 

Our extended family first attended family camp at Friedenswald four summers ago—my wife Marlyce and me, our three sons with their wives, and six lively grandsons. It was the first camp visit for the grandboys and at least one of the spouses, but we had such a good time that we’ve been back each year since. Our youngest grandson, who was clinging to furniture in the Tamarack Lodge the first year, now tears around like he owns the place, and the older boys have made fast friends among other family campers their age, some of them relatives. This year we had a new granddaughter, little Zoe, to bounce around and cuddle.

That first evening, as people introduced their families in the auditorium, I found myself doing a rapid count in my head. Grandkids, children, me, my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents—yes, that made six generations of Gundys who have spent happy times at Friedenswald! I couldn’t help but mention that statistic, with due Mennonite humility, as I introduced our group, and I think I’ve repeated that small brag every year since. While many camp families have similar stories, likely not many stretch over quite so many generations, so here’s a brief, incomplete history.

It started with my great-grandparents George and Clara (Strubhar) Gundy. George was pastor of the Meadows Mennonite Church in central Illinois for many years, and he and Clara were also in charge of the Meadows Old People’s Home (its actual name when they began managing it). George had just retired from the church when they joined a number of others at the site near Shavehead Lake in summer 1950 to clear brush and build the first cabin. Here’s Clara’s account of that time and her return for the first camping season two years later:

In the fall, I was asked to help at Camp Friedenswald for a few weeks.  There I slept in the first cabin that was built and George helped build it.  That brought back memories of the few days that we spent there cutting brush before any building was done.  We slept in a tent with our clothes on and were cold all night.  We got up at five in the morning and cut brush to get warm. Then we went to a little eating place a few miles away.  That day some men from Michigan came and George helped them build the first cabin that was built there and the next day we helped a Mr. and Mrs. Sommer’s from Pekin lay the cement floor for the second cabin.  Then we went home but that was one time we were bushwhackers, but we enjoyed it and you wouldn’t believe what piles of brush were piled up at first.

When I went back to help after camp was set up I helped with kitchen work, dining room, and did the washing outdoors.  We had a short wash line and plenty of bushes to dry the towels on.  That was real pioneering.  There were quite a few children there and when it rained we ate under a tent, but there were little creeks running through the tent and we had to watch where we stepped.  It had a ground [dirt] floor.

-from Clara (Strubhar) Gundy’s “Reminiscences” [1]

Clara actually helped in the camp kitchen in July, 1952, as noted in her diary entries for that time. The conditions were still primitive, with the kitchen in a cabin and a tent attached for dining, but Clara was used to serious labor. Her regular tasks at the Meadows Home included washing, ironing, gardening, canning, and other work for many years. I’m quite sure she was unfazed, though perhaps annoyed, by the little streams running under the tent.

George had heart problems, and passed away in September 1951 in Woodburn, Indiana, at the home of their son Don and his wife Frances (Ramseyer) Gundy. The next summer her older son Gerdon and his wife Pauline brought Clara to camp on their way home from a visit to Don’s family in Woodburn—they lived in Graymont, Illinois, just a few miles from Meadows. According to Clara’s diary for July 13, 1952, the group (with her grandsons John and Bob) arrived in time for a solid first camp experience:

Came to Camp F. with Gerdon & Pauline. Climbed the hill for a few min. of service. Had dinner. John & Bob helped with dishes. Then they left. I lazied around.

Clara carefully recorded numbers of people she helped to serve: 94 for three meals a day the first week, and the other women who stayed in her cabin.[2] The weather was hot and humid (some things don’t change), there were heavy rains, and lightning struck a cabin, but “not much damage” resulted. On Sunday she went with others to Eighth Street Mennonite Church in Goshen for “a nice service,” then “slept and wrote letters.” The second week was similar:

7/21/52 Helped Susanne Friesen of Goshen wash. Folded it & did my ironing in rest period. 55 campers.

7/22/25 Hot & cloudy. Heavy rain in eve. & windy at night. Limbs were broken off.

7/23/52 Rain & wind again. Stunt night in the dining room last night. Picnic supper on north hill.

7/24/52 Washed again. Campers left after dinner. Saw Irene & Mordy Musser. Only 10 here for supper. Girls took walk & Susanne Friesen & Anita Klassen went boating. I wrote letters.

7/25/52 Washed all the dishes. Cleaned under tables. Fixed bricks. Swept out cabins. Cleaned toilet. Campers came. Campfire service. Women serenaded their husbands. SS camp.

7/26/52 Lyle’s birthday (Lyle S.). Wrote him a letter. Rainy discussion period. Speaker Stanley Shenk just got there at supper time.[3]

7/27/52 S. School by Don Bowman [?]. Sermon by Bob Hartzler. Dinner at 11:30. I had a way to come home with M. Stahlys. Good to be home.

And so began the long intertwining of the Gundy family with Camp Friedenswald. Just about every one of George and Clara’s many descendants of the first four generations—now well over a hundred, though I don’t have an accurate count—has been to camp, at least for a weekend family reunion. Many also came as campers and later worked on summer staff, some as full-time staff as well. There are many stories, some funny, some romantic, some that will not be recorded here, for reasons you can imagine. Here are some highlights.[4]

Quite early on, my uncle Dick and his wife JoAnn (Yoder) Gundy worked on staff from about 1959-61. According to their daughter Beth (Gundy) Boehr, even earlier Dick was the first residential staff member, and “before they were married [he] wintered in the newly built cabin by himself as the story goes.” He must have had a chilly winter!

Beth grew up partly at camp, and later worked as counselor and waterfront director during her college years in the 70s. Her sons Jake and Micah Boehr were both also campers and later on summer staff.[5] Her husband Jeff and Beth raised their family in Bluffton, but Jeff changed careers to serve as program director from 2012-15.[6] Thus he joined Corbin Graber, husband of my first cousin Tanya (Gundy) Graber, as high-level camp staff married to Gundys.[7] Corbin was program director from January 1997 to June 2001, then moved up, at least altitudinally, to became executive director at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp, where he remains today.

Dick’s younger brother John Gundy also remembers those years. Here Gerd Jr. is the oldest of the seven siblings, Bob the youngest brother:

Gerd Jr. took Bob and me to help Dick with a project for several days each year.  Jan [John’s wife] told me today that before I started my 1W term at Prairieview I drove her from Smithville, Ohio to Camp, where she helped Jo wash sheets from weekend visitors  . . . and make beds for the next weekend and I helped Dick with something. Then I took her to Bluffton for start of her senior year with one suitcase.[8]

John and Jan Gundy, both graduates of Bluffton College, are also long-term members of the Friedenswald Builders. Their daughter Erin Gundy worked several summers at camp while in college at Goshen, like many staff members taking on many roles, from kitchen staff to nature leader and camp photographer. “I treasure that time,” Erin remembers, “despite the heat, humidity, mosquitoes and poison ivy.” Perhaps inspired by those days, Erin and her husband Peter Allemang now live off-grid in a beautiful octagonal house they built near Weirton, Ontario.

Gerdon and Pauline’s family gathered at Friedenswald more than once when their children had begun their own  families. My parents’ home movies include one from 1962, which shows family members old and young lounging in innertubes and splashing happily in the waters of Shavehead Lake.[9] In one shot I’m wearing a swim mask, which wasn’t much use—I was already too nearsighted to see much through it! The movie includes outside shots of both the chapel and the dining hall, both fairly new, but I remember Uncle John frying eggs in an iron skillet over an open fire, so we must have eaten at least some meals outside. Several big-finned Fords and Chevies are parked in the shade right next to the girls’ cabins where we stayed.

* 

Clara Gundy came home from camp in late July 1952, just in time for my birth in early August of that year. Don and Fran’s youngest son Duane Gundy was born in Woodburn a few months later, in December.[10] He would become a skilled builder as well as a gifted musician, served two terms at Friedenswald as maintenance director (1979-81 and 87-96), and still lives nearby on a channel connected to Shavehead Lake.[11]

Gerdon and Pauline’s descendants (they had 28 grandchildren) held another series of biannual reunions starting in the early 1980s, and Duane and Fran often joined us for a meal or a day. We stayed in Lakeview Lodge, which remains “the A-frame” for us old folks, and as more and more great-grandchildren came along we eventually expanded into Tamarack Lodge as well.

Duane also would bring his guitar around and play some music with me and others; once we played a stirring “Goodnight, Irene,” and I accompanied several of my uncles on a fairly successful version of “I’ll Fly Away.” My sons Nate and Ben also contributed to camp music with their guitars and voices.

One of those reunions must have been in 1981, when Nate was just a few months old. The Lakeview Lodge in those days had big dorm-style bunkrooms, usually with men on one end, women on the other, and one big bathroom on each end. While I dozed with the men, my wife Marlyce spent a good part of both nights in the women’s bathroom, trying to convince noisy young Nate to settle down and sleep. Some years later we pitched our tent on the lawn outside, seeking a bit more privacy, but were driven inside by a big thunderstorm on Saturday night and ended up with our sleeping bags sprawled out near the fireplace. We were all pretty weary in the morning, but at least somebody else made the coffee and breakfast casseroles.

My sister Kate, who will always be Kathy to the family, helped organize those reunions, served a term on the Camp board, and frequently came to volunteer in the kitchen or attend other retreats. After her untimely death in 2021, memorials from friends and family went toward a new holding cabinet for the kitchen and to support camperships and the marvelous, one-of-a-kind play structure then being constructed by facilities manager Jonathan Fridley and a host of volunteers. Kathy also took many of the older photos here.

*

Romances and Other Adventures

I came to Friedenswald as a camper several times, both for summer and snow camp, and friendships begun at camp considerably eased my transition to college life at Goshen.[12] My most dramatic camper memory may be my friend Steve jumping from a top bunk onto my friend Dave’s arch-top Harmony guitar, creating a most painful sound and a sustained argument about why Dave had left it on the floor with the case open anyway. The friendship did survive.

We stayed in cabins for summer camp, but lodging for snow camp varied, and often seemed a bit improvised. My first year we bunked in makeshift rooms in the back of what had been “Tubby’s Store,” at the junction of Peninsula Road and Union Road. It was a longish walk from there to main camp and the toboggan run, but worth it. The run began, at least in my memory, with a big, sweeping turn at the top, and at least every third toboggan, with three or four high schoolers wedged onto it, crashed on the curve and never made the long straight, bumpy run down. It was great fun if you did manage the turn! But by the next year, the run started a little lower and ran straight down the hill.[13]

I attempted one or two camp romances myself, even getting a kiss near the dining hall fireplace one late night at a snow camp, but neither lasted.

Our oldest son Nate, however, had considerably better luck with camp romance. He met the charming Jessica Witmer from Orrville at junior high music camp, and over the next few years they wrote occasional letters back and forth. Somehow, I found one of these letters in back of the middle drawer of the big desk in my office while working on this piece. She starts by congratulating him on making the varsity soccer team as a freshman, and mentions getting 11 service points and 5 kills in her last volleyball match before running short on news.

The letter is signed “Love, Jess,” but their camp schedules didn’t overlap again until they both returned for music camp after high school. We heard very little from Nate until he got home, as usual, but then he quickly mentioned that they’d started dating, and they never looked back. A few years later, when we’d become friends with Jess’s parents as well, we spent a night in her childhood bedroom. Bob and Waunita told us to look in her walk-in closet, where we found “I ❤︎ Nate Gundy,” written in red magic marker on the wall a long time before.

Nate also remembers that “the same summer Jess and I started dating (2000), we ‘borrowed’ the door mats from the other boys cabins and several wooden chairs from the dining hall and made our cabin into a proper carpeted lodge.” Nate and Jess now live in Orrville, and this summer their oldest two sons came for Friedenswald youth camps.[14] I don’t know if he’s told his boys about the doormat maneuver.

Our second son Ben also had a relationship that began at camp, but it ended less happily; he and his girlfriend met while on staff one summer, and worked the next summer together as well. At some point that year she rolled our little blue Neon onto its side, under circumstances that were never completely explained to us. Her parents got it fixed, but the romance soon was over.[15]

But many years earlier, we got an unexpected midweek call while Ben was a camper. The director told us that Ben and a friend had mooned a female counselor during a Capture the Flag game, and as punishment the two of them would need to miss a day’s activities and work with the maintenance staff instead. Well, OK, we said, that seems reasonable. Evidently this misdemeanor did not result in his being banned from later staff work, as Ben even served as worship leader one summer.[16]

Joel, our youngest, also spent many summers as a camper and then on staff, and all three still have multiple camp songs and meal blessings at the ready. Like Ben and Nate, he remembers staff housing with no AC and many earwigs, and slipping into the dining hall bathrooms for precious relief from the heat.

In their younger days, all three of our sons attended both “regular” camps and the gone-but-not-forgotten music camps. The concert at the end of music camp was always a special treat, with the Chapel packed with parents and campers and energetic choral music threatening to raise the roof.[17] Afterwards, we’d climb the hill for barbecued chicken and corn on the cob before we collected our campers’ odorous belongings and headed home.

More recently, my nephew Darin Gundy was on staff for two years, besides serving there with the worship group Shining Through while a Bluffton University student. The best story I heard from Darin is that on their days off, he and a couple of staff buddies would take the drain plug out of the camp rowboat, launch off, and see how far they could row before it became swamped.[18]

*

When our family began attending family camp in 2021, major selling points included good camp meals we didn’t have to prepare or clean up,[19] the lake, the trails, and the many scheduled (and optional) activities focused on both worship and creation care. A bonus was the chance to reconnect not only with each other but with other family campers and staff. This year our oldest three grandsons came for youth camps, and two were counseled by Ben Hartzler, whose father Greg and uncles counseled our sons years earlier. Many of the Hartzler clan returned for family camp, and one morning I caught up to some of them for a pleasant, if somewhat warm and buggy, hike up into the oak savanna that included measuring some of the biggest oaks and beeches.[20]

I was personally delighted to hear some years back that Jenna Liechty Martin, graduate of Bluffton and my former student, had been named executive director.[21] As we’ve returned year after year, it’s been exciting to talk with and learn from the leadership team, staff, and the guest pastors, and to see the careful, imaginative stewardship that has gone into maintaining and developing the camp grounds, and creative, grounded programming that entwines spiritual development, creation care, gender diversity, and ecological education. And the younger ones make great use of the many scheduled activities, the lake, the play structure, the swings, the tube slide, and on and on.

It’s been almost sixty years—I can hardly believe it—since I first dragged my suitcase into one of the long-gone boys cabins, took my first dive off the board into Shavehead Lake, and started singing those catchy camp songs. I still rarely learn them all the way through, never mind the motions. But hope springs eternal. I’m hoping for more years making the trek up the hill and down to Mosquito Hollow for music, popcorn, wacky skits, and worship. Maybe someday I’ll even wade into the fen! And, more likely, I hope there will be a seventh generation of Gundys at camp someday.

[1] Clara lived to be 94, in good health until the last year or two, and wrote out her “reminiscences” in longhand many years later. My mother, Arlene (Ringenberg) Gundy, typed them up and distributed copies. Clara’s diaries have been in my keeping since I used them, among many other sources, in writing about my Gundy and Strubhar ancestors in A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara (Illinois, 1996).

[2] Among those in Clara’s cabin was the young Mary Ann Bertsche, now Moser, longtime Bluffton College librarian, retired but still attending First Mennonite, where I see her regularly.

[3] I believe this Stanley Shenk is the biblical scholar who later taught at Goshen College for decades; I visited his house once or twice as a student, and took Gospel of John from him in 1974. In 1952 he was pastoring in West Liberty, Ohio in 1952, and likely drove in from there.

[4] As a recovering literary scholar I learned that titles should include subtitles, sentences should include semicolons, and essays should include footnotes. I have resisted the first two fairly successfully here, but for reasons I can’t explain have been bitten hard by the footnote bug. How did I decide what should go into these footnotes? Um, intuitively.

[5] I have a vivid memory, during one of the early reunions, of young Beth enthusiastically greeting the slightly older Graber boys, whose parents were also on staff, when they came down to the beach.

[6] Our son Nate’s band Honeytown played for winter retreat at Friedenswald during at least one of Jeff’s years.

[7] Tanya’s father Jim Gundy was a long-time Mennonite pastor in Burrton, Kansas, and he and his wife Marj faithfully made the long drive out for several Gundy reunions, with at least some of their seven children, as our home movies document.

[8] Roger, my father, was the second oldest of Gerdon and Pauline’s seven children—six boys and a girl. He and my mother Arlene (Ringenberg), high school sweethearts and the royal couple of Flanagan High School’s 1948 homecoming, got married in December, 1950, and began farming near Flanagan. Farm work kept them mostly close to home during June and July, but they came to camp frequently for family reunions, and sent their six kids off as campers despite needing our help to walk beans and tend the garden.

[9] The dock is narrower, the beach has a concrete ledge, there’s a tetherball pole in the water, and a high dive but no slide. The kids today have better floaties, there’s more evidence of sunscreen, and hair and swimsuit styles have evolved considerably. Otherwise, the beach scene is pretty much the same.

[10] Duane and his brothers are my first cousins once removed, but he and his slightly older brother Ralph were my favorite cousins, closer to me in age than any of my direct Gundy first cousins, and I was always happy when the family came to visit Clara in Meadows and we got invited to Sunday dinner. Clara would make a big roast, cut off the fat and put it on her plate, and then pass the rest around.

[11] Duane later oversaw construction of the Tamarack Lodge and the rebuilding and enlargement of Lakeview Lodge. More bathrooms, and no more dormitory bunks!

[12] With my parents I attended Waldo Mennonite Church, where my mother had grown up, but my grandparents still attended Meadows, and our extended family mostly treated the fact that we were Old Mennonites and they were General Conference as not worth worrying about.

[13] I also remember snow camp lodging in bunkrooms somewhere in the back of the dining hall, and in the chapel. We were staying in the dining hall the year of the fireplace encounter, so it was easy to linger late in the public space. Jenny, wherever you are, I hope you’re well.

[14] In the “romances that never were to be” category, I remember chatting with Jess just after we arrived for a music camp concert when a high school camper who was clearly crushing hard on her came up to talk. Jess fended him off with admirable patience and tact.

[15] Among the camp leadership during their years on staff was Todd Kirkton, camp director from 2003-6, whose mother Vicky (Yordy) Kirkton was a few years ahead of me at Flanagan High School.

[16] When Ben got home he claimed that the counselor had basically dared them to do it. We could not verify this version of the story, but we have found him to be generally trustworthy.

[17] My son Nate, who now leads the band program at Central Christian School in Kidron, fondly remembers choir director Hal Hess telling him the secret to successful conducting: “Make sure they know that you’re crazier than they are.”

[18] Darin claims they once made it clear across the lake and partly back before the boat swamped and they had to tip the water out of it. Not to give anyone any ideas.

[19] Meals for 14 (now 15) are a lot of work. Over the last years I’ve also become expert at piling plates, silverware, glasses, napkins and trays together, sorting things at the station, and delivering the washable items to the dishwashers when the kids and some of the parents have vanished from the table.

[20] A personal highlight: I’ve seen and heard the resident pair of sandhill cranes three years in a row—big, beautiful birds with a raucous call. Look for them near the Allen Hill campsite!

[21] A major side benefit of teaching for many years is being able to claim successful alumni who once dazzled me in class as “my” students, however minor my contributions often were. Jenna, alas, was not an English major, but she did take at least two courses with me.