4

SEX, SEVEN, SICK

How Adults Kept the Children in Check

Macy Thomas thought about falling in love. At eleven years old, she looked ahead to her future and imagined living in the Kishacoquillas Valley of central Pennsylvania, a community she had traveled to for five consecutive summers as a Fresh Air child. Although as an African American Macy stood out among the overwhelmingly white population of Mifflin and Huntingdon counties, she still dreamed of returning to the site of many summer pleasures, marrying a local boy, and having a family. Her mother, Jolene Thomas, listened to her daughter describe her “obsession” but could not share her enthusiasm.¹ She knew, as did every parent of a Fresh Air child, that most guests could no longer travel to the country once they turned thirteen. Macy’s wish to live in the Kishacoquillas Valley, however fervent and sincere, had little chance of coming to fruition. The age limits and strict behavioral vetting that kept the threat of interracial romance at bay thwarted Thomas’s desires.

Together the themes of forbidden love, managed adolescence, and medical vetting explain both the Fresh Air movement’s longevity and the children’s varied and at times contradictory response to it. Some, but not nearly all, of the visits resulted in hosts inviting their guests back over the course of many years. Children usually, but not in every instance, responded positively to the invitations to return. As long as the children cooperated with their adult hosts, avoided any romantic entanglements, and accepted second-class status, they could craft long-term relationships that advanced their careers and increased their chances of financial stability. Only when they disrupted their hosts’ suburban equanimity by agitating to be sent home, becoming entangled in romantic attachments, or claiming equal status did the relationships end and the re-invitations discontinue. In a careful exercise of social control, hosts and program administrators selected children’s genders, set campground policy, and protected hosts from infection as prepubescent children morphed into teenagers all too capable of romantic entanglement.

Sex

Parents and social reformers have long sought to control children’s sexuality. As the middle class grew in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, the idea of adolescence became more widely recognized. With increasing pressure to delay marriage until one had earned enough to establish financial independence, the period between childhood and adulthood lengthened. Parents in turn attempted to repress children’s sexual urges, whether to masturbate or experiment, in hopes of establishing patterns that would extend into the risky period before one married and earned one’s fortune.² Although they would rarely dare to do so to adults, members of both the religious and medical communities felt free to moralize about the sexual habits of children and youths.³ Such ready intervention into the private lives of children signified a larger cultural concern for self-control—especially evident among “neo-Puritans” in the United States who “saved the hottest jeremiads for pelvic matters.”⁴ Childhood innocence had become linked with the absence of sexuality.⁵ Adults sought to keep it that way. Ultimately, the interest in controlling children’s sexuality served as one component of a broader project to exercise dominance and control throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶

Such repressive interests remained the responsibility of parents until psychologist Sigmund Freud called into question the innocence of children. By the end of the nineteenth century, children faced moral condemnation and social disapprobation anytime they engaged in sexual activity. A child who masturbated invited rebuke from ministers concerned about the eternal well-being of the child’s soul and from social reformers attempting to maintain the foundations of society itself.⁷ However, Freud attempted to cast aside such moralizing pursuits by positing that, rather than being free of sexual knowledge, children had already begun to integrate and process sexual information.⁸ A new class of experts emerged in the first half of the twentieth century who knew better than parents how to liberate children from unhealthy sexual strictures. By the middle of the twentieth century, schools, children’s activity centers, and various child professionals had supplanted parents—and especially mothers—as the purveyors of sexual education.⁹

The shift to sex education in the schools did not reduce sexual repression in Fresh Air host homes. Rural and suburban residents did engage in variant sexual practices, but the cover of social respectability often repressed libertarian impulses unleashed elsewhere by Freud and related behaviorists. Given the religious foundations of the Fresh Air movement, theological assertions about children’s malleability also influenced participating hosts. In particular, Protestant families described children as both impressionable and impervious.¹⁰ On the one hand, a good Creator engendered children who needed only gentle encouragement to flower. On the other, as creatures of a sinful world, children resisted discipline meant to foster good behavior. Although contradictory, these twin tenets led to the same ends. Whether to nurture or to force acceptable behaviors, parents influenced by these doctrines prohibited sexual expression in their guests and children. As suburban mothers entered the workforce and ideas about natural sexual development influenced the religious community, many parents moderated their control, but at least through the end of the 1970s, Fresh Air children encountered more sexual repression than liberation.¹¹

The entry of children from African American and Latino communities into white host families in the mid-1950s and afterward introduced the threat of racial mixing. U.S. history makes evident that “[n]o American issue ever ignited as much fire as amalgamation, mixing races.”¹² The nationally publicized 1958 “kissing case” drives home the point. White mobs and police officers terrorized two black boys, one eight, the other ten, for playing a kissing game with three white girls.¹³ After the milestone Brown decision, segregationists revealed deep-seated fears that interracial schools would lead to interracial sex; as white youths listened to black music replete with sexual themes, the segregationists’ worries intensified.¹⁴ To be certain, not all white southerners opposed school integration.¹⁵ Yet in those places where “massive resistance” did emerge, concerns about interracial sex set the stage for school integration battles across the country.¹⁶ In the North and the Midwest, where most Fresh Air children spent summer vacations, host concerns about interracial sex paralleled southern passions in intent if not in form. At root, northern white suburban parents through the 1970s had no more interest in their children marrying across racial lines than did their southern counterparts. Comments from white antibusing activists in cities such as Boston reveal similar fears about interracial sex.¹⁷

Organizers of Fresh Air ventures assuaged these fears of racial intermixing by presenting physical intimacy in as nonthreatening a manner as possible. During the 1950s, when interracial hosting first became common, publicity shots featured white hosts touching African American children as they welcomed or comforted them. The white hosts often appear uncomfortable. A 1956 photo shows three white host mothers standing stiffly behind their African American guests. No physical contact is apparent. More typically, photos showed hosts laying a hand on a guest’s shoulder or touching a homesick child.¹⁸ As African American children came to dominate the program in the 1960s, publicity materials featured host parents kissing their guests goodnight, holding their guests’ hands while walking to the car, or snuggling with their guest on the sofa while reading a bedtime story.¹⁹ Only at the end of the sixties did images proliferate in which guests and their host siblings draped arms around one another’s shoulders, tossed one another in the pool, or built an interracial human pyramid.²⁰ By the 1970s, photographers focused on black guests hugging or holding hands with their white host siblings but only in same-sex pairs.²¹ At no time did promoters allow even the suggestion of physical contact across race and gender lines except in such endearing cases as when a white male host is shown cradling a napping African American girl.²²

Those who set up Fresh Air visits designed a second simple, yet effective, method to curtail unwanted romance. Program administrators allowed hosts to select whether a boy or girl would visit their home. For decades, hosts could choose the gender of their guest.²³ Although program administrators no longer allowed hosts to select the children’s race or religion by the beginning of the 1970s, not a single program surveyed here—whether run by newspaper companies, social service agencies, schools, denominational agencies, or congregations—stopped hosts from selecting their guests’ gender. In this way, hosts reduced or eliminated opportunities for their children to become romantically attached to a guest of another racial group.

A preference for girls continued. In many programs, invitations for girls led boys by a ratio of two to one.²⁴ As the percentage of African American and Latino children grew, so did the balance in favor of girls over boys. In response, by the mid-1960s the Fresh Air Fund had set numerical goals to increase invitations for boys.²⁵ By the early 1970s, Veronica Anthony, the Fresh Air Fund’s Friendly Town Director, stopped short of naming the sexual root of the problem when she declared, “People think boys are harder to manage; that they cause trouble and may be a risk…. [Some] say they’d rather have no guests than take a boy.” To attract host interest, she described “little boys sitting on the stoop all summer long,” notably emphasizing the boys’ young age and, presumably, less risky state.²⁶ Despite Anthony’s efforts, appeals for hosts to invite boys only grew more insistent through the 1970s.²⁷ Although publicly unspecified, the prospect that black and brown boys would threaten the social and sexual equilibrium of the hosting communities mirrored similar attitudes toward black and brown men. As comments and reactions from white suburbanites made evident through the 1970s, a single African American or Latino man moving into an all-white community projected a threat to white women, whereas a single African American or Latino woman in the same setting presented a target for white men.²⁸

Yet gender selection did not stop romance from blossoming. Private correspondence to Fresh Air administrators revealed host concerns about interracial attraction. As one local host wrote, “One of your [black] boys was much interested in our white girls”; another expressed the opinion that “it would also be wise if the older [black] boys could be placed in homes where there are no girls their age.”²⁹ Still another local organizer stated his concern even more obliquely by suggesting that Fresh Air children be placed in different homes each summer because “[f]amiliarity in this case might lead to certain problems.”³⁰ Looking back on his years as a Fresh Air child in the 1970s, Luis Diaz remembered falling in love with two different local girls and regretting that he never had the opportunity to really tell them how he felt.³¹ Even though few accounts became public, Fresh Air children of color and the white children they met while on vacation still fell in love. Like Macy Thomas, who traveled to the Kishacoquillas Valley and expressed interest in the white boys who lived there, or the young white woman from that community who fell in love with a Fresh Air visitor, married him, and moved to Queens, hosts and guests, male and female, crossed the romantic color line despite the wishes of the adults around them.³²

Cross-class romance had not threatened hosts or organizers to the same degree. Novels and movies had long idealized working-class heroes and heroines falling in love with members of the upper class.³³ Although sometimes offered with a dose of caution that marrying above one’s station would require giving up friends and family in exchange for comfort, ease, and luxury, popular culture familiarized the idea of cross-class romance.³⁴ Prior to the shift to interracial hosting, Fresh Air promoters celebrated such romantic attachments. A 1948 article told the charming story of an Otego, New York, family who hosted two Fresh Air girls and their single mother. A few months later, the girls’ mother married their hosts’ oldest son.³⁵ In the mid-1950s the Fresh Air Fund still proclaimed that many visitors married romantic partners they met while on a summer visit.³⁶ Such proclamations disappeared from promotional materials from that point onward.

Romances that crossed both class and race lines simply proved too threatening. By program policy instituted at the vast majority of Fresh Air initiatives, children who traveled to the country came from impoverished families. From the mid-1950s onward, most of them came from African American or Latino families. By contrast, hosting families had enough financial stability to bring an additional diner to the table without undue financial hardship; with few exceptions, all were white. Even though movies such as Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), starring Spencer Tracey, Katherine Hepburn, and—most significantly, Sidney Poitier—began to make the prospect of interracial attraction somewhat less taboo, such films still addressed interracial romance only. Poitier’s character was a doctor, not a working-class laborer. Those responsible for publicizing Fresh Air programs made the decision to avoid all mention of romance in light of the multiple dynamics at play. They could not script a scenario where only race proved salient.

The prevailing conservatism of both Fresh Air programs and the rural hosting communities muted any record of gay and lesbian attraction. While Fresh Air children recognized same-sex relationships and often understood them to be a normal part of city life, they did not make their sexual preferences evident to their hosts if they strayed from heterosexual norms.³⁷ Through the 1970s, state and social repression of the gay and lesbian community fostered silence and covert behavior.³⁸ Despite that silence, Fresh Air children and their hosts found ways to express affection within gender lines that did not require public disclosure or invite punishment. At least one Fresh Air participant recalled being taught to masturbate by her host sister while they lay together in the bedroom.³⁹

Organizers also hid abuse during this period. Consistent with the record of many religious communities, Fresh Air leaders initially invested far more resources in protecting hosts from dangerous children than in protecting children from dangerous hosts.⁴⁰ Through the 1970s, program administrators halfheartedly vetted hosts while rigorously vetting children. Given the relatively lax process for approving hosts, home visits could easily prove treacherous. An accurate assessment of how often abuse took place is difficult to make given the historical mistrust of law enforcement within many of the urban neighborhoods from which Fresh Air children came and the significant power imbalance between program administrators and participant families.⁴¹ Many instances of abuse never made it into the written record.

Yet some did. Instances ranged from the host who hit her guest on the back in 1956 to the host who fondled his guest in the 1960s and forced her to perform sexual acts.⁴² In other instances that came to light only in the early 1980s, white hosts in Vermont beat and tormented a five-year-old girl from East Harlem during a four-week stay, and a counselor at a Fresh Air camp sexually assaulted a ten-year-old boy.⁴³ As a result of these latter cases and the lawsuits they prompted, the Fresh Air Fund “admitted it had been naïve,” began participating in efforts to prosecute abusive hosts, and changed its vetting procedures.⁴⁴ But it did not do so until the 1980s. Through the course of the period under scrutiny here, the children remained vulnerable to sexual predators and could not rely on Fresh Air personnel to support them if they registered any kind of abuse complaint.

Overall, Fresh Air hosts and administrators invested far more energy in assuaging donor fears and curtailing sexual contact across racial lines than in preventing sexual assault. Publicizing interracial visits with photos of chaste hugs, goodnight kisses, and tender hand-holding presented the programs as safe, nonthreatening undertakings. Allowing hosts to choose the gender of their guest avoided complications around sleeping and privacy in the home while also greatly reducing the number of African American and Latino boys who received invitations. At any point, administrators could have modified gender-selection policies just as they had modified the selection of race and religion. The fact that none of the programs did so serves as yet another confirmation that fears about interracial sex presented the greatest challenge to the Fresh Air movement, and the resulting policy decisions proved the most essential to the movement’s long-term success. Like most other social service providers at the time, those same administrators offered little public comment or concern about the safety of the children in the intimate spaces of bedrooms and camp cabins.

The adults’ efforts to squash budding romance did prove effective but not foolproof. Macy Thomas most likely did not marry someone from her favorite summer vacation spot. Cultural, racial, and class chasms ran deep between New York City and the Kishacoquillas Valley. A few children of color ventured across those gaps, married Fresh Air romantic partners, and relocated to their former hosting communities.⁴⁵ Interestingly, those with light skin tones, whether white people or those from Puerto Rican or Dominican backgrounds, relocated most often.⁴⁶ Local residents, like many other white Americans, found people with lighter skin tones less threatening.⁴⁷

The few children who returned to hosting communities did so without Fresh Air support. Only guests who received special invitations from their hosts got to go back after they became teenagers and, in many of the programs, could return only if their hosts paid their way. In some instances, children drawn by romance or nostalgia revisited without an invitation. When they returned, no one could deny their sexuality. At points the reunions turned awkward. The story that follows explains how Fresh Air organizers kept older children from returning by joining age caps with gender selection.

Seven

Laurence Mickolic revealed much when he explained gender inequity in the Fresh Air camp program. For twenty-three years, Mickolic had directed camps for the Fresh Air Fund. Although in 1960 he enthused over the ability of his staff to transform a group of “rowdy teenage girls,” by the early 1970s that enthusiasm had begun to wane. He referred to girls who ran away and others who, along with some boys, were “hard to handle” because “they fight and … cause trouble.”⁴⁸ By 1978, Mickolic had found ways to deal with troublesome boys because he allowed them to attend camps until the age of sixteen. Girls, however, had to stop attending once they turned thirteen. As he explained to a reporter, Fresh Air camps served girls only through the age of twelve because “[t]hey’re a little too sophisticated these days.”⁴⁹ He did not need to clarify his point. His concern had little to do with the girls’ knowledge of the classics, their erudition, or their ability to engage in polite conversation. He referred to the onset of menarche and the girls’ understanding of and interest in sex. Rather than grapple with those issues directly, Mickolic set an age cap.

Mickolic’s policy of rejecting adolescent females unified Fresh Air homes and camps. Home-based programs had put a similar limitation in place on girls and boys for much of the twentieth century. By putting the age cap in place for girls in camp settings as well as homes, Mickolic and other Fresh Air administrators joined in the project of simultaneously shielding girls from sexual advances and reducing the threat of their unchecked sexuality.⁵⁰ As in the case of hosts who exercised the option to select their guest’s gender, Fresh Air programs often allowed hosts to select their guest’s age and extend re-invitations to former guests through their mid-teens. The policy of host preference again forestalled concerns about sexual contact between adolescents and dovetailed with a practice of shuttling older children and those with behavioral issues to the camp environment. Hosts’ preference for younger children likewise emphasized their reluctance to engage guests who had lost the sexual naïveté of a seven-year-old.

A discussion of age selection begins first with the parameters set by the sponsoring organizations. In general, as program administrators gained experience with sending children on summer vacations, they usually raised the lower age limit. Already in 1897, a survey of the twenty-four Fresh Air programs active at that time found that the vast majority accepted children when they turned six.⁵¹ Others did not follow that practice. In the 1950s a Fresh Air counselor commented on the “baby actions” of a two-and-a-half-year-old camper.⁵² As late as 1972, a Fresh Air program in Ames, Iowa, allowed four-year-old children to participate.⁵³ Mickolic’s program raised the entry age to five by 1949 and kept it there for the next three decades.⁵⁴ The only home-based program to have set the entry age above seven did so by disallowing any child younger than eight in order to address the “problem of homesickness.”⁵⁵ Across region and time, children could most commonly participate once they turned five, six, or seven.

Home-based programs more consistently set the upper age limit at twelve. In 1897, well over three-quarters of the children transported out of the city were younger than thirteen, but it should be noted that, prior to the shift away from hosting white ethnic children, a small number of programs allowed teens to continue participating.⁵⁶ By 1922, the Fresh Air Fund had settled on twelve as the standard age cap, although local communities occasionally lowered it to ten.⁵⁷ Rarely did local communities raise the upper age limit.⁵⁸ As the African American and Latino children came to dominate the programs, publicity materials more and more consistently stated, “A child is no longer eligible to participate in this program after age 12.”⁵⁹ During the early 1970s, programs in Boston, Chicago, and Des Moines did allow a few youths in their early teens to travel to local homes, but even these initiatives emphasized that most of their participants, as was the case in Boston, fell “between 5 to 12 years of age.”⁶⁰

Some programs allowed children who had developed an especially close relationship with their host family to be re-invited until they turned sixteen. Children could be placed with new hosts until they turned twelve, but after that point Fresh Air staff no longer arranged new hosting sites. Only a re-invitation from a prior host would bring a teenager to the country.⁶¹ Few administrators spoke publicly about their attitudes regarding the extension option, but in 1978 Carolyn O’Keefe, a host placement volunteer, let slip that “older children are the subject of debate among” Fresh Air officials because “[a]t 13 or so, unless they’ve had a lot of positive summer experiences, a kid in the Bronx is on the streets for life.”⁶² O’Keefe perceived widespread distrust of teenagers and, strikingly, a lack of faith in the efficacy of the summer hosting program itself. But such candid comment was rare. Rather than discuss the tensions present in hosting teens, administrators instead fostered an informal screening mechanism to ensure that children would not introduce too much of those streets into the hosting environment.

Hosts expressed a preference for younger children within the prescribed age range. Administrators complained that the children “between the ages of 10 and 12 … we find hardest to place.”⁶³ Echoing mid-century professional and legal shifts that treated childhood as a time of freedom from adult knowledge and responsibilities, hosts had begun asking for younger and purportedly less worldly wise visitors.⁶⁴ A 1954 Pennsylvania host requested “the youngest you can get but not an older one.”⁶⁵ As a 1978 report on the evening arrival of a group of thirty-five Fresh Air children in the north-central Pennsylvania town of Clearfield noted, “the children are younger this year because sponsors requested them.”⁶⁶ One year later, a local Fresh Air representative bemoaned that hosts “would rather have the younger ones,” which meant “the only way to get the older ones is to get families to re-invite them.”⁶⁷ Given the widespread preference for younger children, even those children fortunate enough to be placed at a young age could not count on re-invitations (see figure 8). Camps did provide opportunities for some older children, but here again registration rates dropped precipitously once the children became teenagers.⁶⁸

The preference for younger children led to problems arising from immaturity and homesickness. Upon returning to New York, one young child did not know where he lived, insisting that he came from Alabama rather than Brooklyn, a discrepancy cleared up only when his mother arrived to claim him.⁶⁹ Mary Ann Strawn, a host mother in the northwest Illinois suburb of Rolling Meadows, dubbed her five-year-old guest Yvette the “Princess of the magic tennis shoe” because she could not keep her shoelaces tied.⁷⁰ In contrast to these and other minor problems arising from preschoolers traveling away from their families, homesickness traumatized far more children. Although children who complained of homesickness in camp settings often did so to resist authority, Fresh Air children visiting host homes seemed more set on simply extracting themselves from a strange environment.⁷¹ Most common among children ages five to nine, homesickness could be triggered by something as simple as a neighbor’s dog barking “just like” a pet at home or the cumulative effect of travel. Upon exiting the bus transporting him from New York City to Wicomico, Maryland, five-year-old Edward Phillips demanded, “I wann’ to go home, and I am hungry to [sic].”⁷² Amid tears and inconsolable heartache, some children did return home early.⁷³

FIGURE 8. “Mrs. Dale Cooper of Linville (right) welcomes her guest, Tangiere Walker” (original caption). Used by permission of the Daily News-Record, Harrisonburg, VA (“Holiday Begins,” Daily News-Record, July 14, 1978, 13).

Fresh Air administrators responded to recurring bouts of homesickness by instituting new procedures rather than raising entry ages. Other than a few programs such as the United Way initiative in Minneapolis that stopped sending five- and six-year-olds to camp, administrators chose to manage homesick children rather than remove homesick conditions.⁷⁴ At point of departure, Fresh Air staff focused on separating the children from the parents as quickly as possible. In 1968 one reporter observed two staff members “practically shoving” two sobbing girls, ages five and six, on to the train while their parents watched.⁷⁵ Once in the home, hosts could call a “24 hour emergency number” if homesickness or other “adjustment problems” emerged.⁷⁶ If in need of help, hosts received advice on how to keep the homesickness at bay.⁷⁷ If such advice proved ineffective, organizers shifted children over to experienced hosts with reputations for providing solace to homesick children or, in extreme cases, sent the children back on an “early return.”⁷⁸

The drive to keep children in homes despite the prevailing issue of homesickness attests to the organizers’ dependence on full-length visits. Organizers described homesickness as the “major” or “biggest” problem faced by hosts and made sure to mention those instances when children “were not even homesick.”⁷⁹ Moreover, although organizers frequently claimed a re-invitation rate of 50 to 60 percent, they never released statistics on how many children became homesick or went home early.⁸⁰ Motivated by a desire to provide the best possible experience for the city travelers and to give donors more success stories than tales of homesick woe, organizers pursued robust strategies to comfort distraught children. The difficulty of arranging travel logistics, contacting parents, and appropriating funds for an early return pressured organizers to keep homesick children in guest homes, but concern for long-term program success also factored in their calculation.

Children again exercised significant influence over their hosts and Fresh Air movement organizers. They could make their hosts start “climbing the walls” in frustration over persistent homesickness or become despondent, as in the case of one host whose first guest left the same day she arrived and whose second guest left after she stayed only half the time.⁸¹ Only on the third try did the guest not claim to be homesick and stayed the full two weeks, thereby, in the host’s words, proving “satisfactory.”⁸² Hosts fretted over their charges, changed their bedtime routines, and arranged for visits with other Fresh Air children in the vicinity.⁸³ They scheduled phone calls home, prepared the children’s favorite foods, and tried to keep the children so busy that they would not think of an early departure. Regardless of whether the children intended to manipulate their hosts through claims of homesickness, their actions nonetheless triggered time-consuming emotional and procedural responses from their adult hosts.

Homesick-prone children fulfilled hosts’ desires only if the children conformed to their hosts’ expectations for age-appropriate behavior. By the end of the 1970s, hosts began to comment on the conduct of their young guests. Even a five-year-old might shatter host expectations. When five-and-a-half-year-old Troy traveled from Bell Harbor, New York, to the Eberhart household in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, he surprised his hosts by nonchalantly “blurting out a curse word if the mood struck.”⁸⁴ Other hosts noted that their young guests were “street-wise” or found that the children brought “the agnosticism and sophistication of the city and the profanity of the streets” into their homes.⁸⁵ Again echoing Laurence Mickolic’s comment about Fresh Air girls over the age of twelve, a host in Friedens, Pennsylvania, by the name of Karen Gibson noted that many of the children came to her community “like little adults, very sophisticated.”⁸⁶

A conclave of Fresh Air representatives in the mid-1960s sheds light on the frequent use of the term sophisticated to describe urban children. Seventy administrators, volunteers, and staff people gathered in New York City to share ideas and address issues arising from hosting “Inner-City” youths.⁸⁷ In the midst of a wide-ranging discussion, a participant asked “why new invitations are limited to 12 year olds.” In response, an unidentified conference member noted, “Generally youngsters over 12 years are more sophisticated than children of the same age in Friendly Town communities.” As a result, the conference goer added, “adjustments are difficult.”⁸⁸ Other correspondence from adults involved in hosting attributed the sophistication to the children’s exposure to television.⁸⁹ Regardless of the source of the differing experiences, in this instance the adults used a term usually reserved to describe upper-class refinement as a euphemism for knowledge about sexual relations. Hosts desired children who remained ignorant of such intimate matters—another participant at the New York conference noted that “invitations for children 10 and over are minute compared to younger age groups”—but spoke about that preference in the most oblique manner possible.⁹⁰

Older children no longer desired by hosts could take their vacations at a number of sex-segregated camping facilities. As early as 1950, the New York City Mission Society began scheduling a “pioneer unit” for teenage boys, a model of primitive camping that numerous camps began implementing at the time.⁹¹ Separate camping programs for teenage girls focused on “homemaking” skills like sewing, cooking, personal grooming, and child care but could also include carpentry and woodcraft.⁹² Although by the 1960s a few camps did run coed programs for teens, including a work camp for well-behaved campers over the age of fourteen, more commonly Fresh Air camps either discontinued camp offerings for girls once they became teenagers or offered sex-segregated programs for adolescents.⁹³ Primitive camping continued to be popular through the 1970s, but the opportunity for Fresh Air girls to “rough it” remained rare.⁹⁴

Despite age caps and gender selection, hosts spoke of their guests as family. From the 1940s through the 1970s, hosts delighted in guests who called them “Mommy” and “Daddy,” referred to their host siblings as “sister” and “brother,” and welcomed being treated “like a member of the family.”⁹⁵ Yet the vast majority of the hosts stopped hosting children once they turned thirteen. In most cases, even those families that re-invited the same guest each year eventually broke off connection. Even though hosts asserted that guests were like “one of the family,” only in the rare instances when hosts adopted or assumed legal guardianship did Fresh Air children truly become family after their teen years.⁹⁶

Those programs that offered both home-based and camp hosting found it difficult to reconcile the two approaches. From the 1940s through 1970s, program administrators stressed that they and the children they served preferred home visits over camp stays. According to a promoter in the 1940s, homes offered a “feeling of belonging that the best camp cannot duplicate.”⁹⁷ Thirty years later, another promoter echoed that sentiment when he claimed that Fresh Air children enjoyed home visits the most “because of the closeness and the lasting bond that often result.”⁹⁸ At the same time, organizations such as the Fresh Air Fund invested far more per camp visit than home stay. In 1969, for example, the Fund invested $157 for each of the 2,550 campers it served while only $27 for each of the 15,700 Friendly Town visitors on its roster.⁹⁹ By 1977, the Fund served 2,700 campers but only 14,000 home visitors, a number that continued to decline through the 1970s and beyond.¹⁰⁰ Two years later, as economic pressures forced mothers to enter the workforce, only 10,600 children ended up in homes.¹⁰¹ At the same time, the Fund continued to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in its camp facilities. In all, the Fund constructed 356 buildings, 3 artificial lakes, and 17.5 miles of roads as well as a $90,000 planetarium.¹⁰² The considerable investment in age-capped campgrounds revealed core priorities.

The channeling of funds to camping programs stemmed first from fund-raising strategies. Fund-raisers have long noted that donors respond well to building projects. Development officers at the Fund capitalized on this tendency by inviting major donors to contribute to camp projects like a planetarium or new lodges, the latter of which received positive acclaim—and more publicity—from other architects.¹⁰³ Donors responded. Already by 1967, they had contributed over three million dollars to camp development.¹⁰⁴ Although contributors also gave money every year for program costs, the largest donations went to buildings and property.

The Fund also adapted camp infrastructure to serve a growing number of physically handicapped children. Unable to find hosts willing to take children with physical disabilities, Fund director Frederick Lewis allowed the Polio Parents Club of Westchester, New York, to make use of the Hidden Valley camp on the Fund’s Sharpe Reservation in 1951. The club ran a two-week program for children “who had been handicapped by polio, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and rheumatic fever.”¹⁰⁵ Within a few years, the Fund had begun scheduling camp sessions that integrated both physically handicapped and able-bodied children.¹⁰⁶ By the mid-1960s, the Fund served “children with handicaps ranging from blindness to diabetes.”¹⁰⁷ Along with “conservation” and “interracial harmony,” Lewis listed service to the physically handicapped among the Fund’s top three outreach opportunities.¹⁰⁸ Although by 1974, the Fund served only 180 handicapped children per summer, its publicity staff ensured that reporters featured the handicapped program on an annual basis.¹⁰⁹

The reporters who wrote articles about Camp Hidden Valley emphasized the children’s independence. In contrast to a prevailing twentieth-century camping trend to reduce opportunities for self-directed play, Hidden Valley staff challenged campers to push their limits on their own.¹¹⁰ A camper with cerebral palsy who had to wear leg braces surprised his mother by climbing a rock wall. When she expressed concern to a nearby staff person, the Fresh Air staffer replied, “Don’t worry. We’ve got Band-Aids.”¹¹¹ Rather than protect the children, staff encouraged the campers to hike, play baseball, and dance in wheelchairs. Geraldine Hill, a camper born with “a club foot and seven fingers,” attested that camp staff “showed me I could do things I never thought I could do—they made me feel like an able-bodied person.”¹¹² In 1973 the Fund began experimenting with sending children with handicaps to the homes of willing hosts.¹¹³ A few responded, but in the main service to physically disabled children took place on camp property.¹¹⁴

A sprawling, well-funded camping facility capable of serving able-bodied and physically handicapped children alike undercut the program’s interest in long-term relationships. Children did return to camps and in a limited number of instances came back to serve as counselors or summer program directors. Given high turnover rates among the largely college-age counseling staff, long-term sustainable relationships seldom developed in the camp setting. By investing so much of their fortune in camp facilities, the Fund’s board members made clear where their longest-term interests remained. As families stopped re-inviting children at the end of the 1970s, Fresh Air Fund directors poured ever more money into their camping facility. Host interest may have waned, but camps thrived. The one component of their program in which there could be no re-invitations and, for girls, no participation at all once they reached their teen years continued to grow.

Yet 50 percent of those who visited homes did return at least one additional summer. Across the country, that figure remained consistent until the very end of the 1970s. For the space of nearly four decades, about half of all hosts invited their guests back. The largest of the programs noted that the average length of stay of a child in a given host home lasted just under five consecutive summers.¹¹⁵ Some children took special trips during the school year or at other points in the summer to participate in host family events like weddings, birthday parties, and vacation trips.¹¹⁶ One even moved in with her former hosts in order to find a local job when she turned eighteen.¹¹⁷ Although Fresh Air promoters rarely stopped to explain why half of the children did not receive re-invitations or that in many areas only a third or even as few as 10 percent of the children went back to the same family three or more times, many children did anticipate returning to the same family more than once.¹¹⁸

Even such long-term relationships can appear quite different from the perspectives of the children. Some, such as Luis and Nilson Diaz, two brothers from New York who participated as guests in the programs in the 1970s, lost track of their hosts once they became teenagers but felt positive about the experience as a whole. As an adult, Luis even reconnected with his original host family via a social media site.¹¹⁹ Others, such as a group of teenage girls from Gulfport, Mississippi, who traveled to Newton, Kansas, to attend school at Bethel College, discovered that the warm welcome they remembered from their experiences as Fresh Air children had cooled considerably upon their return as young adults. In addition to being denied the privilege of associate church membership, the young women confronted racial epithets, found dating difficult, and received unequal treatment in host homes when on choir tour.¹²⁰ Most commonly, older Fresh Air guests recognized that once they became teenagers, they could not venture back. As sixteen-year-old James Murray lamented in a 1976 letter to his former host, “I can’t go because I’m too old.”¹²¹ The author of a letter to the editor in Bennington, Vermont, observed that hosts found their former guests to be threatening when they returned as teens or adults.¹²²

Cindy Vanderkodde’s experience confirms the observation. Like so many other Fresh Air children, she was African American, hailed from New York City, and first visited a host at the age of five. Traveling under the auspices of a Fresh Air program run by the Christian Reformed Church, she felt welcomed and included by her hosts and the surrounding community in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Vanderkodde stayed long enough with Helen and Roger Vandervelde, her hosts from Grand Rapids, Michigan, that she learned the embrace eventually turned cold. When she was younger, the former Fresh Air child thought, “Oh wow! This is family. They love me.” Yet once she graduated from college, established a career, and had “become an equal” to the hosts, Vanderkodde observed that her hosts’ affections cooled. “There was just no interest there,” she lamented.¹²³

Many other former Fresh Air children reported a similar sense of alienation upon becoming an adult or even entering adolescence. Glenda Adams, a participant in the same program as Vanderkodde, recognized a former host sister when she arrived as a first-year student at Calvin College but received no acknowledgment in return.¹²⁴ Peggy Curry, the mother of a Fresh Air child in Harrisonburg, Virginia, noted that her daughter never received another invitation to visit a host family in Pennsylvania once she became a teenager.¹²⁵ The list goes on of former Fresh Air children who felt cut off by their hosts or simply lost contact for decades.¹²⁶ Notably, all the examples identified here came from situations where white hosts brought African American children into their homes. Although some children did maintain connections with former hosts into adulthood, most participants enjoyed short interactions without the benefit of long-term relationships.

A recurrent desire for naïve, prepubescent children again shaped age limits built into the programs. Seven-year-old children had far less trouble finding a welcome at camps and homes than did seventeen-year-olds. The younger children still embodied the themes of innocence long promoted by Fresh Air programs: lack of sexual knowledge, naïveté about worldly affairs, and absence of both physical and moral contagion. Likewise, Fresh Air Fund administrators’ interest in serving the handicapped dovetailed well with the overall attraction to desexualized, unaware, cooperative children. Although camps did promote the children’s independence to a degree, that support focused more on freedom of mobility than independence from adult authority. As long as the children accepted a subservient role, they had the full support and affection of their hosts. Once they became sophisticated or equal to their hosts, many fewer found a ready welcome.

Age caps and sex segregation proved effective. They quelled much of the children’s dissent. Yet wrapping the Fresh Air movement in an antiseptic gown did even more. By carefully screening all potential guests for contagious disease, Fresh Air programs protected hosts from the threat of the city’s sickness entering their homes.

Sick

Fresh Air programs guaranteed that every child sent to the country had a clean bill of health. Recruitment notices assured hosts that all children had to pass at least one and most often two medical examinations prior to departure. Only discussion of transportation received more consistent and widespread attention. At the same time, not a single program required that hosts also receive medical examinations in order to participate. Like the programs themselves, the threat of contagion went only one way.

Administrators initially focused on tuberculosis cures. In the earliest years of the programs, Fresh Air administrators sought to cure children by exposing them to fresh country air—hence the fresh air label. After 1944, however, the discovery of antibiotics dramatically altered that practice.¹²⁷ A course of isoniazid, and later rifamycin, rendered fresh air cures obsolete. Rather than bring children who had a communicable disease to the country, program administrators made certain that no child who left the city ever had a disease.

The screening continued even after the children left the city as program staff and volunteers measured the children’s weight. Through the mid-1950s, hosts commented on the amount of food their guests consumed, kept statistics on average weight gain, and exclaimed over children who individually ate “more than one loaf of bread per day.”¹²⁸ A 1948 report from a Fresh Air camp noted “a gain of 257 pounds …, four and one half pounds to the boy” and “a gain of 71 pounds” by the thirty-eight girls attending the camp.¹²⁹ The children likewise paid attention to their weight. In 1950 Anne O’Hagan, a New Yorker visiting the island town of Jamestown, Rhode Island, expressed concern that if she gained too much weight, she would not “be undernourished anymore” and thus ineligible to return.¹³⁰ With the advent of federal food subsidies, free breakfast programs, and greater attention to children’s nutrition, however, concern about weight gain during Fresh Air visits waned in the later half of the 1950s until, by the beginning of the 1960s, comments on the children’s poundage rarely appeared in the written record.

Interest in tuberculosis cures and weight gain may have dissipated, but assurances about the children’s health remained. Time and again, recruitment notices emphasized that children received two medical exams, one by a doctor a week or so before departure and one by a nurse the day before they left or as they boarded the bus or train.¹³¹ In the words of a local chairperson, sponsors did “everything possible” to assure that the children arrived “in perfect health.”¹³² The long-standing reputation of the city as an environment filled with disease—evangelist Billy Sunday once warned that God should “wear rubber gloves” when dealing with urban dwellers—fostered this intense and sustained concern about contagion from the city.¹³³ Since the 1920s, some clinic personnel had even tested Fresh Air participants for venereal disease without explaining how such a test might be relevant to hosting programs.¹³⁴ In one instance, Mennonite Fresh Air program administrator Paul N. Kraybill contacted Bud Lewis at the Fresh Air Fund in 1952 to see whether Lewis’s organization ever gave blood tests to Fresh Air participants so as to “determine the incidence of venereal disease.”¹³⁵ Hosts had apparently contacted Kraybill to express concern that some of the children might “spread the disease to others in the country through drinking glasses, toilets, etc.”¹³⁶

A few programs promoted the medical exams as free health care for the children. A report on Dr. Frank A. Manzella, a physician who gave more than 15,000 medical examinations to Fresh Air children in the course of his fifty-year career, emphasized that all the exams had been offered free of charge.¹³⁷ The Cleveland Fresh Air program in particular touted its comprehensive pre-trip physical exams and, by 1971, its “year-round medical care.”¹³⁸ That same year, the Fresh Air Fund in New York also made attempts to extend health care to children in their programs when physicians discovered that between “50 and 90 per cent” of the children had never previously been to a doctor.¹³⁹

The provision of free checkups did not change the fundamental equation. From the perspective of the rural hosts, the city bred sickness, and the country bore health. In contrast to the unhealthy, disease-ridden city, promoters and hosts viewed the suburbs and country as inherently salubrious. In addition to the ameliorative benefit of clean air, good food, and cool nights, promoters highlighted the country’s psychiatric restorative properties, the healing power of space for children to “run around” and “let off steam,” and the reparative value of “placing cool bare feet on the green grass of a meadow.”¹⁴⁰ As a result of the one-way equation, although the city children endured medical scrutiny that at times included humiliating delousing in the presence of local hosts, Fresh Air host families never had to contend with questions about their physical condition.¹⁴¹

Assertions about the benefits of country living obscured health hazards regularly faced by the children while on their visits. Transportation to the rural locations could leave the children “confused, tired, dirty, hot, and hungry” and, in at least one instance, “in tears” upon arrival.¹⁴² In another instance, a car accident left several children injured while on their Fresh Air vacation.¹⁴³ Many Fresh Air children returned home with injuries ranging from bee stings to broken bones.¹⁴⁴ Those placed on farms faced the real threat of death or dismemberment from working around and riding on farm machinery.¹⁴⁵ Each year some did tumble from hay lofts, get kicked by a draft animal, or find their fingers cut by a blade.¹⁴⁶ Although the Fresh Air Fund began an awareness campaign that resulted in fewer accidents and injuries, by 1966, 634 children still experienced an accident or became ill during their stays.¹⁴⁷ The insurance provided by most Fresh Air programs covered the resulting medical expenses, but the risk that a child traveling on a vacation would return home in poorer health than when she or he left belied the claims that country visits only improved the children’s physical condition.

Program administrators like Kraybill and Lewis paid attention to health concerns because they and their staff genuinely cared for the children, but also because they wanted to protect hosts from contagion. In the programs’ early years, only a third of the children examined traveled to the country.¹⁴⁸ Even so, hosts complained that children still brought lice and impetigo with them.¹⁴⁹ Some children did test positive for tuberculosis.¹⁵⁰ It seems that no one, from the Fresh Air children and their families to the hosts themselves, registered the possibility that contagion could as easily flow back to the city from the country if a member of a host family came down with measles or was already infected with tuberculosis. The assumption that only urban residents could spread disease blinded all involved to alternate vectors of contagion and obscured the record of rural injuries, farm accidents, and travel trauma.

The medical vetting process thus set apart Fresh Air children from other urban dwellers. Unlike their counterparts back in the city found to be contagious, the young travelers who arrived on the doorsteps of suburban and country homes brought no disease with them and therefore posed no medical threat. The children could bring stories and perspectives of the city into their host homes, but program administrators exerted every effort to ensure that nothing more dangerous came with them. In effect, the programs sanitized the children as they vetted them. Paul Kraybill’s 1952 query about testing children for sexually transmitted disease was not unique. As late as 1971, medical professionals engaged by the Cleveland Fresh Air program screened potential participants for sexually transmitted diseases.¹⁵¹ Although they offered little or no explanation to the children or their parents, the medical staff indicated that at least these children of the city would bear no medical threat and, presumably, would less likely be sexually active. Program administrators sold Fresh Air programs with a guarantee that a measure of the urban world would enter host homes, but it would not be contagious.

Innocence and Power

Fresh Air administrators did their job well. By curtailing romance, focusing on preadolescents, and ensuring clean bills of health, those in charge continued to define their programs by the images of innocence that they projected. Fresh Air staff succeeded in promoting their programs as sexless, nonthreatening, and contagion free.

The narrative that fueled this presentation centered fundamentally on power. As historian E. Melanie DuPuis contends, “Stories about perfection are in fact acts of power.”¹⁵² The reporters, administrators, hosts, boosters, and endorsers of every stripe used the privileges afforded them by virtue of class, status, wealth, and often race to assert that Fresh Air trips were not only a good way to respond to the apparent plight of children stuck in the city but also, as one booster claimed, “the best thing that could happen to a child” in those circumstances.¹⁵³ Unblemished children sent to a superior setting by flawless supporters told a perfect story. But as critics had begun to note by the 1970s, that Fresh Air narrative, regardless of the individual motives of those involved in telling it, powerfully devalued and diminished the children’s capacity. At the same time, by emphasizing the children’s poverty and need, promoters—perhaps inadvertently—highlighted their own wealth and ability. A few activists rejected the assertion that the Fresh Air hosts and administrators offered viable solutions to the children’s problems, ones that even the children’s parents could not solve.¹⁵⁴ The activists recognized that to host a Fresh Air child may have been an act of kindness, but it was also an act of power.

From the perspective of the ever more trenchant critics, children brought to the country counted more as passive recipients than capable actors. In rural communities afraid of interracial romance, in camps and homes where age caps limited long-term relationships, or in the examining rooms of health clinics where medical professionals asked questions about STDs, administrators limited the children’s initiative. Although the young sojourners challenged stereotypes, talked back, rejected doctrine, swam to suit themselves, and celebrated the city, Fresh Air critics held that program promoters cast the children as passive recipients of charitable largesse.

In the end, the Fresh Air hosting programs centered on an exchange between children and adults. Race, class, and gender always shaped and molded those interactions, but at root Fresh Air organizers sent children rather than their parents outside the city. As the following chapter makes clear, Fresh Air lasted so long and reached so many because its leaders had found a way to encourage giving based on presenting the children—not their parents—as deserving of pastoral salubrity. By the middle of the twentieth century, the adults who had participated as travelers in the early years of the program had long since been left behind. They had lost their cachet. Only those children who remained mattered.