A tradition for upper classmates attending elementary schools across Long Beach, California in the 1960s was a week-long camping adventure by school bus to the nearby mountains. Some fifth graders went to Camp Hi-Hill in Angeles Crest, others went to Camp O-Ongo in Running Springs. Everyone debated and argued which camp was best. For reasons I don’t recall, our class went to Camp O-Ongo.
The campgrounds were replete with cabins, dining halls, campfires, and an endless stream of organized outdoor activities designed to engage throngs of fifth graders in various crafts, learning, team-building and physical activities.
Kids were segregated by gender, then randomly divided among a dozen or so cabins, each named to help ensure no one would find themselves lost at bedtime. Our cabin was led by a camp counselor I vaguely remember, except that he was barely older than a high schooler.
Our cabin was called the “Manzanita”, named after the indigenous evergreen shrub which dominated the local chaparral. The Manzanita cabin’s mix of boys could be best described as skewing heavily towards nerdiness. I won’t share their names for fear of retaliation, but there’s little doubt that the shoe fit, with room to spare.
No sooner than juggling and tossing for a premium bunk space had concluded, the counselor gave us the task of imagining a our cabin’s team name. And, so it was… the nerds settled on the coolest name of all, and we became forever known as the “Manzanita Playboys.” We were all bark and no bite, but who cared.
A few of the surviving members of the Manzanita Playboys recently gathered at Joe Jost’s, a one-hundred year old dive bar in Long Beach, for a sixty-year reunion of the founding of the Manzanita Playboys. We drank cheap beer, ate pickled eggs and pretzels, and had a couple of Joe Jost’s Special sandwiches. No one really remembers for sure who came up with the name, but I’ll go to my grave swearing it was me.
We didn’t talk much about the camp, except for a few fading memories about trying to get to first base with a girl who’s name I dare not mention, plotting a failed panty raid on the girl’s cabin, and the bus ride home when someone got car sick as we swerved around the curves of the mountain road back to civilization. But the memory that still sticks is the bravado of calling ourselves, the nerdiest cabin mates of all, the “Manzanita Playboys.”
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Albeit, sixty years too late, I made a logo and printed up some t-shirts and buttons.
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