Camp Mah-Kee-Nac Totem Counselor of the Week

For the summers of 1995 and 1996, I worked at camp in Western Massachusetts called Mah-Kee-Nac. Towards the end of my first summer there, I was picked to be the “Counselor of the Week” in our weekly newsletter, The Totem. Here is the exclusive interview:

Days at Mah-Kee-Nac were long, but I was on rollerblades at MKN’s outdoor hockey rink most of the time…which was a lot of fun. The Danbee I refer to was Mah-Kee-Nac’s sister camp that sometimes shared evening activities with us. Although Extreme is still my favorite band of all time, I would say currently my favorite band is Pearl Jam. And if you don’t know who Blaine Lacher is, he was the Bruins goalie back in 1995. I would update this answer today with either Tim Thomas or Adam McQuaid.

When I think of Mah-Kee-Nac, a couple funny stories come to mind. While teaching roller hockey at MKN, sometimes the campers would be late for class and we would have to call the office to have them paged to the rink. The office girls were from England, so they weren’t really familiar with famous hockey names. So a few times during the summer you could hear Wayne Gretzky, Cam Neely, Mario Lemieux, or Bobby Orr being paged to go to the hockey rink.

Another time, I went to Danbee because I had plans to hang out with one of the counselors. I was hanging outside of the office with some of the campers and the camp director came over to see why I was there. When he went to go get the counselor, one of the campers asked me, “Why is there a swear on your hat?” Unbeknownst to me, the campers in my bunk had altered all of my hats. I thought I was wearing a Boston Bruins hat, but it had been changed to say “Boston Bitches”. I quickly ripped of the “Bitches” part, hoping the director had not noticed. My campers laughed themselves silly when I told them about it.

I also found the Camp Mah-Kee-Nac Vault for 1995 which had this picture of my bunk from 1995. I know, it doesn’t look like me…