Pranks! (Quaker Lake Style)

We loved to taunt the cooks!  Recognize me?

I have heard from a few former youth from my days at Springfield Friends Meeting over the past couple of days that they have children of their own who are attending Quaker Lake Camp this week.   Such conversations got me thinking about all of the useful things my 7 summers working there taught me that served me well as a youth pastor.  Among the things I learned was how to pull off a great prank. Like most camps, the staff at QLC has to find ways to amuse themselves during a long, hot summer, and we did- OFTEN! We not only had previous staffs to show us the way to a good prank, we had the movie Meatballs, which was popular at the time. And we all wanted to be Bill Murray.  Here are a few memories of a few great pranks from those days.  There are so many more...


The first prank I will mention was a revenge prank. I travelled across the country with Carl Semmler and Alan Brown in 1979, and Carl had, on a very hot, muggy night in New Orleans, gotten up in the middle of the night and pushed buttons until he turned on the heat, because he was chilly. Alan and I both woke up in puddles of sweat, and when we tried to make him aware of his error, he threw a glass ash tray at us. Fast forward a few weeks when all 3 of us were working at QLC. Carl always slept in a sleeping bag like a mummy. So one evening I unzipped the bag and emptied and entire bottle of baby powder in the bag. When Carl climbed in that night in the dark, the powder flew and he, his bed and most of the room was buried in powder. It was awesome. Even more awesome were all the pranks he pulled on the female staff before finding out it was me- 5 year later!


Prank number 2 involved grand theft, clothing! During a junior high camp my first summer a cabin of girls had pranked my cabin in some small way, so we decided to strike back. One afternoon, while the girls were all busy, we sneaked into their cabin and stole all of their luggage, placing it in a corn field behind the main lodge.  We also found that one of the girls had some "day of the week" panties, so we took "Friday" and froze them!  They came back to their cabin, panicked, looked everywhere, and we finally had to give up the location of the luggage after the camp director got really angry with us. We did not, however, give up the frozen panties until breakfast on Saturday (with a formal presentation in front of the whole camp, of course!), which has always made us wonder what panties did she wear on Friday? As with most great pranks, this resulted in a rule change which forbid guys from entering girls' cabins for any reason...

Our fearless leader, Neal Thomas!

At some point during my QLC career our boss, Neal Thomas, issued a ban on wasting things while doing pranks.  It meant we had to get more creative.  One week we discovered that there was entire 25 pound bag of dried potato flakes that has been attacked by mice and was about to be thrown out.  We saved it, assuming there had to be something evil we could do with such a gift.  We were right.  There was a cabin next to the main lodge that housed the female staff who were not cabin counselors- life guards, cooks, etc. There was no air conditioning anywhere at camp back then, and so at night the ladies would have many floor and window fans running in an attempt to stay cool.  Late one night after they were all asleep, we blockaded their door with cement cinder blocks and started shoveling in the potato flakes through an open window. With the help of their own fans, we created quite a blizzard.  And quite a mess...


One of the traditional pranks in those days involved the guys sneaking around the lake in the middle of the night, locking the girls in their cabins, and singing to them- thus waking them up. In addition to just being irritating, it often had the effect of causing the girls to need to use the restroom.  The restroom was in an outhouse a short walk from the cabins, and since they were locked in, that was an issue.  One particular night one of the girl's counselors, Beth Grantham, began to yell at my guys, telling them they were in big trouble.  She finally threatened them by saying, "You just wait until I tell Carl Jones you are out of the cabin!!!"  At that moment, I simply said, "Good morning, Beth!"  She forgave me within weeks...  :)


QLC allowed counselors to tell ghost stories in those days, and one of the favorites was about The Quaker Lake Hand. The story has something to do with a camper loosing his hand and the dismembered hand haunting the camp for many years. One night, with 30 or so 9 and 10 year old campers gathered in one cabin, a couple of the guys were telling the story. I had the bright idea to, at the crucial moment in the story, put my hand behind a glow-in-the-dark frisbee and slap it against the screen of the cabin. It worked- screams were heard all over camp, and the next morning a number of campers showed up for breakfast packed and ready to go home. Oops! Once again rules were changed, and ghost stories were banned.  Sorry, future generations...


As you can see, we were creative and daring in those days, and these stories just scratch the surface!  But I learned a great deal from all of this silliness. I learned that you have to be careful with how you treat people, even in the name of fun. I learned that creativity is a gift that must be used with some degree of caution (although it took me a LONG time to learn that lesson well!). And I learned yet again that life, lived together in the name of Jesus, is never, ever boring! 


Because of Jesus,