The 10th Street Experience

Ed Camp is an old man now who walks with a cane, wears a pacemaker and suffers from diabetes, but there remains a thread of steel in his voice.

It takes no stretch of imagination to believe that the commands he once fired across a playground roared with the intensity of a cannon barrage.

But the voice that could pierce metal was never intended to train anyone for combat. It was meant to teach respect, responsibility and self-discipline to a lot of kids who grew up understanding that.

It’s why 50 years later those boys, now men, gathered recently to honor Camp and to thank him for helping shape their lives in a manner that left little room for failure.

He was their playground director at the 10th Street School in South-Central L.A. from 1945 to 1960, ruling over a patch of grass and asphalt the way a lion prowls its turf.

The men who used the playground as kids call those years “the 10th Street Experience” because they consider it more than just a passing phase in their lives. It was an epoch.

Somehow the man who insisted on being called Mr. Camp, not Ed or hey dude, has assumed the stature of a giant in their memories, the way war imprints on a veteran’s mind, larger than life and louder than trumpets.

“He had an almost magical quality to motivate and inspire,” one man recalls, but the quality didn’t manifest itself in the usual way. It was different back then.

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“I was strict,” Camp says today, leaning forward in an easy chair, a cane across his lap. “I’d give a kid a swat once in awhile if he didn’t behave. I’d wash his mouth out with soapy water if he swore.”

He also organized baseball and basketball teams, took the youngsters camping and cared deeply about what was happening to them. Children were safe with him.

When a potential child molester tried to attack a girl in a school bathroom, it was Camp who, responding to her screams, threw him to the ground and held him for the police.

When a bear invaded their tent area on a trip to the mountains, it was Camp who, armed with an ax, stood between the bear and his boys, bellowing defiance, until the animal, intimidated, fled.

Now 78, he occupies the same two-story house he has lived in since 1948 in a neighborhood near 10th Street barricaded to keep out drug dealers. Tough once, it’s even tougher today.

A boy was killed not long ago at the corner near Camp’s house. A bullet pierced his doorway once and spattered against a wall. Gunfire is often the music of the night.

“He’s a prisoner of his own neighborhood,” Phil Post says, “and it’s a damned shame. He deserves better.”

A scout for the Seattle Mariners baseball team, Post was one of Camp’s boys back then and organized the 50th reunion. Those who came included cops, educators, business leaders, tradesmen and a former pro baseball player. Most are retired.

“He led not so much by word but by example,” Post says, “etching in each of us the burning desire to excel and meet his approval. Will there ever be another man like him? I don’t know.” It was different back then.

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Camp has lived in L.A. since 1926, brought here by his parents from Rhode Island. After a stint in the Army, he earned a teaching credential at USC, played some pro baseball and taught school until 1975. In between he created the 10th Street Experience.

The manner in which he faces his own frailty hints at the kind of stuff he displayed back then. He was a husky, 200-pounder once--”strong as a bull and quick as a cat”--but now weighs just a hair over 100 pounds and moves with the cautious pace of an old man.

In addition to battling heart problems and diabetes, Camp contracted polio in 1943. He recovered but still has trouble swallowing.

He dismisses his infirmities the way he dismissed the alibis of those in his charge who complained that they couldn’t rise to the standards he set.

“You can do it!” was a battle cry on the Ed Camp playground, and the boys who would become men learned, after all, that they could.

Camp doubts that he could be a playground director today, and he’s probably right. You can’t swat a kid or roar at him across the asphalt or force him to excel beyond himself. You’d either get sued, shot, beaten or fired.

At the 50th reunion, the men who gathered at a restaurant gave Camp a plaque. It said, “50 years ago you made an enduring impact. You provided a sanctuary of order, discipline and respect. We remember. We thank you. The 10th Street Guys.”

It was different back then . . .

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com