Venice Camp--20 Years of Pure Joy

The mayor of Los Angeles couldn’t make up his mind.

There he was, facing more than 100 kids in the middle of singing a song about what they liked for breakfast, and he couldn’t even supply the next stanza.

After an uncomfortable pause, some of the children began offering suggestions. “How about pizza and Coke?” a tiny reasonable sounding voice called from the crowd.

Tom Bradley smiled broadly and nodded his approval. So the children finished the song with a stanza about what presumably was the mayor’s favorite food. “Pizza and Coke, pizza and Coke,” they sang. “I like mine fried upside-down, I like mine fried all around. Flip ‘em, flop ‘em, flop ‘em, flip ‘em, pizza and Coke, pizza and Coke.”

It was the only lull in an otherwise seamless performance. For 20 years, Venice Camp has been providing inner-city children with the opportunity of expanding their horizons in the smog-free, rolling Santa Monica Mountains. On Tuesday, camp officials invited Bradley and other dignitaries to the site to mark those two decades of service.

“We wanted to thank them for their support,” said Alice Drucker, executive director of Los Angeles Youth Programs Inc., the nonprofit agency that runs the summer day camp on about $100,000 a year in contributions and grants.

It was in 1968 that the camp first opened its doors in Venice to economically disadvantaged children from a variety of ethnic neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles. Ten years later, Venice Camp moved to the five-acre Crestwood Hills Recreation Center in the Santa Monica Mountains above Brentwood and opened its doors to physically handicapped youngsters as well.

Since its founding, Drucker said, about 6,000 youngsters age 3 to 14 have attended the camp. Parents pay $5 per child per two-week session. Attracting an average of 500 children each summer, she said, the camp is run by 30 staff specialists who lead the youngsters in nature study, drama, outdoor cooking, crafts, overnight camp-outs, trips to the beach and other activities.

“For kids living in housing projects there is nothing that is recreational or safe,” Drucker said, adding that most of the children commute to and from camp each day in county-supplied buses. “The main thing they get out of this is an appreciation of people who are different, an appreciation of nature, and relationships that make them feel good about themselves. This is a very nurturing place.”

Indeed, that seemed to be the case on Tuesday as the children, most of them wearing blue and white Venice Camp T-shirts and baseball caps, entertained their guests with antics ranging from silly camp songs to skits depicting camp life. One skit featured a boy wearing a sign identifying him as “nobody” answering the call of a distressed fellow camper who had just told the audience that when he needed help, nobody came. Another featured a camper, identified as “day,” who performed a break dance to illustrate the moment on a camp-out at which day finally breaks.

“L.A. is the most diversified city in the world and I am glad to see it reflected here in these mountains,” Bradley told the children. “The most important thing you can get out of this camp is the realization that somebody cares about you. Keep dreaming those dreams.”

Afterward, the children dispersed for yet another hard day of play.

“Here you don’t have to worry about trouble,” explained Desmond Pagan-Afanador, 13. “There’s no gang violence.”

Shakina Robinson, 11, perhaps recalling the initial song with which Bradley had been entertained, had a more practical reason for coming to camp. “I like it because they give you junk food,” she said.