Camp Onota

With less than a week of summer left, The Jonathan Channel is savoring our last few days with one more story of camp. So far, we have traveled through time with the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart. Through the Weingart Institute, to Camp Wigwam, to Camp Paradox, and then to Brant Lake Camp, the duo never overlapped during their summers at camp. They met in 1919 at Columbia University. One can only imagine that over the course of their first few meetings, a game of “Jewish Geography” was played, where it would have been discovered that both attended Weingart and Wigwam. They likely reminisced over bizarre staff members, legendary campers, and collegial camp songs. Our next story is of a pair of songwriters whose first meeting was at summer camp.

During the summer of 1937 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at Camp Onota, a 22 year old Adolph Green had been invited by a friend to guest star as the Pirate King in the camp’s production of The Pirates of Penzance. Directing the production that summer was 18 year old Leonard Bernstein.

Moments after they were introduced, Bernstein, who had heard about Green’s knowledge of classical music dragged him into the dining hall and challenged him to identify different classical pieces. After numerous tries, Bernstein could not stump Green. Finally, he asked him to identify one more melody, and after a few bars, Green said, "I don’t know what that is." Bernstein leaped up, threw his arms around Green, kissed him on the cheek and said "I just made it up on the spot!"

At camp they would wander through the surrounding hills, singing each other snatches of music, impressing each other with esoteric bits of knowledge, and discovering their common love of everything from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat to an obscure novelty song called "I Wish That I’d Been Born in Borneo." This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The two would become roommates in the late '30s and early '40s. During that time, Green formed a musical comedy group with Betty Comden and Judy Holliday called the Revuers. They performed original Comden and Green musical skits at the Village Vanguard, where Bernstein often accompanied them on the piano. When Bernstein was asked to create a musical based on Fancy Free, a ballet by Bernstein and Jerome Robbins, Leonard asked Green and Comden to write the book and lyrics which later became On The Town. In 1953 the trio wrote the music and lyrics for another Broadway show, Wonderful Town. When Green’s son Adam was born in 1981, Bernstein was asked to be the godfather. This title came with strings attached; part of his responsibility of being a godfather was to hold the baby during his circumcision. Green most likely got a kick out of informing Bernstein of this task.

Shortly after Green died in 2002, his son Adam found a letter his father had written on his fiftieth birthday to his best friend, recalling the night they first met at camp:

“Whatever our ages, + until we stop all walking, we are still taking that walk in the night around the Onota hills… How happy your friendship makes me. It fills me with the simple + complicated joy of knowing there can be a meaning to life–, that our haphazard + rambling walk is filled with endless connections into the past + the future.”