You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.
Acknowledgments
This book began as an ode to Sy Friend, the retired director of The Variety
Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, Pa. Like many works
of fiction, it morphed into something else. I worked at the camp for four
summers when I was a student at Oberlin College. That was more than forty
years ago, but Sy’s lessons of inclusivity, love, and acceptance—delivered
not with condescending kindness but with deeds that showed the recipients
the path to true equality—remained with me for the rest of my life. In that
spirit, I am thankful to the entire Variety Club family: the late Leo and Vera
Posel, who donated the land for the camp in the thirties; the late camp
trustee Bill Saltzman, who insisted I become a counselor when I applied for
a job as a dishwasher at age nineteen; my friend and former co-counselor
Vinny Carissimi, who later became a brilliant, two-fisted Philadelphia
attorney who dug me and many former camp staffers out of several horrible
legal scrapes, usually for free. And of course Sy and his husband, Bob
Arch, now living in retirement in Lake Worth, Fla. Sy served that camp
from age sixteen until his retirement three decades later (1950–1979). I’ve
never met a more brilliant, compassionate person. He was a slender,
handsome man, a fast-moving object who slipped around the campgrounds
like a spirit, in clean white tennis shoes, shorts, and golf shirt, bearing an
ever-present cigarette between his fingers and the melody of some
spellbinding opera in his head, for he loved that genre. He knew the name
of every camper and often the names of their parents as well. He was
decades ahead of his time. His staff looked like the United Nations, long
before the word “diversity” echoed around America. We were all poorly
paid and overworked. But the lessons we learned from Sy left us rich. Many
of the former staffers went on to excel in various fields.
The kids loved him with an extraordinary intensity. Each night at
bedtime, he played a scratched recording of a bugle performing taps on the
camp’s ancient loudspeaker, followed by a gentle “Good night boys and
girls.” And if you stood outside facing the rows of cabins, which were not
air-conditioned—he refused to let the trustees install air-conditioning,
saying, “They need to feel the air. Let them live. They’re inside all year”—
you could almost hear the murmurs of all ninety-one campers, the children
lying in their bunks, the words echoing up and down the row of dark cabins,
“Good night Uncle Sy.”
He served as a principal in the Philadelphia school district during the
year, but was a summertime legend to the children of the camp. One of my
campers, Lamont Garland, now fifty-five, a born-and-raised North Philly
kid who never allowed a lifelong dependency on crutches brought on by
what was then called cerebral palsy to stop him working for the
Philadelphia Electric Company for twenty-five years before his retirement
in 2014, told me a story about Sy years ago that I never forgot. Lamont,
who today lives in Columbia, S.C., told me this story when he was seven or
eight. He was attending the Widener Memorial School in Philadelphia at the
time, which has admirably educated Philadelphia’s children with disabilities
for the last 116 years. We were sitting on the porch of one of the camp
cabins on a summer afternoon and he said, out of the blue, “Uncle Sy came
to Widener once.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he work there?”
“No. He just showed up. We were in assembly in the auditorium one
morning, and he just walked in.”
“What happened?”
“We gave him a standing ovation.”
I leave it to you, dear reader, to picture that crowded auditorium more
than forty-five years ago, the conglomerate of crutches, wheelchairs, and
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