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The New York Times
Friday, Augus t4, 2006
Camp Is Their Second Home
Here's how to find Bill and Jancy Dorfman's vacation getaway: Just walk 100 feet or so east of senior boys'
cabin 1-4, or 200 feet south of the Taj (a k a the senior girls' cabin) and a few steps up from Lake Armington
at Camp Walt Whitman in Piermont, NH. The couple have owned the camp since 1983, but Mr. Dorfman's ties to the
300-acre property in the White Mountain date back to the1950's. A nephew of the former owners, he was a Walt
Whitman camper all through his childhood. "The first place I took Jancy after we'd been dating six months was here,"
he said. The couple's familiarity with the beauty of the New Hampshire woods and waters strongly influenced their
plans for the three-bedroom house, which they use all summer and visit in fall and winter. It had to have a view of
the lake and surrounding mountains, and it had to blend in with the rest of the structures at Walt Whitman, which
each summer is home to some 400 campers - for the record, one of them my daughter. And it had to be comfortable,
light-filled and very inviting, because during the summer there are plenty of visitors. Campers crowd onto the
screened porch for barbeques and various "bunk night" activities; counselors collect there for meetings, and staff
members from England and Australia tiptoe in at 2 a.m. to watch World Cup broadcasts. "What we wanted," Mr. Dorfman
said, "was a house that didn't say to the parents of the campers, 'Oh, the directors live in this super special house,
they're living in the lap of luxury.'" In fact, he says, parents were thrilled. "We had an open house the first summer,"
he said, "and they wanted to know why we'd waited so long.
"For the first 16 years that the couple owned the camp, their summer home was a wood cabin with leaks and assorted
squirrels, mice and the occasional bear. "I loved living there," said Mr. Dorfman, the former headmaster of the
Highland School, a private school in Queens. "I don't know about Jancy." "I was a good sport," Ms. Dorfman
countered. "But good sportsmanship had its limits;" It would be a simple matter, she suggested. All they had to
do was tear down three cabins that dated from 1953 and had long housed the oldest campers, and build new ones -
a win-win situation, new quarters for everybody. First Mr. Dorfman said no-after all, he had lived in those very
cabins when he was camper. Next, he said some version of "Well, O.K., guess you're right, Honey. It would be a
good idea." Then, on further consideration, he concluded that really, they were being far, far too hasty about
the decision. "That's when I called in the back-hoe," Ms. Dorfman said.
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