The Wallooner | Winter 2021
5 Counselor Bob Lohman leading a group of young campers. (Photos courtesy of Wendy Booth Boyd)
THE WALLOON OUTDOOR CLUB FUN AT THE FOOT IN THE 1960’S
“I
By Lauren Macintyre
t was the most fun time of my life,” recalls longtime Wallooner Charley Zimmer when speaking of the Walloon Outdoor Club, where he served as a counselor and water skiing instructor. “We just loved it,” echoes Wendy Booth Boyd, who attended the camp and whose brother, Chuck Booth, served there as a counselor. The Walloon Outdoor Club (WOC), an innovative day camp that operated in the Walloon Lake village from 1964-68, was the brainchild of Dr. Gerard Mudd, a prominent St. Louis cardiologist with a large cottage on the South Shore. Not wanting to send his five children Mary Linda, Madonna, Milissa, Marian and Gerard away to camps at that time, he and his wife Elizabeth decided to establish the Walloon Outdoor Club. The Mudds thought it would also appeal to other Walloon families who wanted to keep their children productively engaged in outdoor activities while spending summers at the lake. Dr. Mudd was a member of a longtime Walloon family whose tenure on the lake was established nearly one hundred years ago. His father Dayton Henry Mudd, an original partner and vice president of J.C. Penney, came to the lake in the early 1920’s. Dayton and his wife Margaret Flemma built a large Sears kit cottage on South Shore Drive, which was then passed on through the family. In 1951 his son Gerard and Elizabeth built an imposing log home on adjacent land. The original Mudd cottage was occupied for many years by Gerard’s sister Margaret “Muddie” Fletcher, then later sold to the Clark family. Getting the Outdoor Club up and running was a mammoth undertaking. Imagine the challenge of designing the curriculum, finding a location, hiring staff, purchasing sports equipment, and then after completing that,
Counselor Nancy Noel with campers waiting for the Mackinac Island ferry.
recruiting campers to come to the program! The Mudds were apparently not daunted by these tasks. As their son Gerard notes “Our father built up a whole infrastructure for the future of the WOC, including the purchase of buildings, furniture, fixtures, sailboats, canoes, motorboats, skies, archery equipment, radios, shotgun reloading equipment, trampoline and a GMC Suburban truck.” So meticulous a planner was Dr. Mudd that he chronicled everything related to the WOC in a 160-page journal still owned by the family today. For the headquarters, Dr. Mudd purchased an iconic building in the Walloon Village: the beloved Brower’s Grocery and Soda Fountain. Originally built in 1908 as the Shepard Delicatessen, it had various owners and iterations including Crago’s Grocery and a brief stint as a dance hall. Later it became Brower’s, which is how most Wallooners today remember it. Famous for its ice cream soda fountain and artfully patterned tin ceiling, it was every young Wallooner’s favorite spot in the Village in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. After the Browers retired, the building then found new life as the hub of Outdoor Club activity. Dr. Mudd also bought the quonset hut next door. The Mudds used their own expansive log home as a center of WOC activity. The water sports took place there, as well as tennis on a large court the family had built. Dr. Mudd’s wife Elizabeth supervised the activities at
An Aug. 1, 1964 article from the Petoskey News-Review describing the first season of the WOC, with a picture of the old Brower’s building (Photo from the Greenwood Cemetery archives)
the house. As her daughter Marian Mudd Miaskiewicz notes “The campers came there for swimming lessons, water skiing, canoeing, tennis and all around fun water sports. It was basecamp for the first few years.” Camper Wendy Booth Boyd loved going to the house. “Mrs. Mudd really kept us entertained there. She was such a great person.” Dr. Mudd assembled an impressive cast of educators, friends and families to staff the Outdoor Club. The Mudds had founded a prestigious boys’ school in St. Louis called St. Louis Priory; from that school Dr. Mudd brought Brian Barry, a physics instructor and retired member of the Royal Navy to head the WOC. Later Marty McCabe, another staff member from the school, took over. Charles Switzer, a student at Oxford, ran the Sea Ray cruises and sailing program, which included a fleet of Javelin sailboats. Wallooner Charley Zimmer taught water skiing, and while at Duke University recruited his good friend Jeff Mullins, star Duke basketball player and Olympian, to work at the WOC also. The Mudds housed many of the St. Louis staff in the family’s large log home. “It was always a full house which amazingly never felt crowded,” remarks Marian. Charley and Jeff both taught water skiing behind the Zimmers’ Chris Craft Holiday and did a variety of odd jobs for Dr. Mudd. Charley also led a team of twelve WOC counselors, (continued on next page...)
