Early-day guile helped create civic wilderness

It is one of Seattle's secret treasures — a 68-acre municipal park in West Seattle where for $40 a night you can rent one of 10 rustic cabins. It's a camp with a history that would surprise many present-day Seattleites.

The wilderness experience in the big city comes with six bunk beds that have plastic-covered foam mattresses, a bare light bulb and a stone fireplace outside.

Besides numerous kinds of birds, you might spot a coyote, and certainly, if you leave food outside, raccoons will visit at night.

Even the entrance to Camp Long reflects its low-key status. It's easy to miss the little sign along 35th Avenue Southwest pointing to it; the gate is actually half a block down, past homes on Southwest Dawson Street.

There was a 65th-birthday party for Camp Long on Saturday afternoon at its lodge, with cake, coffee and a Boy Scout honor guard.

There was plenty of gray hair among the 100-or-so people attending.

Some recalled the cast of characters who pushed to build this Seattle jewel, dedicated Nov. 8, 1941, after four years of work.

The park was the creation of men who lived in a much different time, and in a much different Seattle:

• The camp was named for King County Superior Court Judge William G. Long, who worked in Juvenile Court and who, years later, freely admitted that materials used to build the park had been diverted from other government projects. As work proceeded, he remembered in a Sept. 17, 1957, speech, "there was more and more snaffling of materials."

One such occasion was when another Superior Court judge was handling the bankruptcy of a plant nursery. The abandoned ornamental trees found their way to Camp Long, as did, on another occasion, lumber from a school being dismantled, and, another time, lumber belonging to the county.

• The first director, Clark E. Schurman, a revered Scoutmaster who designed the artificial "Schurman Rock," used at the camp for rock-climbing training, also sometimes disciplined boys by cutting the Scout emblems off their shirts.

• The idea for Camp Long is attributed to Archie Phelps, a member of the Seattle Park Board and later a King County commissioner, who was given this assessment in 1948 by the Seattle Municipal League: "Hard worker, experienced; tempestuous; questionable judgment."

The previous year, Phelps had been acquitted of official misconduct for loaning a 25-ton county crane to an Enumclaw logger. Phelps said he simply wanted to get county roads repaired faster.

But to someone like Sheila Brown, current education-program supervisor at the camp, it's a matter of perspective.

"My understanding is that they were crusty guys who believed they were doing a really good thing for young people. It was the Depression years; nobody had any money," she said.

"I used to work at Catholic youth camps. If stuff wasn't used by somebody else and you could make use of it, you were just being smart. The other guy just wasn't smart enough to get there first."

And to Gordon Rasmussen, 83, of Mercer Island, and Bruce Smith, 88, of Bellevue, who as kids were in Troop 65 that was run by Schurman, the discipline they got also was a matter of perspective.

On their mountain hikes, said Smith, "not following directions could be a matter of injury, or life or death." Seeing a fellow Scout having his emblem cut off, he said, "was something you didn't forget."

One time, Smith remembered, Schurman did slap a boy — and later "felt terrible about it." Mostly, he remembered that Schurman "had terrific patience to take 30 kids out in the woods for two weeks."

But that was then.

"No way the parents would stand for it," Rasmussen said about that kind of discipline. "They wouldn't allow that: ... 'They couldn't do anything to my darling kids.' "

Saturday, what mattered to many of those attending was not the history of Camp Long, but what it meant to them now.

Nine boys, ages 12 and 13, from Boy Scout Troop 481 out of Renton and Kent, had spent the previous night in Cabin No. 7.

They stood around the fireplace and cooked hot dogs on propane stoves, the rain pelting around them.

The boys figured they had finally fallen asleep in their bunk beds at around 1 in the morning, having spent the time mostly talking about school and friends.

"It's fun. The cabins are nice," said Cody Covington, 12, of Kent.

Also attending the Saturday party was Sandy Beaucage, a 25-year volunteer at the camp.

She remembered how, when living in New Jersey, her Girl Scout troop had its wilderness experience camping at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

"That's pretty pathetic," she said. "And then think of what we have here in Seattle at this camp. I used to do 'Tot Walks,' with little kids 2 to 5 years old.

"You let them out on the trail, and they just sit there and feel the moss. They'll look at a hole in the base of a tree for 15 minutes. It's a magical place."

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com