A near miss makes camp even sweeter

Jerry Maravilla could hardly wait to go to camp. The week before he was to go last year, the 7-year-old kept asking questions at his local YMCA. When were they leaving? How long would they be gone? Where do the parents drop off their kids? At home, he had been pestering his mom to sign the necessary paperwork.

But when he and his mother showed up at 7:30 a.m. to meet the bus, camp director J. Jesus Diaz-Ceja was puzzled. “He walked up and I thought, ‘Hey, Jerry, I didn’t know you were going.’ My first reaction was, did I make a mistake?”

Though Jerry had been excited about camp, the director figured his mother was not. She hadn’t gone into the YMCA of Pomona Valley to sign the permission forms even though she picked Jerry up there every day after work.

“He’d tell me when we were at home, and there was nothing I could do because the Y was closed,” said his mother, Elizabeth Delgado. She didn’t realize her oversight until she noticed her son’s sullen mood one night. His older sister, Ashley, explained that he was disappointed about missing camp the next day.

So his mom packed his bag that night, woke him up early the next morning and prayed she could work something out. When they arrived, Diaz-Ceja recalled, “His mom was right behind him with all this stuff, and she said, ‘OK, what do I have to do to make it so he can go?’ ”

Luckily for the little soccer player, there were extra spots because his Y had contracted to use all of Camp Edwards that year.

Jerry’s mother breathed a sigh of relief as she watched the bus pull away.

“I got really busy,” said the 42-year-old mother of three who had just moved the family back into the three-bedroom house she owns in Pomona. After Jerry’s dad left when he was 6 months old, the family moved into the smaller guesthouse in the back to rent the front house to cover the mortgage.

“I knew camp was coming, but not exactly when,” said the auto insurance claims adjuster. “Being a working mom, working long hours, I have to stay on top of doctors’ appointments, keeping the yard clean, cleaning house, keeping food in the house ... somehow that year, it suddenly came, and oh, my God, Jerry really, really wanted to go.”

Delgado said the third-grader has talked about camp ever since and was thrilled to return this July. “That right there tells you it’s a positive thing for him,” she added. “He will remember camp for the rest of his life.”

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About 11,000 children will go to camp this summer thanks to the $1.4 million raised last year.

The annual fund-raising campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which this year will match the first $1 million in contributions at 50 cents on the dollar.

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