Family travel

Children can touch history
at Vermont's Camp Meade

Copyright by Dan Sheridan

We could have stayed in a nice, modern motel.

Only 30 minutes more on Vermont's I-89 north to Burlington and we'd have had fast food nearby and air conditioning inside. We could have had an indoor pool; even a hot-water faucet that didn’t rumble during a morning shave.

But cold air is overrated, especially in Vermont. And who needs more junk food?

If we hadn’t swung onto State Route 2 at Exit 9, the Middlesex exit, we’d have missed the F-86D Saber Jet on the grass. The Korean-war-era fighter plane was about ten car lengths from our cabin in Middlesex at the Camp Meade Motor Court.



Helen Mary with an F-86D SabreJet
 

My daughter, who was then in fifth grade, wouldn’t have seen the boxy, olive-drab Army ambulance marked with a big red cross drive up to each cabin in the morning. Sure, they're on TV reruns of M*A*S*H*, but this one transports not bleeding soldiers but fresh towels and clean bedding.

The 20 stand-alone cabins, all with showers, are a throwback to the road-travel days of the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s. Before so many Marriotts and Motel 6s. Before polished theme parks. In Burlington, an otherwise terrific place, we would have paid a lot more than $54.50 for the night. And we'd have gotten a lot less. s

How could a chain compete with history? How could a chain compete with a quirky, non-Disneyized museum in the rough?

Near the swimming pool, under old evergreens, is a 1936 U.S. Army howitzer, half out of its sandbagged, camouflaged enclosure. The big gun is just yards from a ten-wheel, 2.5-ton Army truck, the venerable deuce and a half.

There's a 1942 jeep with a tall radio antenna at the rear, light and slimmed compared to its hunky SUV descendants. Beyond that, on the horseshoe-shaped lawn in front of the cabins, is a strange-looking M5A1 Stuart light tank from 1942, early World War II.

There’s a large, heavy-canvas mess tent under the trees, an amphibious "duck" landing craft and, near the camp entrance, a stubby, two-engine AT-11 Beech trainer built in 1941. The silvery wings were detached and placed next to the plane.



A father and son by the amphibious "duck"
 

Down a hill behind the cabins, at a reconstructed Vietnam war firebase, is another Army ambulance near a Bell Huey Cobra gunship. The long, limber blades, a worker said, were removed because kids were pulling them down while playing.

People touch things. Kids climb into the old jeeps and sit on the tanks. My daughter, HelenMary, climbed up a well-worn ladder to the F-86 cockpit. On Saturdays, between 10 and 3, rides are available on military vehicles.

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We stayed in cabin 13, with "Gen. Joseph Stillwell," marked on the front and our car on the side. Next door was the "Maj. Gen. M.A. Edson, USMC 'Red Mike'" cabin and down to our right was the "Gen. Douglas MacArthur" cabin. And, yes, a recorded reveille was sounded at 0800 hours.

The cabins are, well, sparse. They're clean, tidy, equipped with plain, old-fashioned fans and painted with the same reddish stain as the picnic tables in front of each cabin. There's even cable TV, though whether "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell would have approved of Nickelodeon is an open question.

People in a nearby cabin invited us to a birthday party but instead we drove two or three winding miles up Route 2 towards Stowe to the Ben & Jerry's ice cream plant outside Waterbury. After watching the quality-control testers during the plant tour [$2.50 adult admission], or maybe it was after the free samples, Helen Mary declared her intention to someday become a Ben & Jerry's taste tester.

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Gus Gosselin, Navy from 1955 to 1957, bought the place in 1984 with his wife, Clara, when it was just a motel across Route 2 from a Citgo gas station. He's 63 now, and works, officially, three days a week. ``The kids are taking over. We're just helping out,'' he says, claiming that his daughters, Diane, 40, and Lori, 36, pretty much run the place.

When Gus and Clara bought Camp Meade, friends told them to change the name. Folks didn’t know if it was a Boy Scout camp or an army base. Instead, Gosselin started his collection.

``Somebody said, ’You ought to get a tank,’'' says Gosselin. ``Well, it took three years, but I got the Stuart for $25,000. Today you can’ get a tank for less than $50,000.''



WWII Purple Heart vet with the 1942 Stuart tank
 

In fact, Camp Meade was a federal Civilian Conservation Corps camp during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a place where out-of-work young men could live and get $30 a month from the government while they planted trees, built state parks, and cut firebreaks.

There’s a small Depression museum to the side of the camp restaurant, near the Army/Navy surplus store and a World War II museum. The recorded voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt plays from an old radio. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," Roosevelt says. The front pages of old newspapers are framed on a wall near an entrance. "Long War Ahead, Says FDR," one declares.

Since many New England veterans' organizations make Camp Meade a travel destination, there's a good chance your kids will meet some of the now-elderly people who took part in World War II and the Korean conflict.

Helen Mary wanted one of the dummy training hand grenades piled in a barrel at the store because they didn’t have the gas mask she really wanted. The mask would keep noxious cigarette smoke away, she explained. She didn’t get the grenade but she can have the dog tags, personalized with her name and blood type, next time we're there.

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Gosselin combs magazines published for military-equipment collectors. He said the F-86, which he bought in 1987 for $29,000 or $30,000, was flown by the Yugoslavian air force after the U.S. replaced it with newer aircraft. It sported a red star on each side of the fuselage when it arrived in Vermont on a flat-bed truck.

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In the USO Canteen, the breakfast and lunch restaurant by the Great Depression museum and the store, Sunday's buffet is like a Navy mess. Lots of ham, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy, hash and eggs made to order by Gosselin or daughter Lori. There's even "SOS," chipped beef on toast. It's all $6.50. Kids under10 pay 65 cents times their age; a 5-year-old is $3.25.

Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman and Harry James play in the background. A painted Navy fighter flies on one wall; a red-tipped silver fan blade as a propeller. Victory posters from World War II are on the wall: ``You buy 'em, we'll fly 'em'' says an aviator in a brown leather jacket.



Visitors can experience a 1942 Ford jeep
 

War-bond stamps are next to a mannequin in an Army Air Corps flight suit with a shearling jacket. Army jackets hang on pegs and there are American and German steel helmets. A blue Navy B-25 model bomber hangs from the ceiling.

How could I like Camp Meade? I demonstrated against what I saw as a senseless war in Vietnam. I was appalled when, a long time ago, Guardsmen shot down kids protesting that war at Kent State. But I had a cousin, dead before I was in kindergarten, who was a gunner on a B-17 that flew through thick flak over Germany. Three uncles used equipment like this fighting the Nazis. Camp Meade isn’t about politics or the views of generals. It celebrates, in a quiet way, the quiet men who rode in the vehicles or fired the guns or flew the planes.

Sure, it's nostalgia and scarf-over-the-shoulder romanticism; war from a distance. But Camp Meade doesn’t glorify killing or legitimize patriotic hate. It celebrates the common man's take on an era of shattering depression and murderous global war.

Gosselin brings the touch and feel of the times to people, especially kids, who, if they think of the '30s and '40s at all, see them as irrelevant history. Hearing a fireside chat by FDR, seeing photos of bread lines or listening to reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor is beyond flag waving.

What makes it work for me is the quirkiness. This is no corporate-perfect theme park, no academic or armed-services history exhibit. It is one man's vision -- and vision is much too fancy a word -- of where we have been. That mannequin in the old bomber jacket was wearing a perfectly-out-of-place pair of 1970s dark glasses. The amateur touch.

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Camp Meade Motor Court is open May through October. To get there from the south, exit Interstate 89 at northbound Exit 9, Middlesex. That is one exit northwest of Montpelier, Vermont's state capitol. Camp Meade is 1/2 mile south on Route 2 going toward Route 100B to Waitsfield and Sugarbush.

For reservations or information, telephone (802) 223 5537 [and tell them you learned about it on kidsboston.com] or click here for the official Camp Meade web site.

Dan Sheridan is a Chicago reporter and editor working in Boston. He can be reached at dms@kidsboston.com.