Camp Catawba

The camp's nearest neighbors and indispensable practical aids were Mr. and Mrs. Ira W. and Sally Lentz Bolick, a mountain farm couple who descended from 18th-century German immigrants to America.

[2] The boys at Catawba participated in traditional summer camp activities—ball games (on a sloping field), swimming (in a spring-fed pond and later in a modern pool), horseback riding (at stables in Blowing Rock), and hiking throughout the 3,000-acre (12 km2) Cone Estate (now the Moses H. Cone Memorial Park) which bordered the camp, and across Grandfather Mountain.

Vera Lachmann, who taught classics at Brooklyn College, told the campers the Iliad and the Odyssey in alternating summers, and directed a drama program that included plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes; Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller and Yeats; and Nelly Sachs, who was a friend of hers.

The music program, under Tui St. George Tucker, consisted of a choir, an orchestra (with some parts adjusted according to the instrumentalists available), and private lessons, particularly on the recorder, her professional specialty.

Some arts counselors went on to become respected professionals including: Eva Frankfurther, Thomas Locker, Hannibal Alkhas, Mark di Suvero, and Richard Pepitone.Throughout Catawba's 27 summers, most of the campers and many of the staff came from New York City and Washington, DC.