Mohegan Woodlands

On Facebook, I am reconnecting with a lot of people from high school. On my last blog, I gave a shout out to people from Mohegan Woodlands, a bungalow colony where I spent my summers from around 1964-1973. I got a few wonderful responses, but my hard drive has crashed since then and I lost off of your e-mails and phone numbers. There were 30 or 31 families who lived there, half a dozen who were close with my folks (later, my mother and her boyfriend), and most of us kids hung around together at some point. I really am anxious to hear from you folks and promise to call anyone who'd rather talk than e-mail. I know I've done searches for Mohegan Woodlands fairly often and have come up with almost nothing. I'm trying to keep my name off this blog as much as possible, though I know that some of your got here from a Facebook page that does have my real name (ambivalent, me?), but my mother's name was Joan Zogott and my brother's name is Daniel.

Some time when I'm a little less tired, I'll talk some about the place. It is iconic for me. It represented a place to play safely in the outdoors, even when we left the official boundaries of the colony and ventured into the woods. Worst care scenario was poison ivy.

I was in fact talking to my nephew about Woodlands the other day. Walter Jonah Zogott just started first grade and is taking tennis lessons. I told him how his daddy and I used to play tennis until you couldn't see the ball any more. He asked why, which is a fairly good question. The answer is that there was only one tennis court and all the grown-ups liked to play, so they only let the kids play from seven to eight at night, when it was getting dark. (We also got ten to eleven in the morning, when we were almost all at day camp. Thanks lot, grown-ups!)

I'd even like to hear from people who went to the same day camps we did: Laur-Lee and Floridan. I did track down my favorite counselor from Floridan a couple of years ago, who turned out to be someone rather important in some sort of federal government health agency, and seemed weirded out to hear from me.