Camp Out : Labor Dispute With Counselors Spoils Summer Fun for 179 Girl Scouts

Remember as a kid how you couldn’t wait to get away from that hot city and those nagging parents to spend a couple of weeks in an idyllic mountain hideaway? It’s called summer camp, and generations of Americans have childhood tales to tell of exciting times in the forest primeval.

But few experiences can match those of the 179 Girl Scouts, mainly from the Los Angeles metropolitan area, who on Tuesday left for Camp Osito-Rancho, a pretty 160-acre spread amid lodgepole and Jeffrey pines, two miles southeast of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains.

At 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, the girls, 10-year-olds to teen-agers, made the journey in four buses, ecstatic over the long-anticipated 11 days of horseback riding, swimming and hiking. At noon, upon arriving at the camp, about 1,000 feet above Big Bear Lake, they had lunch in the dining hall and went outside to sing songs and begin participating in camp activities.

Then, hardly had they had time to scrape a knee, when a camp official summoned the girls and made a stunning announcement.

Camp was canceled.

Everyone was going to have to jump aboard the buses again for the hot, bumpy four-hour ride back to the Angeles Girl Scout Council headquarters on West Adams Boulevard.

“A lot of kids got mad,” said Girl Scout Cheryl Fagan, 11, of Carson.

Parents, some bewildered, others angry, were called to meet the girls as they sleepily tumbled off the buses at about 11 p.m. Tuesday.

As the upset Girl Scouts were later to learn, they were the victims of a labor dispute between the council and the camp’s counselors.

According to Howard White, council president, the Girl Scout program at the popular camp, which dates back half a century, had encountered “a lack of leadership,” and apparently several of the counselors had walked off the job.

“Since we didn’t have sufficient staff to carry out the program” and properly supervise the girls, said White, a partner in a Los Angeles accounting firm, it was decided to immediately close the facility.

White said on Wednesday that he had not had a chance to talk to the approximately three dozen camp counselors, primarily college students, who run Camp Osito-Rancho (Ranch of the Little Bear).

“So I can only speculate on the discontent,” he said. “Maybe (the counselors) weren’t getting time off when they were supposed to get time off and there were frustrations there.”

Reached by telephone at the camp, Bridget Merrill, 24, of Studio City, the camp’s equestrian director, said a labor dispute had been smoldering for some time. The counselors, she charged, were overworked and either wanted more staff or more money.

“We said if we were going to work this hard, we would like more money for it,” said Merrill, a senior majoring in photography at San Diego State University.

Wages for the camp counselors, Merrill said, ranged from about $380 a month to slightly above $500.

Matters had become so heated between the counselors and Girl Scout officials that nine counselors staged a sit-in at the dining hall Monday night to make their point, she said.

Sessions Held

About 380 girls were at the camp site Tuesday, because it was “change day,” when one group was arriving while another was leaving, she said. By then, she said, four two-week sessions had already been held, with two more sessions--now canceled--to go.

Because of the labor dispute, fewer than half of the camp’s counselors were on hand to supervise the Girl Scouts when they arrived from Los Angeles, she said.

At 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Joanne Swan, the Angeles Council program services director, broke the news to the Los Angeles contingent that they would have to go home that evening.

“Some girls cried,” Merrill said. “They didn’t understand. Some counselors cried too.”

“I was stunned, shocked,” said Debbie Fagan, 31, of Carson when she received a call late Tuesday telling her that she would have to pick up her daughter, Cheryl, at the Angeles Council’s headquarters.

Happy Memories

Fagan, who said she had happy memories of the same camp when she attended it 21 years ago, said it was to be the first overnight camping experience for Cheryl, a sixth-grader at the Broad Avenue Elementary School in Wilmington.

Grace Barkin, 10, of Long Beach said that after getting the bitter news, the children decided to get even.

Grace, a fifth-grader at the Douglas A. Newcomb Elementary School, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that some of the Girl Scouts took out their frustration on Program Services Director Swan for not telling them why they had to go home.

So, she said, when about 40 of the girls were herded into a crafts class until it was time for the buses to leave, they used “crayons and construction paper and toothpicks” and made ugly faces of Swan on paper plates.

“We were sort of mad,” Grace said. “And we taped them to trash cans.”