June 5, 2025 • 42 mins
Camp Shane is under new leadership: Selma’s son, David Ettenberg. In the 1990s, David’s reign brings with it more campers, more money, and even a Disney movie inspired by the camp itself. But as diet culture and fat phobia grips the decade, life at Shane gets stricter, stranger, and more dangerous. Selma struggles to hand over control, a disastrous Heavyweights screening becomes legend, and cracks in the camp’s foundation begin to show.
Camp Shane—one of America’s longest running weight loss camps for kids—promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.
But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane’s facade of happy, transformed children. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. More than 50 years after its founding, host Kelsey Snelling is bringing the real story of Camp Shane to light.
In this eight-episode series, she unpacks and investigates stories of mistreatment and reexamines the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. Along the way, she reveals and weighs the heavy price of shame.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.
This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please
take care. Camp Shane, like any other summer camp, had
a set of traditions that kept it afloat starting in
the late nineties. One of those traditions was watching the
movie Heavyweights, the Disney movie from nineteen ninety five about
(00:22):
a boy's weight loss camp. In the film, a group
of campers hold an uprising against the camp's oppressive, militaristic
leader played by Ben Stiller.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Attention, campers.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Lunch has been canceled today due to lack of hustles
deal with it.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
It's based at least partially on Camp Shane. I actually
talked to the director of the movie, Steve Brill.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
My name is Steve Brill. I think I was built
as Stephen Brill earlier in my career, but I dropped
the end. I thought it was too pretentious.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
A great Okay, I won't call you Stephen. Then Steve
told me that the idea for the movie came from
an advertisement. When he was a kid. Steve saw the
notorious Campshane ad in the back of the New York
Times magazine. You know the one with a skinny kid
holding out his waistband inches away from his body to
show off how much weight he'd lost.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I would always stare at that ad, going Wow, what
would it be like to go there?
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Years later, Steve was working in Hollywood brainstorming movie ideas
with then rookie producer Judd Apatow.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
And I told him that about that ad. He said,
we have to make it that.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
So that's how it became about a weight loss camp,
and particularly about Camp Shane, because that was the only
camp that we knew about.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
If you know anything about Camp Shane, then when you
watch Heavyweights you can see the parallels. There are kids
smuggling candy. There are way ins, there's a bus driver
pretending to pull into a fast food drive through before
course correcting in the direction of camp. There are even
go carts, gold carts.
Speaker 6 (01:56):
How many times can you go into gold dis as
much as you want, carry Jerry, if you went to
Camp Shane, you'd be sorely disappointed.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
The go carts were always broken. For many kids who
had not yet been to Camp Shane, Heavyweights was their
point of reference, and the movie made camp look crazy fun.
When I was interviewing people for this show. It came
up again and again.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Movies like Heavyweights.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
That movie Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
I think we all saw Heavyweights.
Speaker 7 (02:25):
Oh I really had naturally was Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
In my mind.
Speaker 8 (02:28):
It was like the movie Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
But Camp Shane wasn't quite like Heavyweights, not really. Even
Steve Brill could see that. During his research, he watched
several promotional videos from fat camps all over the country.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
The Camp Shane when it was always just something a
little off about it. I remember being bummed ultimately that
the camp that I was hoping would be the model
camp was shady.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
This is Camp Shane. I'm your host. Kel's smelling today.
We're talking about Camp Shane's new ownership, mother son squabbles
and an innocent film screening gone awry. Like the camp
in Heavyweights, Camp Shane passed hands from an older, married
couple to a young man with a fresh perspective. But
(03:19):
instead of the fitness guru Ben Stiller, Camp Shane had
David Ettenburg. By nineteen ninety, he had been camp director
for eight years and business was booming. The proof was
in the sugar free pudding. Shane's tax returns that year
showed profits of two hundred and sixty thousand dollars adjusted
(03:40):
for twenty twenty five, that's upwards of six hundred and
thirty thousand dollars, and that's just from the nine weeks
that Camp Shane was open each year, and enrollment was rising.
By nineteen ninety five, four hundred kids had signed up
to go to Camp Shane. It had come a long
way since the twenty nine campers of its opening year
(04:01):
in nineteen sixty nine. Looking back at the nineties, there
are certain things you might remember, like Friends, Seinfeld and
the Simpsons dominating television, or Sir mix a Lots Baby
got back on the radio.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I liked Bigs.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Did not.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Maybe you have memories of walking around your hometown mall
or sitting at home in the computer room exploring the
World Wide Web. These cultural touchstones might make you sigh
with happy nostalgia, But there was another cultural undercurrent roaring
through the nineties, fat phobia. Fat Phobia wasn't new, but
(04:49):
as pop culture shifted and advertising became all the more pervasive,
it was taking on fresh tactics to convince Americans that
being fat was something to fear, something to to be mocked,
and if you were fat, you'd better spend serious chunks
of your hard earned money trying to slim down, and.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Protea can help you keep missiles while you lose fat.
Speaker 9 (05:13):
So make the special k breakfast part of your daily
diet and exercise plan.
Speaker 10 (05:18):
That's why I chose the Ultraslim Fast Plan and I
lost fifty pounds in six months.
Speaker 11 (05:23):
Your body can be trim toned, firm, slim, fit, and
in shape in just eight weeks. Now there's the sports
illustrated Super Shape Up program fully sponsored by Diet PEPSI.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Trim toned, firm, slim, fit and in shape. I think
we get the point. When you weren't explicitly being sold
thinness like in those ads, it was still implicitly being
marketed towards you. Fashion magazines were filled with images of
emaciated models with pale skin and dark circles under their eyes,
(05:57):
a look dubbed heroin chic with out an ounce of irony.
These models weren't selling diet pills or exercise plans, but
they were communicating the idea that thinness equals beauty, even
if it's a thinness that can only be obtained through
objectively unhealthy means like drug addiction or disordered eating, and
(06:18):
in TV and movies, fat people were constantly the butt
of the jokes, once again sending the message that being
fat is abnormal and shameful. Take the show Friends, for instance,
it was filled with jokes about Monica's weight.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Oh oh, and I'm.
Speaker 10 (06:34):
Sorry that I said you were a cow in high school.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
That's okay, I was a cow.
Speaker 6 (06:40):
I know, I'm just sorry I said it.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
All of these signals were affecting people's psyches. For example,
in nineteen ninety four, Esquire magazine printed an article revealing
that fifty four percent of women surveyed would rather be
hit by a truck than be fat. Think about that,
women would rather be seriously injured or die than be fat.
(07:09):
This fear of fatness could have stemmed from the fact
that between nineteen eighty and the late nineties, childhood obesity
rates in America nearly tripled, hovering around fifteen percent. In
nineteen ninety seven, the World Health Organization declared obesity as
a major public health problem and a global epidemic. Around
(07:31):
the same time, the American Heart Association added obesity to
its list of major risk factors for heart disease and
heart attacks. Then, in nineteen ninety eight, the National Institutes
of Health changed body mass index or bm categories. For
those who don't know, BMI is a medical screening tool
(07:51):
that measures the ratio of your height to your weight.
The resulting number supposedly indicates how much body fat you have.
Your number plays you into four categories underweight, healthy weight, overweight,
or obese. Under the new guidelines, a BMI of twenty
six or higher was considered overweight. With this change, millions
(08:15):
of Americans went to bed normal sized and then woke
up overweight without gaining a single pound. The National Institutes
of Health told reporters at the time that the changes
were necessary because of studies linking extra weight to health problems.
Parents and physicians alike now had a medical cause to
(08:36):
prescribe fat camp to even more children. But here's the thing.
BMI actually does a crap job of assessing how healthy
someone is, and it was never meant to assess the
health of an individual in the first place.
Speaker 7 (08:50):
It was developed by a Belgian mathematician in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That's doctor Lisa Erlinger. She's a family physician, educator, activist,
and speaker who focuses on anti bias weight inclusive trauma
informed care for patients of all sizes and backgrounds. This mathematician,
named Adolph Kettale was simply collecting data on averages. He
never intended for this to be used as a medical prescription. Plus,
(09:18):
he conducted his measurements only on men, and this was
nearly two hundred years ago. Clearly, his findings are far
from applicable in most modern societies.
Speaker 7 (09:29):
Those ideas were adopted by eugenesis people trying to create
the ideal human. And also later this BMI, which was
never intended to measure the health of an individual, particularly
not in our modern community, started to be used as
a way to assess the health of an individual.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And here's another thing. BMI does not take into account
muscle mass, body composition, or really anything other than height
versus weight.
Speaker 7 (09:59):
BMI is also just incredibly poor predictor of how much
body fat a person has. And we know this intuitively, right.
We know two hundred and fifty pound people who are
all muscle, and we know one hundred and fifty pound
people who are all fat. And so the idea that
just taking these two measurements would tell us how fat
a person is is intuitively ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Researchers have found that BMI alone is not a good
indicator of mortality risk. In some studies, people in the
overweight category actually had the lowest mortality rate of anyone.
Obese people fare better than any other group when faced
with congestive heart failure, certain bypass surgeries, and hypertensive heart disease.
(10:42):
Ironic because doctors often use BMI to determine the types
of treatment a patient will receive, and a patient's BMI
can even affect their insurance premiums.
Speaker 7 (10:53):
And so not only was this never intended to be
a measure of health, the way we use it is
clearly not a reflector of health.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Contrary to popular belief, it's extremely possible to be healthy
and fat at the same time. Yet in nineties America
and at Campshane, that possibility was completely unrecognized. In fact,
obesity was starting to be viewed as a disease to
wait inclusive health experts like doctor Rachel Milner. These attempts
(11:26):
to turn body size into a disease not only to
humanize people and put blame where it doesn't belong, it
also sets people up for ineffective treatment. It's why she
actually avoids using the words obese or overweight.
Speaker 9 (11:40):
This language and this attempt to identify body size as
a disease is really a way for the pharmaceutical companies
and for the diet industry to make money. If we
say bodies or a disease and then they come up
with these so called interventions. This is a multi multi
billion dollar industry.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
A condition can be classified as a disease if it
impairs the normal functioning of the body, but millions of
fat people have no negative symptoms at all. In fact,
fat storage is actually the human body working properly. It's
a key component of our species survival. With this in mind,
doctor Milner doesn't think weight should factor into medical treatment.
Speaker 9 (12:24):
The only role that body size should play in medical
treatment is if the dosage of a medication or anesthesia
or a blood pressure cup needs to be adjusted to
make sure that it's safe and effective for the size
of the person's body. Outside of that, it is unethical
(12:45):
to make body size a part of treatment.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So yes, Americans were getting fatter throughout the nineties. I mean,
how could we not when eleven servings of grain were
at the base of the food pyramid. BMI was also
screwing with obesity data. We can now look back and
realize it wasn't really the health catastrophe the National Institutes
of Health or the World Health Organization would have us believe.
(13:12):
But at the time, rising childhood obesity raids and rampant
fat phobia and popular culture meant more parents were concerned
about their children's weight and more people were interested in
Camp Shane than ever. Behind the scenes, Camp Shane was
going through some major strife. Selma and her son David
were caught up in a battle for ownership and things
(13:34):
were about to get nasty. Not yet ready to pass
the rains to her son, Selma still owned the camp,
but David was camp director and partial owner. He and
his wife, Zuppora moved into the house in the center
of camp and lived there. During the summer season, Salma
moved into a house across the street from Camp. That
meant David had more power and presence than ever before.
(13:58):
Under David's reign were different because his motivation wasn't necessarily
to help kids lose weight like it was for Selma.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
The biggest change between Selma and David's era is that
you could tell by lots of little things that it
had become a business, a for profit business.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
That's Sue Steinberg, who you heard from last episode. By
the nineties, she was working at Camp Shane as a lifeguard,
swim instructor, and later on head of the pool. She
witnessed what she saw as a rocky transition from Selma
to David.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I did recognize the signs of the lack of love
for this community and with that said, giving David Attenburgh
the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
To him, it was a business, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Like he never purported to have started a camp for
fat people to create a bubble of societal you know,
marginalzed people who could explore their identities. You know, like
he never would have said that Camp Shane was supposed
(15:08):
to be that.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
To him, he would have.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Said, you know, I am running a business, and he
ran it as such for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Another person who noticed this was Janna Hopkins. Jenna was
a group leader throughout the nineties. She saw David's leadership
style grow increasingly lax over time.
Speaker 12 (15:28):
It seemed to be better managed by the owners and staff.
In the beginning, it just seemed like maybe it was
too big for them to properly manage, and maybe weren't
even really We're just taking the money and running, you know,
just it's all right, Well, if that happens, who cares,
you know. That was sort of the mentality that it
seemed to be as the years went on.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
What happened next was an avalanche. According to reporting from
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Selma insisted that David and his wife Suppora
live in their house on camp all year long, even
outside of the summer season. David and Zappora said no.
According to David, Selma then sent the sheriff to evict
(16:11):
them from their on campus house. Selma later claimed that
David abruptly announced he was quitting during the crucial hiring
period in April before camp began. We'ren't sure whether or
not he actually did. Because of this debacle, which may
or may not have even happened, Selma and her husband, Irving,
(16:31):
furiously filed a lawsuit to invalidate their previous agreement, the
one that said David would one day own the Camp.
David then used his minority shareholder status to dissolve the company.
An ugly legal battle ensued. In the end, both parties
agreed that David would purchase the camp for one point
(16:51):
two million dollars. By nineteen ninety three, David was the
sole owner of Camp Shane. Though David and his mother
were often at odds, he did continue a few of
her business practices, like hiring counselors through exchange programs like
Camp America, an organization that sends Camp counselors from other
(17:14):
countries across the globe to America for summer jobs. This
saved David money because Camp America counselors generally worked for
lower wages than state side counselors would, and David loved
saving money. Camp America counselors are some of the central
(17:34):
characters behind the grandest of Camp Shane lore, like the
supplier of the M and M cartel in episode one,
Remember Heavyweights. Each year, a counselor would drive to the
Blockbuster in town to rent the VHS tape and host
a screening in the gymnasium. And yes, I know some
of you listening are probably googling Blockbuster and VHS tape
(17:55):
right about now. But one year the screening didn't quite
go according to plan.
Speaker 8 (18:01):
There was the operations manager then was from Eastern Europe
and he had a heavy accent and he was told
to go to Blockbuster and rent Heavyweights.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Well, I don't know why we didn't have it at
the camp. We watch it every year. God bless him.
He goes to the video store and he asks for Heavyweights.
He's like, I want the Heavyweights. The heavy waits and
he's like what heavywaits? Is like yeah, hey hea he
waits and he's like all right, So he gets what
he thinks is Heavyweights, the you know funny Ben Stiller
(18:35):
comedy Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
That's Nelson Jan Caterino. You heard him in episode one.
He was a camper at Camp Shane for several years
before working as a counselor for several more summers. But
back to the story. The counselor into the tape and
brought it back to camp.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
And they put in what they think is Heavyweights, and
they turn it off when it wasn't heavy Weights. It
was Heavyweights, which was this graphic porno. It only lasted
for like a few seconds to like Big Dog, who
was like a notorious counselor, jumped in front of the projector.
(19:15):
But all the kids were like five seconds saw this
like graphic sex act.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
We're talking around one hundred kids, some as young as
eight years old being exposed to graphic pornography. Somehow, despite
this mishap, the Heavyweight screenings continued with the actual movie.
Of course. Another Camp America counselor was a British former
race car driver named Simon Greenwood. Merril Winter, a camper
(19:44):
and then counselor throughout the eighties, nineties, and two thousands,
worked closely with Simon.
Speaker 10 (19:50):
All the girls fell in love with Simon. He had
an English accent, he was adorable, and he's meticulous, so
he was always good at what he did.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
If this were really like the movie Heavyweights, then Simon
would be pat the encouraging counselor that all the kids
and fellow staffers love, only like the Lady Magnet version.
David loved Simon too, and soon David made him his
right hand man, and they were quite the character foils
to one another. Where David was distant, he.
Speaker 10 (20:21):
Never took the time to get to know the kids,
he didn't know any of them.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Simon was invested.
Speaker 10 (20:28):
He was a hard worker, he loved the kids, he
loved the concept of camp, and he was really the backbone.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Of that camp.
Speaker 10 (20:38):
It wouldn't have survived without him.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
But Selma was still living across the street from camp,
and she didn't care how many passionate, hard working sidekicks
David had by his side. She challenged David at every turn.
She may have no longer been the camp's owner, but
she was still around, helping out in the office and
writing her golf cart around the camp grounds to yell
at kids for chewing gum. Even when she was off campus,
(21:04):
she never really left. She was known to watch whatever
she could from her house. If that sounds like I'm exaggerating,
I'm not. She sometimes sat on her porch with a
pair of binoculars to peer inside the camp. She even
contested the sale of the camp, claiming she felt pressure
to sell at a low price. Everyone could see the
continuing tension between Selma and David, including Meryl.
Speaker 10 (21:28):
I saw they were feuding. You couldn't not see they
were feuding when they weren't talking. Yet they were sharing
an office together, and they were mother and son, so
it's really hard to fathom. But she installed a lock
on the door so if David walked out of the office,
she would just lock it from her seat, which was
(21:50):
kind of funny.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
And these were the adults in charge of hundreds of children.
Jenna Hopkins, the group leader you heard from earlier, no
noticed the rivalry between Selma and David. As soon as
she stepped on camp for her first day of work.
Speaker 12 (22:06):
Everybody knew that there was a battle going on. It
was just it was, you know, it permeated everything.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Jannah was a single mom in Texas when she came
across an ad for Camp Shane in the back of
a teacher's magazine. She decided to apply and got a
job as a group leader.
Speaker 12 (22:20):
Kind of thought, well, I'm going to make money. I
got an opportunity to be in the outdoors and maybe
lose some weight. Plus my kid camps for free. This
is pretty cool, and you escape the you know, one
thousand degree summers in Dallas.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Jana drove herself and her seven year old all the
way from Dallas to the Catskills. That's a crazy journey
for a single mom to make, but she did it.
After days on the road, Jana arrived in Ferndale and
drove into the center of Camp Shane.
Speaker 12 (22:54):
So I drive in and I park, and we get out,
and I walk up to the you know, kike the
window of the office and this woman slammed the window
open and she looks at me and she says, what
do you want? So I'm immediately thinking, oh, no, what
you want? You know, maybe I'm in the wrong place.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 12 (23:15):
And I said hi, I said, my name is Jana,
and I said I'm supposed to be a group leader
this summer. And she looks at me and she says,
I didn't hire you. Go home, And I'm just standing
there with my kid going uh oh, I have to say,
I mean, so many things are running through my head.
I'm literally still standing there. And then David Edinburgh comes
(23:37):
out of the office and he says, Jana, Jana, Janet's David,
don't worry about that.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Just ignore her.
Speaker 12 (23:42):
That's my mother. And that was how I met Selma.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
But Jana couldn't really ignore Selma. She kept making herself
known and flexing power that she didn't really have anymore.
One day, Jana took a group of her campers for
a walk into town. One of the girls fell and
hurt her leg. It hurts so much she couldn't walk
back to camp. So Janna ran back to camp to
get her car and drove the girl to the infirmary.
(24:07):
On campus, you know, no cell phones.
Speaker 12 (24:09):
I couldn't stop and whip my phone out and say, hey,
I need somebody to come help me. So I made
the choice to go ahead, and I ran. I didn't
really run, but I went back to camp. So I
got my keys, I got my car, and I came
back and I picked her up, just her, and I
took her back and I took her to the infirmary
and I left my co counselor with the other girls
and said, you know, y'all going back. And the next morning,
(24:32):
I woke up in my cabin thing where I slept,
and I heard something and I opened my eyes and
Selma was sitting right next to my bed in a chair,
and I just looked at her and I said, Selma,
And she said, did you put a camper in your
car yesterday? And I mean, you know, I just woke up.
(24:52):
I was I was disoriented, and I was just shocked.
And I said, yes, yes, I did. And she said
you're not allowed to do that. And I said, here's
what happened, you know, And she said you should have
just walked back and got somebody. And I just felt
like I had to get her back as soon as
I could, and so she just gave me. She kept
saying me, I could get fired, and I was breaking
(25:14):
rules and and all these things. And I'm thinking to myself, man,
she had some balls.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
And she had to have planned that out.
Speaker 12 (25:23):
She had to find out where I was living. She
had to know which room was mine. She even brought
a chair. I mean, there wasn't a chair in our room.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Truly horrifying. Remember, at this point, Selma was no longer
in charge, but that didn't stop her from trying to
discipline staffers as if she were. Her presence still loomed large.
Speaker 12 (25:47):
And I honestly I was afraid of her. There are
a lot of people who love her and have a
lot of respect for her, But I didn't see or
know that Selma. I just saw the one who was
overwrought with the desire to get her camp back and
would do anything she could to do that.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Jana didn't know just how far Selma was willing to go.
In nineteen ninety five, a smoke alarm went off in
Selma's house across the street from Camp, prompting a visit
from the fire department. The police investigated Leslie, Selma's daughter
(26:28):
and David's sister believed Selma started the fire herself, using
old newspapers and film negatives to frame David. Selma claimed
she wasn't home that evening. Later that summer, a quote
concerned parent sent an anonymous letter to the New York
State Department of Health calling attention to overcrowding and poor
(26:50):
food quality at Shane. The thing is the letter included
lots of insider details like enrollment figures, bunk square footage,
and health inspection day. To David, the letter wasn't anonymous
at all. With all of this drama and chaos going on,
(27:10):
no one seemed to be prioritizing the kids. Sometime that August,
a fourteen year old broke his collarbone while allegedly playing
unsupervised at the off campus Lake. Nineteen ninety five was
Jana's last summer. At this point, she'd been at Campshen
for years. She had the sense that something bad was
(27:31):
going to happen, and she didn't want to be there
when it did.
Speaker 12 (27:35):
The biggest problem I had with David, I think, was later,
as things are getting crazy, and I just kept saying,
I said, I don't want this to happen, and he
would think, I know, I know, don't worry I'm handling.
I'm handling, But clearly he wasn't handling.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Another thing David wasn't handling well, the food. David didn't
prioritize nutrition so much as he prioritized cutting calories, so
kids were served the same junk food they were likely
eating at home, just much smaller portions, say two French
toasticks for breakfast instead of four, and then for dinner
one slice of pizza instead of two or three, served
(28:17):
with a glass of milk. Not enough food to sustain
kids doing eight hours of exercise a day. Now, there
was one workaround, at least for the skinny campers at Shane.
If kids were deemed an acceptable level of thin, they
were sometimes awarded a visit to the pigout Room, a
(28:42):
supply closet off the dining hall filled with all the
contraband snacks that shaners weren't allowed to eat, peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches, candy chips, cakes baked.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
By the camp chefs, and then of the people that
were like normal weighted people, they had the pig out
Room where you know, I never got there, so I'm
not really sure but I think there was peanut butter there.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
You know. The pigout Room disappeared in the late nineties,
but while it existed, it was protected like a national treasure.
Sometimes staff would check bags and backpacks to make sure
no one was hiding any contraband food that they might
have smuggled from the room. Campers were almost never allowed
in there, try as they might, and most counselors were
(29:28):
in either. Only the fittest were permitted, those who had
reached Camp Shane's definition of a goal weight. Usually that
meant the Camp America counselors who were already thin and
weren't at Camp Shane to lose anything. So camper's food
intake was heavily restricted, and then their reward for restriction
(29:50):
was to eat a bunch of cake and cookies in
the pigout room. It's a confusing message that further fetishized
quote bad foods and not one that instilled health the habits.
Sue remembers a Camp America counselor who was a semi
professional soccer player. He was one of those straight sized
counselors who would have been allowed to go to the
pigout Room. He didn't understand this relationship that camp was
(30:14):
establishing between campers and food. For him, food was fuel.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
He never could compute. And I just remember the whole
summer of him being like, I do not get it.
These kids are out there running all day and we
are feeding them, you know, a teaspoon of apple butter
and some dried toast and some cottage cheese.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Like her fellow counselors, Sue also had questions about the
camp's approach to food and how it was all adding up.
One day, she got a glimpse of the numbers and
learned just how little these kids were surviving off of I.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Was working there with the nutritionist, and she was concerned,
you know, rightfully so, and she was somewhat distraught. She
was just like, the numbers aren't computing. I remember specifically,
she was like, oh, on Thursday, we got fourteen hundred
calories and that was sort of in the range that
we were supposed to be getting per day. And she
(31:13):
sort of, you know, showed me the numbers of like
four straight days of like nine hundred or one thousand
calories a day, and somehow I got roped into this
and there was it was a short conversation with David,
but I was like, she's really concerned that, you know,
(31:33):
some days are very low in calories, and she was like,
you know, it all sort of averages out in the end,
and I was like, I don't think calories really work
that way, like you need enough calories every day.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Sue's right, it doesn't work that way. And since David
had been in this space for over twenty years, the
fact that he didn't understand how calories work isn't just shocking,
it's irresponsible. Plus, these days, we know calorie restriction simply
doesn't work. Researchers have found that more than ninety five
percent of all diets fail long term, most within a
(32:11):
couple of years, and often the weight regained puts people
at a higher weight than where they started in the
first place. And still, year after year, the message campers
got was to restrict their food intake. Stacy's Hoff attended
Camp Shane for two summers in the nineties.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
The understanding was very much, you need to lose weight
and by all means necessary while you're at camp. Both
the camp is going to help you and we're going
to turn a blind eye to behaviors that we know
are aiding people in weight loss that are actually not
healthy and good for them.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Stacy told me about the shame and embarrassment she felt
growing up in a bigger body. She hated walking to
the plus size section to pick out her new swimsuit,
and she was always comparing herself to her stepsisters, who
were just naturally smaller than her, while she listened to
her grandma brag about only drinking water and eating ritz
crackers all day. Stacy used food as a coping mechanism
(33:14):
after a traumatic experience in her childhood. She felt like
a black sheep in her family.
Speaker 6 (33:21):
But looking back at photos, I looked like an Olympic swimmer,
Like I looked like a healthy person with a lot
of muscle mass. And it wasn't until I was at
Camp Shane that I learned how to purge, you know,
to binge and purge, how to avoid food right like
(33:42):
if we were going to be waiting the next day,
everybody would just not eat.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
This mentality to lose weight by all means necessary was dangerous.
At Camp Shane, Stacy experienced disordered eating, long hours exercising,
and little food. After a few weeks of this, she
got sick and because she was at fat camp. The
counselors didn't believe her. They thought she was just making
(34:08):
excuses to get out of exercising.
Speaker 6 (34:11):
You had multiple activities that you were doing physically all
day long, and particularly when I would go to things
that were high intensity cardio like aerobics and circuit training,
I basically couldn't breathe. And it wasn't because I was
out of shape. It was because I had bronchitis, and
I probably had just caught a cold or something and
then gotten sick. But I remember coming back up from
(34:34):
the hill from the dining hall and feeling like I
couldn't make it up the hill. I remember asking multiple times,
like I don't think I can do this? Can I
set this out? And being told no. Being very much
given the impression that I was lazy, I just kept
feeling worse and worse, until one day when I was
(34:56):
trying to make it up the hill, I basically collapsed
and they needed to put me on a golf cart
and take me up to the nurses station.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Stacy had bronchitis, which turned into walking pneumonia. She was
given broth and tea, but that was it. She kept
coughing and soon cracked a rib.
Speaker 6 (35:18):
My body was overwhelmed with the amount of exercise and
extreme pressure that it was being put under physically and
not supported with nutrition, and that led to my body
literally crashing, crumpling to beg for help. I mean, that's
(35:41):
what sickness is, right as our body is physically telling
us to slow down, to rest, to recover.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Stacy went home early that summer feeling like a failure.
She didn't accomplish what she went to Camp Shane to
do to lose weight to become skinny. She tried, I
had to replicate the weight loss tactics she learned from
camp at home.
Speaker 6 (36:04):
I would starve myself. I would try to restrict my
calories the way that had been restricted at camp, and
then I would starve. I was just so hungry that
then I would binge, and then I would feel badly
about having binged, and then I would purge, and that
cycle would go over and over and over again. I
(36:29):
don't know that I fully understood body shame until I
went to a fat camp. And it's why it was
called camp Shame. We didn't call it camp shame. We
called it camp shame. And the messaging was very much,
especially for children who had been going for years. It
(36:52):
was a focus on you get love, you get attention,
you get these sort of things when you perform at camp,
and performance in that instance was losing weight.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Stacy's experience of starting with calorie restriction and developing disordered
eating from there is a pretty common long term effect,
according to psychologists and certified eating disorder specialist doctor Rachel Milner.
Speaker 9 (37:24):
So anything that is an attempt to either lose weight
or prevent weight gain for kids and adolescents who need
to be growing and developing, is going to increase their
risk of eating disorders. And if they're not somebody that
developed an eating disorder, it's still going to put them
in a place where they're constantly weight cycling, so they're
(37:45):
trying to lose weight and then regain weight, which we
know as a negative impact on health, and where they
don't get to feel fully embodied, that they feel like
their body is constantly betraying them.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Of course, this mindset and messaging wasn't only playing out
at Camp Shane. It was happening at home, at school
and in the TV and movies kids watched, which brings
us back to heavyweights. One interesting thing about the movie is,
even though it was released in nineteen ninety five, it's
somehow not filled with outdated fat phobic jokes like you
(38:22):
might expect. The movie is a comedy, but the jokes
are rarely at the expense of the fat characters. Director
Steve Brill said that was intentional.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
I certainly wanted to ennoble and make these characters fun
and people you could look up to and not make
fun of, which is obviously what the fat guy or
the fat kid has always been in movies.
Speaker 5 (38:46):
By being overweight, you know, the shame and the self
criticism and the doubt that it brings into you is
is really harmful. And that's something that you know, we
wanted address is a problem, and that's something that you know,
hopefully the kids when they watch the movie, they.
Speaker 4 (39:05):
Go, oh, it's all right, it's all right to be overweight.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
If you've never seen the movie, then spoiler alert, I'm
about to talk about the ending. The campers have successfully
ousted their militaristic camp director and they've just won the
annual competition against their rival. Camp. Music swells as the
campers all cheer and hug each other. The main character,
Jerry turns to Pat, the camp counselor, and says, thanks
(39:31):
you the best. Damsom move my light. Unfortunately that's just
a movie. At the end of a Camp Shane summer.
There's no trophy, no music that swells as the credits
start to roll. No heart's filled with new lessons about
(39:54):
loving yourself in spite of the bullies and naysayers. It
is all right to be fat, like Steve said, but
our culture is often telling us otherwise. So even though
almost all Shaner's had fun at one point or another,
I don't think any of them walked away from camp
thinking it's all right to be heavy. Another difference between
(40:15):
Camp Shane and the fictional Camp Hope. The camp owner
at Shane hadn't been ousted. In fact, in spite of
his mother's sabotage, David was about to lead Camp Shane
into its biggest decade yet next week. On Camp Shane.
Speaker 10 (40:37):
He was happy with bodies in camp, whether they'd be
kids or counselors, didn't matter if they were doing things
that were unethical or dangerous.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
We reached out to David Edinburgh and his wife Zupora
Djanowski for comment. At the time of this recording. We
have received a reply. Camp Shame is a production of
iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host Kelsey Snelling. Camp Shame is
produced by Brittany Martinez, Taylor Williamson, Sarah Schlead, Lucy Jones,
(41:14):
and Aliah Yates Grau. Our editor is Courtney Hameister, with
additional editorial support from Lindsay Cradowell and Grace Lynch. Our
executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rutterer and me Kelsey
Snelling for iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Christina Everett. Fact
checking done by Madeline Gore, Lucy Jones, Paloma Moreno, Jimenez,
(41:39):
Lauren Williams, and Fiona Pastana. Our theme music is produced
by Sean Patel. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us
on Instagram at camp Shame. That's with an M. If
you or anyone you know went to Camp Shane, reach
out with your camp's forries
This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.
This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please
take care. Camp Shane, like any other summer camp, had
a set of traditions that kept it afloat starting in
the late nineties. One of those traditions was watching the
movie Heavyweights, the Disney movie from nineteen ninety five about
(00:22):
a boy's weight loss camp. In the film, a group
of campers hold an uprising against the camp's oppressive, militaristic
leader played by Ben Stiller.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Attention, campers.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Lunch has been canceled today due to lack of hustles
deal with it.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
It's based at least partially on Camp Shane. I actually
talked to the director of the movie, Steve Brill.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
My name is Steve Brill. I think I was built
as Stephen Brill earlier in my career, but I dropped
the end. I thought it was too pretentious.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
A great Okay, I won't call you Stephen. Then Steve
told me that the idea for the movie came from
an advertisement. When he was a kid. Steve saw the
notorious Campshane ad in the back of the New York
Times magazine. You know the one with a skinny kid
holding out his waistband inches away from his body to
show off how much weight he'd lost.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I would always stare at that ad, going Wow, what
would it be like to go there?
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Years later, Steve was working in Hollywood brainstorming movie ideas
with then rookie producer Judd Apatow.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
And I told him that about that ad. He said,
we have to make it that.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
So that's how it became about a weight loss camp,
and particularly about Camp Shane, because that was the only
camp that we knew about.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
If you know anything about Camp Shane, then when you
watch Heavyweights you can see the parallels. There are kids
smuggling candy. There are way ins, there's a bus driver
pretending to pull into a fast food drive through before
course correcting in the direction of camp. There are even
go carts, gold carts.
Speaker 6 (01:56):
How many times can you go into gold dis as
much as you want, carry Jerry, if you went to
Camp Shane, you'd be sorely disappointed.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
The go carts were always broken. For many kids who
had not yet been to Camp Shane, Heavyweights was their
point of reference, and the movie made camp look crazy fun.
When I was interviewing people for this show. It came
up again and again.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Movies like Heavyweights.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
That movie Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
I think we all saw Heavyweights.
Speaker 7 (02:25):
Oh I really had naturally was Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
In my mind.
Speaker 8 (02:28):
It was like the movie Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
But Camp Shane wasn't quite like Heavyweights, not really. Even
Steve Brill could see that. During his research, he watched
several promotional videos from fat camps all over the country.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
The Camp Shane when it was always just something a
little off about it. I remember being bummed ultimately that
the camp that I was hoping would be the model
camp was shady.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
This is Camp Shane. I'm your host. Kel's smelling today.
We're talking about Camp Shane's new ownership, mother son squabbles
and an innocent film screening gone awry. Like the camp
in Heavyweights, Camp Shane passed hands from an older, married
couple to a young man with a fresh perspective. But
(03:19):
instead of the fitness guru Ben Stiller, Camp Shane had
David Ettenburg. By nineteen ninety, he had been camp director
for eight years and business was booming. The proof was
in the sugar free pudding. Shane's tax returns that year
showed profits of two hundred and sixty thousand dollars adjusted
(03:40):
for twenty twenty five, that's upwards of six hundred and
thirty thousand dollars, and that's just from the nine weeks
that Camp Shane was open each year, and enrollment was rising.
By nineteen ninety five, four hundred kids had signed up
to go to Camp Shane. It had come a long
way since the twenty nine campers of its opening year
(04:01):
in nineteen sixty nine. Looking back at the nineties, there
are certain things you might remember, like Friends, Seinfeld and
the Simpsons dominating television, or Sir mix a Lots Baby
got back on the radio.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I liked Bigs.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Did not.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Maybe you have memories of walking around your hometown mall
or sitting at home in the computer room exploring the
World Wide Web. These cultural touchstones might make you sigh
with happy nostalgia, But there was another cultural undercurrent roaring
through the nineties, fat phobia. Fat Phobia wasn't new, but
(04:49):
as pop culture shifted and advertising became all the more pervasive,
it was taking on fresh tactics to convince Americans that
being fat was something to fear, something to to be mocked,
and if you were fat, you'd better spend serious chunks
of your hard earned money trying to slim down, and.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Protea can help you keep missiles while you lose fat.
Speaker 9 (05:13):
So make the special k breakfast part of your daily
diet and exercise plan.
Speaker 10 (05:18):
That's why I chose the Ultraslim Fast Plan and I
lost fifty pounds in six months.
Speaker 11 (05:23):
Your body can be trim toned, firm, slim, fit, and
in shape in just eight weeks. Now there's the sports
illustrated Super Shape Up program fully sponsored by Diet PEPSI.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Trim toned, firm, slim, fit and in shape. I think
we get the point. When you weren't explicitly being sold
thinness like in those ads, it was still implicitly being
marketed towards you. Fashion magazines were filled with images of
emaciated models with pale skin and dark circles under their eyes,
(05:57):
a look dubbed heroin chic with out an ounce of irony.
These models weren't selling diet pills or exercise plans, but
they were communicating the idea that thinness equals beauty, even
if it's a thinness that can only be obtained through
objectively unhealthy means like drug addiction or disordered eating, and
(06:18):
in TV and movies, fat people were constantly the butt
of the jokes, once again sending the message that being
fat is abnormal and shameful. Take the show Friends, for instance,
it was filled with jokes about Monica's weight.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Oh oh, and I'm.
Speaker 10 (06:34):
Sorry that I said you were a cow in high school.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
That's okay, I was a cow.
Speaker 6 (06:40):
I know, I'm just sorry I said it.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
All of these signals were affecting people's psyches. For example,
in nineteen ninety four, Esquire magazine printed an article revealing
that fifty four percent of women surveyed would rather be
hit by a truck than be fat. Think about that,
women would rather be seriously injured or die than be fat.
(07:09):
This fear of fatness could have stemmed from the fact
that between nineteen eighty and the late nineties, childhood obesity
rates in America nearly tripled, hovering around fifteen percent. In
nineteen ninety seven, the World Health Organization declared obesity as
a major public health problem and a global epidemic. Around
(07:31):
the same time, the American Heart Association added obesity to
its list of major risk factors for heart disease and
heart attacks. Then, in nineteen ninety eight, the National Institutes
of Health changed body mass index or bm categories. For
those who don't know, BMI is a medical screening tool
(07:51):
that measures the ratio of your height to your weight.
The resulting number supposedly indicates how much body fat you have.
Your number plays you into four categories underweight, healthy weight, overweight,
or obese. Under the new guidelines, a BMI of twenty
six or higher was considered overweight. With this change, millions
(08:15):
of Americans went to bed normal sized and then woke
up overweight without gaining a single pound. The National Institutes
of Health told reporters at the time that the changes
were necessary because of studies linking extra weight to health problems.
Parents and physicians alike now had a medical cause to
(08:36):
prescribe fat camp to even more children. But here's the thing.
BMI actually does a crap job of assessing how healthy
someone is, and it was never meant to assess the
health of an individual in the first place.
Speaker 7 (08:50):
It was developed by a Belgian mathematician in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That's doctor Lisa Erlinger. She's a family physician, educator, activist,
and speaker who focuses on anti bias weight inclusive trauma
informed care for patients of all sizes and backgrounds. This mathematician,
named Adolph Kettale was simply collecting data on averages. He
never intended for this to be used as a medical prescription. Plus,
(09:18):
he conducted his measurements only on men, and this was
nearly two hundred years ago. Clearly, his findings are far
from applicable in most modern societies.
Speaker 7 (09:29):
Those ideas were adopted by eugenesis people trying to create
the ideal human. And also later this BMI, which was
never intended to measure the health of an individual, particularly
not in our modern community, started to be used as
a way to assess the health of an individual.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And here's another thing. BMI does not take into account
muscle mass, body composition, or really anything other than height
versus weight.
Speaker 7 (09:59):
BMI is also just incredibly poor predictor of how much
body fat a person has. And we know this intuitively, right.
We know two hundred and fifty pound people who are
all muscle, and we know one hundred and fifty pound
people who are all fat. And so the idea that
just taking these two measurements would tell us how fat
a person is is intuitively ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Researchers have found that BMI alone is not a good
indicator of mortality risk. In some studies, people in the
overweight category actually had the lowest mortality rate of anyone.
Obese people fare better than any other group when faced
with congestive heart failure, certain bypass surgeries, and hypertensive heart disease.
(10:42):
Ironic because doctors often use BMI to determine the types
of treatment a patient will receive, and a patient's BMI
can even affect their insurance premiums.
Speaker 7 (10:53):
And so not only was this never intended to be
a measure of health, the way we use it is
clearly not a reflector of health.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Contrary to popular belief, it's extremely possible to be healthy
and fat at the same time. Yet in nineties America
and at Campshane, that possibility was completely unrecognized. In fact,
obesity was starting to be viewed as a disease to
wait inclusive health experts like doctor Rachel Milner. These attempts
(11:26):
to turn body size into a disease not only to
humanize people and put blame where it doesn't belong, it
also sets people up for ineffective treatment. It's why she
actually avoids using the words obese or overweight.
Speaker 9 (11:40):
This language and this attempt to identify body size as
a disease is really a way for the pharmaceutical companies
and for the diet industry to make money. If we
say bodies or a disease and then they come up
with these so called interventions. This is a multi multi
billion dollar industry.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
A condition can be classified as a disease if it
impairs the normal functioning of the body, but millions of
fat people have no negative symptoms at all. In fact,
fat storage is actually the human body working properly. It's
a key component of our species survival. With this in mind,
doctor Milner doesn't think weight should factor into medical treatment.
Speaker 9 (12:24):
The only role that body size should play in medical
treatment is if the dosage of a medication or anesthesia
or a blood pressure cup needs to be adjusted to
make sure that it's safe and effective for the size
of the person's body. Outside of that, it is unethical
(12:45):
to make body size a part of treatment.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So yes, Americans were getting fatter throughout the nineties. I mean,
how could we not when eleven servings of grain were
at the base of the food pyramid. BMI was also
screwing with obesity data. We can now look back and
realize it wasn't really the health catastrophe the National Institutes
of Health or the World Health Organization would have us believe.
(13:12):
But at the time, rising childhood obesity raids and rampant
fat phobia and popular culture meant more parents were concerned
about their children's weight and more people were interested in
Camp Shane than ever. Behind the scenes, Camp Shane was
going through some major strife. Selma and her son David
were caught up in a battle for ownership and things
(13:34):
were about to get nasty. Not yet ready to pass
the rains to her son, Selma still owned the camp,
but David was camp director and partial owner. He and
his wife, Zuppora moved into the house in the center
of camp and lived there. During the summer season, Salma
moved into a house across the street from Camp. That
meant David had more power and presence than ever before.
(13:58):
Under David's reign were different because his motivation wasn't necessarily
to help kids lose weight like it was for Selma.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
The biggest change between Selma and David's era is that
you could tell by lots of little things that it
had become a business, a for profit business.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
That's Sue Steinberg, who you heard from last episode. By
the nineties, she was working at Camp Shane as a lifeguard,
swim instructor, and later on head of the pool. She
witnessed what she saw as a rocky transition from Selma
to David.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I did recognize the signs of the lack of love
for this community and with that said, giving David Attenburgh
the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
To him, it was a business, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Like he never purported to have started a camp for
fat people to create a bubble of societal you know,
marginalzed people who could explore their identities. You know, like
he never would have said that Camp Shane was supposed
(15:08):
to be that.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
To him, he would have.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Said, you know, I am running a business, and he
ran it as such for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Another person who noticed this was Janna Hopkins. Jenna was
a group leader throughout the nineties. She saw David's leadership
style grow increasingly lax over time.
Speaker 12 (15:28):
It seemed to be better managed by the owners and staff.
In the beginning, it just seemed like maybe it was
too big for them to properly manage, and maybe weren't
even really We're just taking the money and running, you know,
just it's all right, Well, if that happens, who cares,
you know. That was sort of the mentality that it
seemed to be as the years went on.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
What happened next was an avalanche. According to reporting from
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Selma insisted that David and his wife Suppora
live in their house on camp all year long, even
outside of the summer season. David and Zappora said no.
According to David, Selma then sent the sheriff to evict
(16:11):
them from their on campus house. Selma later claimed that
David abruptly announced he was quitting during the crucial hiring
period in April before camp began. We'ren't sure whether or
not he actually did. Because of this debacle, which may
or may not have even happened, Selma and her husband, Irving,
(16:31):
furiously filed a lawsuit to invalidate their previous agreement, the
one that said David would one day own the Camp.
David then used his minority shareholder status to dissolve the company.
An ugly legal battle ensued. In the end, both parties
agreed that David would purchase the camp for one point
(16:51):
two million dollars. By nineteen ninety three, David was the
sole owner of Camp Shane. Though David and his mother
were often at odds, he did continue a few of
her business practices, like hiring counselors through exchange programs like
Camp America, an organization that sends Camp counselors from other
(17:14):
countries across the globe to America for summer jobs. This
saved David money because Camp America counselors generally worked for
lower wages than state side counselors would, and David loved
saving money. Camp America counselors are some of the central
(17:34):
characters behind the grandest of Camp Shane lore, like the
supplier of the M and M cartel in episode one,
Remember Heavyweights. Each year, a counselor would drive to the
Blockbuster in town to rent the VHS tape and host
a screening in the gymnasium. And yes, I know some
of you listening are probably googling Blockbuster and VHS tape
(17:55):
right about now. But one year the screening didn't quite
go according to plan.
Speaker 8 (18:01):
There was the operations manager then was from Eastern Europe
and he had a heavy accent and he was told
to go to Blockbuster and rent Heavyweights.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Well, I don't know why we didn't have it at
the camp. We watch it every year. God bless him.
He goes to the video store and he asks for Heavyweights.
He's like, I want the Heavyweights. The heavy waits and
he's like what heavywaits? Is like yeah, hey hea he
waits and he's like all right, So he gets what
he thinks is Heavyweights, the you know funny Ben Stiller
(18:35):
comedy Heavyweights.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
That's Nelson Jan Caterino. You heard him in episode one.
He was a camper at Camp Shane for several years
before working as a counselor for several more summers. But
back to the story. The counselor into the tape and
brought it back to camp.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
And they put in what they think is Heavyweights, and
they turn it off when it wasn't heavy Weights. It
was Heavyweights, which was this graphic porno. It only lasted
for like a few seconds to like Big Dog, who
was like a notorious counselor, jumped in front of the projector.
(19:15):
But all the kids were like five seconds saw this
like graphic sex act.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
We're talking around one hundred kids, some as young as
eight years old being exposed to graphic pornography. Somehow, despite
this mishap, the Heavyweight screenings continued with the actual movie.
Of course. Another Camp America counselor was a British former
race car driver named Simon Greenwood. Merril Winter, a camper
(19:44):
and then counselor throughout the eighties, nineties, and two thousands,
worked closely with Simon.
Speaker 10 (19:50):
All the girls fell in love with Simon. He had
an English accent, he was adorable, and he's meticulous, so
he was always good at what he did.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
If this were really like the movie Heavyweights, then Simon
would be pat the encouraging counselor that all the kids
and fellow staffers love, only like the Lady Magnet version.
David loved Simon too, and soon David made him his
right hand man, and they were quite the character foils
to one another. Where David was distant, he.
Speaker 10 (20:21):
Never took the time to get to know the kids,
he didn't know any of them.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Simon was invested.
Speaker 10 (20:28):
He was a hard worker, he loved the kids, he
loved the concept of camp, and he was really the backbone.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Of that camp.
Speaker 10 (20:38):
It wouldn't have survived without him.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
But Selma was still living across the street from camp,
and she didn't care how many passionate, hard working sidekicks
David had by his side. She challenged David at every turn.
She may have no longer been the camp's owner, but
she was still around, helping out in the office and
writing her golf cart around the camp grounds to yell
at kids for chewing gum. Even when she was off campus,
(21:04):
she never really left. She was known to watch whatever
she could from her house. If that sounds like I'm exaggerating,
I'm not. She sometimes sat on her porch with a
pair of binoculars to peer inside the camp. She even
contested the sale of the camp, claiming she felt pressure
to sell at a low price. Everyone could see the
continuing tension between Selma and David, including Meryl.
Speaker 10 (21:28):
I saw they were feuding. You couldn't not see they
were feuding when they weren't talking. Yet they were sharing
an office together, and they were mother and son, so
it's really hard to fathom. But she installed a lock
on the door so if David walked out of the office,
she would just lock it from her seat, which was
(21:50):
kind of funny.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
And these were the adults in charge of hundreds of children.
Jenna Hopkins, the group leader you heard from earlier, no
noticed the rivalry between Selma and David. As soon as
she stepped on camp for her first day of work.
Speaker 12 (22:06):
Everybody knew that there was a battle going on. It
was just it was, you know, it permeated everything.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Jannah was a single mom in Texas when she came
across an ad for Camp Shane in the back of
a teacher's magazine. She decided to apply and got a
job as a group leader.
Speaker 12 (22:20):
Kind of thought, well, I'm going to make money. I
got an opportunity to be in the outdoors and maybe
lose some weight. Plus my kid camps for free. This
is pretty cool, and you escape the you know, one
thousand degree summers in Dallas.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Jana drove herself and her seven year old all the
way from Dallas to the Catskills. That's a crazy journey
for a single mom to make, but she did it.
After days on the road, Jana arrived in Ferndale and
drove into the center of Camp Shane.
Speaker 12 (22:54):
So I drive in and I park, and we get out,
and I walk up to the you know, kike the
window of the office and this woman slammed the window
open and she looks at me and she says, what
do you want? So I'm immediately thinking, oh, no, what
you want? You know, maybe I'm in the wrong place.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 12 (23:15):
And I said hi, I said, my name is Jana,
and I said I'm supposed to be a group leader
this summer. And she looks at me and she says,
I didn't hire you. Go home, And I'm just standing
there with my kid going uh oh, I have to say,
I mean, so many things are running through my head.
I'm literally still standing there. And then David Edinburgh comes
(23:37):
out of the office and he says, Jana, Jana, Janet's David,
don't worry about that.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Just ignore her.
Speaker 12 (23:42):
That's my mother. And that was how I met Selma.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
But Jana couldn't really ignore Selma. She kept making herself
known and flexing power that she didn't really have anymore.
One day, Jana took a group of her campers for
a walk into town. One of the girls fell and
hurt her leg. It hurts so much she couldn't walk
back to camp. So Janna ran back to camp to
get her car and drove the girl to the infirmary.
(24:07):
On campus, you know, no cell phones.
Speaker 12 (24:09):
I couldn't stop and whip my phone out and say, hey,
I need somebody to come help me. So I made
the choice to go ahead, and I ran. I didn't
really run, but I went back to camp. So I
got my keys, I got my car, and I came
back and I picked her up, just her, and I
took her back and I took her to the infirmary
and I left my co counselor with the other girls
and said, you know, y'all going back. And the next morning,
(24:32):
I woke up in my cabin thing where I slept,
and I heard something and I opened my eyes and
Selma was sitting right next to my bed in a chair,
and I just looked at her and I said, Selma,
And she said, did you put a camper in your
car yesterday? And I mean, you know, I just woke up.
(24:52):
I was I was disoriented, and I was just shocked.
And I said, yes, yes, I did. And she said
you're not allowed to do that. And I said, here's
what happened, you know, And she said you should have
just walked back and got somebody. And I just felt
like I had to get her back as soon as
I could, and so she just gave me. She kept
saying me, I could get fired, and I was breaking
(25:14):
rules and and all these things. And I'm thinking to myself, man,
she had some balls.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
And she had to have planned that out.
Speaker 12 (25:23):
She had to find out where I was living. She
had to know which room was mine. She even brought
a chair. I mean, there wasn't a chair in our room.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Truly horrifying. Remember, at this point, Selma was no longer
in charge, but that didn't stop her from trying to
discipline staffers as if she were. Her presence still loomed large.
Speaker 12 (25:47):
And I honestly I was afraid of her. There are
a lot of people who love her and have a
lot of respect for her, But I didn't see or
know that Selma. I just saw the one who was
overwrought with the desire to get her camp back and
would do anything she could to do that.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Jana didn't know just how far Selma was willing to go.
In nineteen ninety five, a smoke alarm went off in
Selma's house across the street from Camp, prompting a visit
from the fire department. The police investigated Leslie, Selma's daughter
(26:28):
and David's sister believed Selma started the fire herself, using
old newspapers and film negatives to frame David. Selma claimed
she wasn't home that evening. Later that summer, a quote
concerned parent sent an anonymous letter to the New York
State Department of Health calling attention to overcrowding and poor
(26:50):
food quality at Shane. The thing is the letter included
lots of insider details like enrollment figures, bunk square footage,
and health inspection day. To David, the letter wasn't anonymous
at all. With all of this drama and chaos going on,
(27:10):
no one seemed to be prioritizing the kids. Sometime that August,
a fourteen year old broke his collarbone while allegedly playing
unsupervised at the off campus Lake. Nineteen ninety five was
Jana's last summer. At this point, she'd been at Campshen
for years. She had the sense that something bad was
(27:31):
going to happen, and she didn't want to be there
when it did.
Speaker 12 (27:35):
The biggest problem I had with David, I think, was later,
as things are getting crazy, and I just kept saying,
I said, I don't want this to happen, and he
would think, I know, I know, don't worry I'm handling.
I'm handling, But clearly he wasn't handling.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Another thing David wasn't handling well, the food. David didn't
prioritize nutrition so much as he prioritized cutting calories, so
kids were served the same junk food they were likely
eating at home, just much smaller portions, say two French
toasticks for breakfast instead of four, and then for dinner
one slice of pizza instead of two or three, served
(28:17):
with a glass of milk. Not enough food to sustain
kids doing eight hours of exercise a day. Now, there
was one workaround, at least for the skinny campers at Shane.
If kids were deemed an acceptable level of thin, they
were sometimes awarded a visit to the pigout Room, a
(28:42):
supply closet off the dining hall filled with all the
contraband snacks that shaners weren't allowed to eat, peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches, candy chips, cakes baked.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
By the camp chefs, and then of the people that
were like normal weighted people, they had the pig out
Room where you know, I never got there, so I'm
not really sure but I think there was peanut butter there.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
You know. The pigout Room disappeared in the late nineties,
but while it existed, it was protected like a national treasure.
Sometimes staff would check bags and backpacks to make sure
no one was hiding any contraband food that they might
have smuggled from the room. Campers were almost never allowed
in there, try as they might, and most counselors were
(29:28):
in either. Only the fittest were permitted, those who had
reached Camp Shane's definition of a goal weight. Usually that
meant the Camp America counselors who were already thin and
weren't at Camp Shane to lose anything. So camper's food
intake was heavily restricted, and then their reward for restriction
(29:50):
was to eat a bunch of cake and cookies in
the pigout room. It's a confusing message that further fetishized
quote bad foods and not one that instilled health the habits.
Sue remembers a Camp America counselor who was a semi
professional soccer player. He was one of those straight sized
counselors who would have been allowed to go to the
pigout Room. He didn't understand this relationship that camp was
(30:14):
establishing between campers and food. For him, food was fuel.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
He never could compute. And I just remember the whole
summer of him being like, I do not get it.
These kids are out there running all day and we
are feeding them, you know, a teaspoon of apple butter
and some dried toast and some cottage cheese.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Like her fellow counselors, Sue also had questions about the
camp's approach to food and how it was all adding up.
One day, she got a glimpse of the numbers and
learned just how little these kids were surviving off of I.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Was working there with the nutritionist, and she was concerned,
you know, rightfully so, and she was somewhat distraught. She
was just like, the numbers aren't computing. I remember specifically,
she was like, oh, on Thursday, we got fourteen hundred
calories and that was sort of in the range that
we were supposed to be getting per day. And she
(31:13):
sort of, you know, showed me the numbers of like
four straight days of like nine hundred or one thousand
calories a day, and somehow I got roped into this
and there was it was a short conversation with David,
but I was like, she's really concerned that, you know,
(31:33):
some days are very low in calories, and she was like,
you know, it all sort of averages out in the end,
and I was like, I don't think calories really work
that way, like you need enough calories every day.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Sue's right, it doesn't work that way. And since David
had been in this space for over twenty years, the
fact that he didn't understand how calories work isn't just shocking,
it's irresponsible. Plus, these days, we know calorie restriction simply
doesn't work. Researchers have found that more than ninety five
percent of all diets fail long term, most within a
(32:11):
couple of years, and often the weight regained puts people
at a higher weight than where they started in the
first place. And still, year after year, the message campers
got was to restrict their food intake. Stacy's Hoff attended
Camp Shane for two summers in the nineties.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
The understanding was very much, you need to lose weight
and by all means necessary while you're at camp. Both
the camp is going to help you and we're going
to turn a blind eye to behaviors that we know
are aiding people in weight loss that are actually not
healthy and good for them.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Stacy told me about the shame and embarrassment she felt
growing up in a bigger body. She hated walking to
the plus size section to pick out her new swimsuit,
and she was always comparing herself to her stepsisters, who
were just naturally smaller than her, while she listened to
her grandma brag about only drinking water and eating ritz
crackers all day. Stacy used food as a coping mechanism
(33:14):
after a traumatic experience in her childhood. She felt like
a black sheep in her family.
Speaker 6 (33:21):
But looking back at photos, I looked like an Olympic swimmer,
Like I looked like a healthy person with a lot
of muscle mass. And it wasn't until I was at
Camp Shane that I learned how to purge, you know,
to binge and purge, how to avoid food right like
(33:42):
if we were going to be waiting the next day,
everybody would just not eat.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
This mentality to lose weight by all means necessary was dangerous.
At Camp Shane, Stacy experienced disordered eating, long hours exercising,
and little food. After a few weeks of this, she
got sick and because she was at fat camp. The
counselors didn't believe her. They thought she was just making
(34:08):
excuses to get out of exercising.
Speaker 6 (34:11):
You had multiple activities that you were doing physically all
day long, and particularly when I would go to things
that were high intensity cardio like aerobics and circuit training,
I basically couldn't breathe. And it wasn't because I was
out of shape. It was because I had bronchitis, and
I probably had just caught a cold or something and
then gotten sick. But I remember coming back up from
(34:34):
the hill from the dining hall and feeling like I
couldn't make it up the hill. I remember asking multiple times,
like I don't think I can do this? Can I
set this out? And being told no. Being very much
given the impression that I was lazy, I just kept
feeling worse and worse, until one day when I was
(34:56):
trying to make it up the hill, I basically collapsed
and they needed to put me on a golf cart
and take me up to the nurses station.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Stacy had bronchitis, which turned into walking pneumonia. She was
given broth and tea, but that was it. She kept
coughing and soon cracked a rib.
Speaker 6 (35:18):
My body was overwhelmed with the amount of exercise and
extreme pressure that it was being put under physically and
not supported with nutrition, and that led to my body
literally crashing, crumpling to beg for help. I mean, that's
(35:41):
what sickness is, right as our body is physically telling
us to slow down, to rest, to recover.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Stacy went home early that summer feeling like a failure.
She didn't accomplish what she went to Camp Shane to
do to lose weight to become skinny. She tried, I
had to replicate the weight loss tactics she learned from
camp at home.
Speaker 6 (36:04):
I would starve myself. I would try to restrict my
calories the way that had been restricted at camp, and
then I would starve. I was just so hungry that
then I would binge, and then I would feel badly
about having binged, and then I would purge, and that
cycle would go over and over and over again. I
(36:29):
don't know that I fully understood body shame until I
went to a fat camp. And it's why it was
called camp Shame. We didn't call it camp shame. We
called it camp shame. And the messaging was very much,
especially for children who had been going for years. It
(36:52):
was a focus on you get love, you get attention,
you get these sort of things when you perform at camp,
and performance in that instance was losing weight.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Stacy's experience of starting with calorie restriction and developing disordered
eating from there is a pretty common long term effect,
according to psychologists and certified eating disorder specialist doctor Rachel Milner.
Speaker 9 (37:24):
So anything that is an attempt to either lose weight
or prevent weight gain for kids and adolescents who need
to be growing and developing, is going to increase their
risk of eating disorders. And if they're not somebody that
developed an eating disorder, it's still going to put them
in a place where they're constantly weight cycling, so they're
(37:45):
trying to lose weight and then regain weight, which we
know as a negative impact on health, and where they
don't get to feel fully embodied, that they feel like
their body is constantly betraying them.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Of course, this mindset and messaging wasn't only playing out
at Camp Shane. It was happening at home, at school
and in the TV and movies kids watched, which brings
us back to heavyweights. One interesting thing about the movie is,
even though it was released in nineteen ninety five, it's
somehow not filled with outdated fat phobic jokes like you
(38:22):
might expect. The movie is a comedy, but the jokes
are rarely at the expense of the fat characters. Director
Steve Brill said that was intentional.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
I certainly wanted to ennoble and make these characters fun
and people you could look up to and not make
fun of, which is obviously what the fat guy or
the fat kid has always been in movies.
Speaker 5 (38:46):
By being overweight, you know, the shame and the self
criticism and the doubt that it brings into you is
is really harmful. And that's something that you know, we
wanted address is a problem, and that's something that you know,
hopefully the kids when they watch the movie, they.
Speaker 4 (39:05):
Go, oh, it's all right, it's all right to be overweight.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
If you've never seen the movie, then spoiler alert, I'm
about to talk about the ending. The campers have successfully
ousted their militaristic camp director and they've just won the
annual competition against their rival. Camp. Music swells as the
campers all cheer and hug each other. The main character,
Jerry turns to Pat, the camp counselor, and says, thanks
(39:31):
you the best. Damsom move my light. Unfortunately that's just
a movie. At the end of a Camp Shane summer.
There's no trophy, no music that swells as the credits
start to roll. No heart's filled with new lessons about
(39:54):
loving yourself in spite of the bullies and naysayers. It
is all right to be fat, like Steve said, but
our culture is often telling us otherwise. So even though
almost all Shaner's had fun at one point or another,
I don't think any of them walked away from camp
thinking it's all right to be heavy. Another difference between
(40:15):
Camp Shane and the fictional Camp Hope. The camp owner
at Shane hadn't been ousted. In fact, in spite of
his mother's sabotage, David was about to lead Camp Shane
into its biggest decade yet next week. On Camp Shane.
Speaker 10 (40:37):
He was happy with bodies in camp, whether they'd be
kids or counselors, didn't matter if they were doing things
that were unethical or dangerous.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
We reached out to David Edinburgh and his wife Zupora
Djanowski for comment. At the time of this recording. We
have received a reply. Camp Shame is a production of
iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host Kelsey Snelling. Camp Shame is
produced by Brittany Martinez, Taylor Williamson, Sarah Schlead, Lucy Jones,
(41:14):
and Aliah Yates Grau. Our editor is Courtney Hameister, with
additional editorial support from Lindsay Cradowell and Grace Lynch. Our
executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rutterer and me Kelsey
Snelling for iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Christina Everett. Fact
checking done by Madeline Gore, Lucy Jones, Paloma Moreno, Jimenez,
(41:39):
Lauren Williams, and Fiona Pastana. Our theme music is produced
by Sean Patel. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us
on Instagram at camp Shame. That's with an M. If
you or anyone you know went to Camp Shane, reach
out with your camp's forries
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