June 26, 2025 • 36 mins
By the mid 2010s, things at Camp Shane are going downhill: campers are arriving with serious mental health needs, counselors are stretched thin, and untrained “health experts” are running the show. When a key staffer finally leaves, the cracks in the camp’s foundation burst wide open. Facilities are falling apart, oversight is non-existent, and then in a moment that's both unforgettable and disgusting — shit finally hits the fan.
References:
- The Epic Family Feud Behind an Iconic American Weight-Loss Camp for Kids
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Eating Disorders
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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kelsey Snelling (00:00):
This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.
This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please
take care. In the mid twenty tens, Camp Shane was
a shit show. Literally.
Nelson (00:15):
I'm walking up the short hill to get to Boys
Camp and I see a waterfall pouring out the back
of my cabin and I'm like, oh, a pipe must
have busted in the bathroom. My room, My cabin blooded
(00:38):
with about three feet of human waste.
Kelsey Snelling (00:43):
Nelson Jancaterino, the camper-turned-counselor we talked to earlier in the show, spent his final year at Shane as a sort of pseudo-maintenance man. He was well acquainted with some of the issues going on at camp. Nelson had been at camp for years, but in the mid 2010s, things seemed to be getting worse. Many buildings needed renovating, equipment was subpar, and cabins were overflowing with water and other – (cough cough) – less desirable substances.How the hell did we get here? This is Camp Shame. I’m your host Kelsey Snelling.This episode, things go down the drain – or should I say, come back up – fast. As you know, Camp Shane was less than perfect. Kids were not eating enough food.Counselors were often untrained and staff could be fired for what seemed like no reason. But even though there had been rocky years in the camp’s past, 2014 was one for the books.
Harrison (01:57):
When I say that summer twenty fourteen was the worst
summer of my life, it's the worst summer by far.
Kelsey Snelling (02:03):
That’s Harrison Davies. He was a Marketing Associate and part of the office staff at Camp Shane in 2014. Because he was a salaried staff member and not a counselor, he was expected to work year round. Harrison is a bubbly guy with a lot of enthusiasm and, at the time, he was excited to land his first full time position post-college. He started the summer hopeful about the opportunity to help out at Shane, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he was walking into more than he had bargained for.
Harrison (02:36):
It was just a toxic work environment. I've never had
a work environment that would come nearly as terribly close
on its worst day than any given day in that
office down the hill.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What made it so bad? (Sigh) Where to begin? First, Harrison
worked long hours.
Harrison (02:56):
You were looking at no less than a ten to
eleven hour work day and sometimes six days a week
at least.
Kelsey Snelling (03:02):
As a marketing associate, Harrison worked in the office, which
was attached to the dining hall at the bottom of
the hill. The conditions were not ideal. For one thing,
there wasn't much to eat. Harrison told me that David
policed how much food the office team got for lunch
and didn't allow them to store much, if anything, in
the fridge.
Harrison (03:23):
In the staff office and the tiny little fridge that
we had in the storage cabinet. The only thing I
think that we were potentially allowed to have in there
was maybe like Diet Coke or diet Sprite, and maybe coffee,
all of which we had to purchase ourselves.
Kelsey Snelling (03:42):
Many counselors we spoke with saw weight loss as a
benefit to working at camp, but not Harrison. He thought
this was supposed to be a camp where the kids
lost weight.
Harrison (03:52):
In a nutshell, you were given the same amount of
food as the overweight campers were who were in their teens.
That's what you were given.
Kelsey Snelling (04:00):
In fact, in the fine print of staff contracts, it
stated that if employees exceeded the quote, Camp Shane designated
guidelines for desired weight, they had to participate in the
same program as the campers. In reality, this extended to
all staff because remember everyone was fed the same thing. Now,
(04:21):
some counselors and staff members were permitted to get seconds
at meal time if leftovers happened to be available, But
since Harrison was bogged down in the office, he rarely
got to meals before extra helpings ran out, and once
when he did successfully get more food, David reprimanded him.
Harrison (04:40):
I do remember David sitting me down one day saying, listen, Harrison,
you're on salary here that that's awesome. Just so you know,
we do see you eating a little more than the campers,
and you know we have to pay for that. He
would get very upset if we made alternative lunch arrangements,
But then again he was also rationing how much we
could he the office. Actually we attempted to order out
(05:03):
and David blocked our order, and he actually took our
order and threw it in the trash.
Kelsey Snelling (05:09):
So of course the food situation sucked, plus the job itself wasn’t really what Harrison had signed up to do. He had originally been hired by David and Zipporah to do marketing work for something called the Shane Diet Resorts. We haven’t talked about the Shane Diet Resorts yet, because they were kind of a side project in the world of Camp Shane and only ran for a handful of years. The Diet Resorts fell under the Camp Shane umbrella, but were designed for adults. One was in Texas, and one just a few miles from Ferndale in NY, both run out of upscale-ish hotels. The program supposedly offered a customized daily schedule, a variety of day trips, healthy meal options, classes, and activities. So this is what Harrison was told he would be working on. But he quickly got roped into doing marketing and additional administrative office work for the flagship Camp Shane as well. In fact, he was moved to the Camp Shane Ferndale location where he both worked on-site in the office and lived in a cabin on the premises. Marketing at camp seemed to entail a complex set of twists and turns. David’s marketed version of camp was let’s say… a little different from reality.
Camp Shane Archive (06:28):
So you laugh a lot when you’re at Camp. You really want to be here. You get up in the morning and you say it’s so awesome.
Kelsey Snelling (06:38):
Mmmmmmm awesome indeed. In some of these videos, it seems difficult to prompt happy responses out of campers.
Camp Shane Archive (06:49):
(Girls)We’re happy Camp Shaners how are you? We're great, we all love each other. (off camera voice) Say we love Camp Shane. (girls)We love Camp Shane! (off camera voice) what do you love about Camp Shane? (girls) The friends-the hot sauce that always runs out...the one bottle of it.
Kelsey Snelling (07:06):
One part of Harrison's job was editing out parts of
the promotional material that didn't fit Camp Shane's brand. The
videos sold a version of Camp that did not fully exist,
a version of Camp that had, wait for it, working
go karts.
Harrison (07:25):
There was a lot of activities that they promised in
their brochures and marketing that would cost money, and they
just didn't do them. I think Go Karts is probably
one of the best ones that never happened.
Kelsey Snelling (07:38):
As for the people riding the Go Karts, well, that
depended on who was allowed to be in the promotional materials.
Harrison said that in one of his videos, David asked
him to cut out a key member of the staff.
Harrison (07:53):
She didn't fit the body image of Camp Shane.
Kelsey Snelling (07:57):
Videos, brochures and the website also so guaranteed that there
would be a beautiful lake and other water activities. But
people like Nelson, the camper turned counselor who'd been at
camp for many years, knew this wasn't quite the case.
Nelson (08:13):
The one big thing is people were like, oh, we
were told that the lake was on Camp. No, it's
like a two mile drive away, Like you have to
load in a van and you have to get bussed there.
Kelsey Snelling (08:22):
Camp Shane also advertised an Olympic sized swimming pool, but
in twenty fourteen.
Nelson (08:28):
The pool water was the consistency of lake water because
it didn't have chlorine or any chemicals in it. It
was disgusting.
Kelsey Snelling (08:34):
And then there were the online reviews, which should have
been more reliable, but Nelson remembers that David would have
him write fake Yelp reviews about how amazing the camp was,
from different usernames and IP addresses, so that it looked
like they were done by real customers. We talked to
two staffers who say they were asked to do the
(08:54):
same thing.
Nelson (08:55):
He was obsessed with online reviews. So he would say, you know, write one at camp and then go down to McDonald's for another IP address and write another one.I remember telling him about Facebook reviews and his face dropped. He was like, you can review us on Facebook?!
Kelsey Snelling (09:13):
Clearly, Camp Shane’s marketing could be misleading. One particular example of this involved the medical support parents were told their children would be receiving while enrolled. When you logged onto Camp Shane’s website, it claimed to be a medically supervised camp. On the homepage, there were three professionals prominently featured
Harrison (10:47):
These experts, doctors and psychologists were giving their stamp of approval,
would come that one day to you know, talk to
the parents about all the important stuff, using their suppose
medical expertise, you know, all the letters after their name,
to give a verbal, you know, reassurance to the parents
(11:08):
that everything was great.
Kelsey Snelling (11:09):
So in the absence of an on-site Medical Advisor, Registered Dietician, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, who was actually on the ground, working day in- and -day out with these campers? Let’s start with the nutritionists. This role was filled by young college students with little to no official credentials or licenses. One former camper that spoke with me said she once learned to make a “healthy wrap” in nutrition class, which only consisted of raw carrots and cucumbers rolled into a tortilla with no dressing. Sounds like top-notch guidance to me! And the nurses? They were critical, because not only were kids exercising a lot, but some campers were coming in with heart conditions, diabetes, or asthma. While we do know that there were licensed nurses on site some years, there were others where the nurses weren’t around every day. And some years they weren’t on site at all..Sometimes David would claim that the nurse was “on their way,” and then no one would ever show up. Lastly, the Cognitive Behavioral Therapists. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT is a style of therapy that can be effective when done right. In fact, it’s one of the most effective evidence-based treatments for all eating disorders because it’s aimed at changing negative thought patterns, giving people with eating disorders tangible ways to overcome low self esteem and trauma. CBT was pitched to parents as equipping kids with “the tools for long-term success.” Maybe the idea of making fat kids slimmer was flawed to begin with, but if that's what parents and campers wanted, this feature of camp assured them that it was happening as safely as possible. However, the people who were supervising these therapy sessions were often inadequate. Like the nutritionist role, these were often filled by college kids. In my research, I only spoke with one CBT counselor who even claimed to be qualified for the role, and even she admitted that her own colleague that summer had no qualifications to be leading CBT sessions. Not only were kids at Ferndale most likely not receiving the therapy they’d signed up for, their parents were still paying extra money for it!
Harrison (13:37):
They billed the parents for this service, under the instructions of trained doctors and so on and so forth.So the parents were supposedly to be sent an invoice at the end of camp for all the sessions at the higher rate, which the parents could then turn into their own insurance companies with the hopes of getting reimbursement.
Kelsey Snelling (13:59):
We don’t actually know if anyone was successfully reimbursed, but Camp Shane claims on its website that sessions were reimbursable between 40 and 70%. And if insurance companies were indeed covering costs for therapy given by unqualified providers, that might be a little something called Insurance Fraud.And not only was Harrison watching this general dysfunction play out at camp. He himself was struggling. The combination of not eating enough and being overworked took its toll. Harrison’s mom even came up from Florida to visit him at camp because she was so concerned.
Harrison (14:39):
And she goes, you know, well, Harrison, I'm a little
concerned about you. Let me. You know, you look skinnier,
you do seem stressed. Let me come and check on you.
Kelsey Snelling (14:50):
She took Harrison out for a day in the city to go see a Broadway show, but he couldn’t stop checking his phone because he was getting blasted with texts from David and Ziporah. Even on this one day off.
Harrison (15:05):
I had already dropped a lot of weight, lost all
my muscle mass that I had gained in my college days,
and my hair was falling out. I remember her crying,
holding me, like what are they doing to you? Like
this isn't you.
Kelsey Snelling (15:24):
So that was twenty fourteen. It wasn't great. But remember
when I said that twenty fourteen was one for the books,
Well that's because twenty fifteen hadn't happened yet, and twenty fifteen, well,
it lit the books on fire. Even though twenty fourteen
(15:57):
was rough, to say the least. Simon Greenwood was still
at Camp as the director. As I've mentioned before, many
people I've talked to feel that Simon was what held
Camp together. Nelson is one of them.
Nelson (16:12):
He was an amazing director. He had so much knowledge
because he started there in like nineteen ninety and then
by the time he's director, he ran Camp. David ran
the business part for the most part, and then Simon
ran the day to day activities.
Kelsey Snelling (16:26):
However, by twenty fourteen, tension between Simon and David had
been mounting for quite some time. The last few years,
he and David would argue almost daily. Often I'm told
it was about how much to pay counselors. Other times
they argued more specifically about how much Simon was being paid.
(16:47):
According to staff who were there at the time, the
tension between the two reached a boiling point, and in
twenty fifteen, Simon did not return to Camp Shane. It's
unclear if Simon chose to leave or if he was
forced out by David. David, who hadn't fully managed day
(17:08):
to day operations in decades, took over Simon's role. He
was now acting as owner and director simultaneously.
Nelson (17:17):
That was the first summer that Simon was not there,
and you could tell.
Kelsey Snelling (17:21):
The camp was already on its last legs. And without Simon,
counselors like Nelson watched as Camp Shane limped onward.
Nelson (17:30):
All the good stuff was Simon, all the bad shit
was David, and as their relationship broke down and we
saw it, it was like a loveless marriage by the
time that they just went their separate ways.
Kelsey Snelling (17:41):
The facilities had been damaged and degrading for years, and
in twenty fifteen things got especially messy all because one
of the international campers plugged in a converter to charge
their phone, and well, the shit hit the fan or
I guess the cabin.
Nelson (18:04):
So the shit from eleven through seventeen year olds had backed up into my room, came up through my toilet, through the sink, and through the shower. Luckily I'm a slob and I had everything mostly on my bed… So my room is flooded, not with water. I wanna make this perfectly clear. Not with water, but with human shit and water. I see turds floating in the water in my, I'm like, what the fuck? It is disgusting.
Kelsey Snelling (18:35):
And when Nelson called David to tell him what happened,
this was the response he remembers getting.
Nelson (18:41):
He was like, oh my God. So he sends-I felt so bad for them- two women who were like the cleaners. Gave them masks and like some gloves to clean up the. And then I helped them clean.
Kelsey Snelling (18:53):
So that was at Ferndale. And it doesn’t seem like the other locations were much better. Counselors like Derek, who worked at the satellite camp in California in 2015, were thrown in the deep end without any warning. Derek is not this counselor's real name – he asked that we keep that information private. When Derek first arrived at camp, another staff member pulled him aside and told him something that freaked him out:
Derek (19:20):
She was like, don't believe everything you've read about David,
And at this point, I haven't read anything about David.
And then she tells us that he went to prison,
and were like, what what happened?
Kelsey Snelling (19:32):
To be clear, David hadn't actually gone to prison, as
I mentioned before, He had been sentenced to four years
of probation and four hundred hours of community service in
two thousand and four for dodging income taxes related to
the camp. Nevertheless, Derek didn't really trust David. As he
tells it, Derek fought every day to keep the camp
(19:54):
afloat and the kids entertained without any training schedule or
guidance from the Ferndale headquarters.
Derek (20:01):
It felt like every day we'd sit down at breakfast
and be like, what on earth are we going to
do today?
Kelsey Snelling (20:07):
Derek and his fellow counselors weren't working with much.
Derek (20:10):
We opened the supply closet and it was literally a, a single rubber made container with like seven, you know, double XL, triple XL Camp Shane shirts, a promotional Frisbee, two baseball gloves, and then like a basketball that had, you know, literally survived the Reagan administration and was still kicking… And it's like, oh my God, we're in real trouble here. Like, we are in serious trouble. We have no idea how we're gonna do this for six weeks.
Kelsey Snelling (20:44):
And that equipment was supposed to be enough for the roughly 60 kids attending the California camp in 2015. Camp in California lasted six weeks that summer, and for each of those weeks Derek and his staff improvised. He told me that it was a lot of walking around aimlessly and a lot of basketball. But at least they kept the camp running.
Derek (21:07):
It's one of those things where I guess if you go and see like a, Blockbuster movie that comes out on July 4th weekend and it's got a $250 million budget, you're expecting these great things and like, it has to live up to that expectation. And so were we the summer blockbuster? No, absolutely not. But for what we had in the group of people that we had, like we were the, the indie picture that punched way above its budget, like, we somehow put something together.
Kelsey Snelling (21:39):
As counselors like Derek and Nelson struggled to navigate a path forward without Simon, Camp Shane’s happy facade was getting harder to maintain. Derek was barely holding Camp Shane California together but Shane’s other locations were also struggling. Kellye Holdridge saw through the facade the moment she brought her 10-year old daughter Sadie to the satellite camp in Florida. At drop off, Kellye and her husband John realized something was off.
Kellye (22:12):
They then called this little girl who was around Sadie's age and said, take Sadie to her room and show her parents around. So we found that very odd. So we went up to the dorm room and, the little girl was saying, I've been here almost all summer. She goes, I hate it. You’re gonna hate it. She goes, you know how they advertise on the pamphlet that you go horseback riding and you do this and you do that. She goes, you don't do any of those things.
Kelsey Snelling (22:37):
For Kellye, this was not a promising start. And it only got more ominous. A lot of the campers who were much older than Sadie seemed to be struggling with more than just their weight.
Kellye (22:49):
In the dorms, there were much older boys that had
their rooms like right down from her, and she said
that she had heard that one young man that he
was disturbed and that he was telling everybody that he
tried to kill his family, tried to set the house
on fire.
Kelsey Snelling (23:08):
Kellye begged her daughter to reconsider. But Sadie was determined to stay. It had actually been her idea to go to a weight loss camp in the first place. She told her parents she would be fine. So Kellye chose to trust her daughter and reluctantly left. She hoped she was overthinking it and things were better than they seemed. While Sadie was at camp, Kellye and John tried checking in. It was difficult for them to get in touch with their daughter. It seemed to them as though the communication between campers and parents was being monitored. Every time Kellye reached out to talk to Sadie, the person who answered the phone would just tell her that their daughter was doing great. They couldn’t even get ahold of Sadie on her birthday. Kellye didn’t hear from Sadie for about a week and grew increasingly anxious. Finally, after several long days with no communication, Sadie made contact.
Kellye (24:09):
Finally we got connected and Sadie is on the phone with her dad at the time, and she just breaks out crying, come get me, come get me, please come get me. She told her dad. She said she was scared. She said, I'm scared. And so he's like, oh my god, guys, I gotta go. I got, I was like, go, go, go.
Kelsey Snelling (24:36):
John raced from South Carolina back to Florida to get Sadie. The entire time he drove, neither parent could make contact with the main office in New York to get David on the line. Luckily, when John finally arrived, Sadie was safe. When he did eventually get David on the phone to demand a refund, David pushed back. As Kellye and John remember it, David insisted that it wasn’t the camp’s fault if certain children – like their daughter – couldn’t handle the “Camp Shane experience.” Kellye had been onto Camp Shane from the get go. She thought the business was a scam.
Kellye (25:13):
There was no guidance. It was more or less throw a bunch of kids at a place, call it a fitness camp by starving 'em. Naturally, they would lose some weight after two weeks.
Kelsey Snelling (25:23):
Sadie wasn't the only camper who left early. Derek had
a similar experience in California with one of his campers.
At this point, Derek was thinking about quitting his job
at camp, having grown so frustrated with the working conditions.
Around the time he decided to leave for good, a
camper in his care was also reaching a breaking point.
Derek (25:47):
The director and myself had taken a kid to the
hospital and the doctor said, like he's lost way too
much weight, he's extremely dehydrated. And like, if he's going
to stay at this camp, he needs to get supplemental nutrition.
Kelsey Snelling (26:02):
Derek figured the camper couldn't stay at Shane any longer,
so he went rogue.
Derek (26:11):
I had called the parent of this kid that had
gone to the hospital and I said, I don't think
your child is safe here. I think that he is
in risk of going to the hospital again because he's
being denied like the nutrition that he needs and the
calories he needs.
Kelsey Snelling (26:29):
And after that call, with parental permission, Derek and the
kid snuck out of camp.
Derek (26:37):
Everybody was asleep, and I went into this camper's room
and I said, pack your things, we're leaving.
Kelsey Snelling (26:45):
The duo escaped together to meet up with the camper's
father in West Hollywood. If a counselor and a camper
fleeing the premises isn't a sign that things were falling apart,
I don't know what is. Derek actually express his concerns
about the lack of care at Shane early on that
summer before he quit. When David asked him to be
(27:07):
the new director of the California Satellite Camp,
Derek (27:10):
I said, well one of my concerns, David, is that
you promised these parents that there was going to be
a nurse on staff and there's no medical personnel at all,
and me being the director, like, I don't have plausible deniability.
I sit at the top of this thing. The buck
stops with me.
Kelsey Snelling (27:29):
It may seem surprising that more parents didn't catch on sooner,
but it seems that communication was restricted at the satellite
camps in a similar fashion to the main camp in Ferndale.
It may have been hard for parents to know what
their children were experiencing.
Derek (27:45):
So you had five minutes to call your parents, and
the director from the New York office is if they
start to say anything negative about camp, you hang up
the call and move on to the next kid. And
that was like, that was the directive of what we
were supposed to do. So if a kid says like
I hated hear this or that, to hang up all right,
next person in the office.
Kelsey Snelling (28:06):
So yes, some of this stuff would have probably been impossible to know. Even a thorough parent could be tricked by advertising, Yelp reviews, and the reality that sometimes kids exaggerate about their experiences. And if this were any old camp, maybe parents WOULD have noticed the red flags sooner. But there’s another piece of this – a piece that I think has been pervading since well before 1968, when Selma Ettenberg first opened the doors of Camp Shane. It taps into one of society's longest-held insecurities.At a fundamental level, I believe Camp Shane held tremendous power over people– with the promise of a transformed life.
Tigress (28:54):
There's a huge amount of industry around weight and weight loss,
in the medical establishment and in the commercial diet industry,
and in the sort of like health and wellness world.
Kelsey Snelling (29:05):
That’s Tigress Osborn, the Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance or NAAFA, a non profit that advocates for fat peoples’ civil rights. She suspects that the longevity of a place like Camp Shane is all about our continual obsession with being thin.
Tigress (29:24):
Definitely one of the differences between body size and some other forms of discrimination is that people think you have a choice about it. That if you don't want to be discriminated against, if you don't wanna be treated poorly in your community, at your school, at your church, at your, you know, job, whatever, well then just change your body and then you won't have to worry about that anymore.
Kelsey Snelling (29:43):
But putting the burden of weight loss on the individual
doesn't address the root issues.
Tigress (29:49):
When we locate the problem in the body, not in
the discrimination. We do that across the life span of people,
all along the spectrum of your whole life. If you
are fat at one point on that spectrum, or if
you're fat for the whole spectrum, people will locate the
bad things that happened to you in you instead of
in the bad behavior that is happening to you.
Kelsey Snelling (30:12):
Nearly 50 years after it opened, Camp Shane was finding ways to exploit society’s obsession with weight, as well as the belief that it could and should be managed at an individual level. As long as that formula made sense, many people were willing to pursue thinness by any means necessary. In 2016, Nelson came back to work at Ferndale and, to him, it was pretty clear that Shane had not recovered from 2015. Barely any counselors had returned from the year prior and the crew was pretty inexperienced. Some may have been inebriated as well. Several people have told me that there was an irresponsible party and drinking culture among the counselors at that time. By now, Camp Shane and David were under a lot of pressure. Nelson started asking about the future of Camp. Knowing that it had struggled the summer before, he had questions.
Nelson (31:09):
Who's direct? Who's this? Who's doing, what happening? Blah Blah. He didn't hire the right people. Didn't hire enough people.
Kelsey Snelling (31:17):
As usual, it seemed like David was cutting corners. Not
to mention, David was also getting older. Counselors like Nelson
started to notice that he couldn't keep up with Camp
like Simon had.
Nelson (31:30):
It really went from someone with 20 years of experience who like ran that camp to David trying to step in and do something he hadn't done for 20 years at like 70 years old.There was a like few times where we were like, is David gonna make it? Like he's exhausted? And then there was, there was one time where I'm like, on the golf cart on the four wheeler and I see him just like, like leaned up against the building. I was like, is this guy gonna die? Like, does he have a heart attack?
Kelsey Snelling (31:54):
And like David, the camp seemed to be getting weaker too.
Nelson (32:01):
It was, like I said, slowly watching something you loved
in a place you'd called home like die in front
of you in real time.
Kelsey Snelling (32:08):
As Camp struggled onward, Nelson remembered a conversation he'd had
with Carl, another camper turned counselor years before.
Nelson (32:16):
I remember talking to Carl and I said, Carl, you
were here for so long. When did you know it
was time to leave? And Carl said, it's the summer
after the summer you spent trying to chase the
summer before.
Kelsey Snelling (32:29):
Simon was gone, buildings were in disrepair, and David was now in his 70s. Parents were getting fed up and children were getting hurt. 2018 was the last summer for Camp Shane in Ferndale, NY. What finally shut down Camp Shane is hard to say. Maybe it was the after effects of Simon leaving. Maybe it was Camp Shane’s focus on money over the wellbeing of the campers Shane claimed to serve. Maybe it was a changing culture that was starting to question this form of weight loss. Maybe it was doomed to fail from the beginning. Whatever the reason, it came to fruition in early 2019. That year, David sold the Ferndale property to a group of investors for over 6 million dollars. Selma originally bought the campgrounds in 1968 for about 50 thousand dollars. I think she would have been rolling in her grave if she knew how much money her son had made off of it, after—as she saw it— stealing the business and kicking her out. I don’t think the old Ettenberg family wounds ever healed. It’s spelled out on Selma and Irving’s headstones. Irving’s read “loving husband, father, and grandfather,” Selma’s has no mention of her role as a mother or grandmother. It simply reads “devoted wife.” Oof. For 50 years, the cabins at Shane had been filled with hopeful kids and raucous laughter. Now, they were silent. After the camp closed, Nelson went back one last time to say goodbye.
Nelson (34:26):
It was deserted. Like all the stuff in the office was gone. Everything that we like, knew and loved about it. Like all the plaques from all from like, from decades of college days and color war and the bunk plaque, everything gone.
Kelsey Snelling (34:40):
But maybe the utopia Nelson and others were mourning never
existed in the first place. Next time on Camp Shane.
Seth (34:57):
And he just kept chipping away and chipping away, chipping away,
and I really wish I could remember how it started,
and it's sort of escalated from there.
Kelsey Snelling (35:09):
We reached out to Simon Greenwood, David Ettenberg and his wife Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording we have not received a reply Camp Shame is a production of iHeartPodcasts. I’m your host, Kelsey Snelling. Camp Shame is produced by Brittany Martinez, Taylor Williamson, Sara Schleede, Luci Jones and Alyia Yates Grau. Our Editor is Courtenay Hameister with additional Editorial support from Lindsey Kratochwill and Grace Lynch. Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rudder and me, Kelsey Snelling. For iHeartMedia, our executive producer is Cristina Everett. Fact checking done by Madeline Goore, Luci Jones, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Lauren Williams and Fiona Pestana. Our theme music is produced by Sean Petell. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Instagram @CampShame – that's with an M!-- If you or anyone you know went to Camp Shane reach out with your camp stories
This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.
This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please
take care. In the mid twenty tens, Camp Shane was
a shit show. Literally.
Nelson (00:15):
I'm walking up the short hill to get to Boys
Camp and I see a waterfall pouring out the back
of my cabin and I'm like, oh, a pipe must
have busted in the bathroom. My room, My cabin blooded
(00:38):
with about three feet of human waste.
Kelsey Snelling (00:43):
Nelson Jancaterino, the camper-turned-counselor we talked to earlier in the show, spent his final year at Shane as a sort of pseudo-maintenance man. He was well acquainted with some of the issues going on at camp. Nelson had been at camp for years, but in the mid 2010s, things seemed to be getting worse. Many buildings needed renovating, equipment was subpar, and cabins were overflowing with water and other – (cough cough) – less desirable substances.How the hell did we get here? This is Camp Shame. I’m your host Kelsey Snelling.This episode, things go down the drain – or should I say, come back up – fast. As you know, Camp Shane was less than perfect. Kids were not eating enough food.Counselors were often untrained and staff could be fired for what seemed like no reason. But even though there had been rocky years in the camp’s past, 2014 was one for the books.
Harrison (01:57):
When I say that summer twenty fourteen was the worst
summer of my life, it's the worst summer by far.
Kelsey Snelling (02:03):
That’s Harrison Davies. He was a Marketing Associate and part of the office staff at Camp Shane in 2014. Because he was a salaried staff member and not a counselor, he was expected to work year round. Harrison is a bubbly guy with a lot of enthusiasm and, at the time, he was excited to land his first full time position post-college. He started the summer hopeful about the opportunity to help out at Shane, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he was walking into more than he had bargained for.
Harrison (02:36):
It was just a toxic work environment. I've never had
a work environment that would come nearly as terribly close
on its worst day than any given day in that
office down the hill.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What made it so bad? (Sigh) Where to begin? First, Harrison
worked long hours.
Harrison (02:56):
You were looking at no less than a ten to
eleven hour work day and sometimes six days a week
at least.
Kelsey Snelling (03:02):
As a marketing associate, Harrison worked in the office, which
was attached to the dining hall at the bottom of
the hill. The conditions were not ideal. For one thing,
there wasn't much to eat. Harrison told me that David
policed how much food the office team got for lunch
and didn't allow them to store much, if anything, in
the fridge.
Harrison (03:23):
In the staff office and the tiny little fridge that
we had in the storage cabinet. The only thing I
think that we were potentially allowed to have in there
was maybe like Diet Coke or diet Sprite, and maybe coffee,
all of which we had to purchase ourselves.
Kelsey Snelling (03:42):
Many counselors we spoke with saw weight loss as a
benefit to working at camp, but not Harrison. He thought
this was supposed to be a camp where the kids
lost weight.
Harrison (03:52):
In a nutshell, you were given the same amount of
food as the overweight campers were who were in their teens.
That's what you were given.
Kelsey Snelling (04:00):
In fact, in the fine print of staff contracts, it
stated that if employees exceeded the quote, Camp Shane designated
guidelines for desired weight, they had to participate in the
same program as the campers. In reality, this extended to
all staff because remember everyone was fed the same thing. Now,
(04:21):
some counselors and staff members were permitted to get seconds
at meal time if leftovers happened to be available, But
since Harrison was bogged down in the office, he rarely
got to meals before extra helpings ran out, and once
when he did successfully get more food, David reprimanded him.
Harrison (04:40):
I do remember David sitting me down one day saying, listen, Harrison,
you're on salary here that that's awesome. Just so you know,
we do see you eating a little more than the campers,
and you know we have to pay for that. He
would get very upset if we made alternative lunch arrangements,
But then again he was also rationing how much we
could he the office. Actually we attempted to order out
(05:03):
and David blocked our order, and he actually took our
order and threw it in the trash.
Kelsey Snelling (05:09):
So of course the food situation sucked, plus the job itself wasn’t really what Harrison had signed up to do. He had originally been hired by David and Zipporah to do marketing work for something called the Shane Diet Resorts. We haven’t talked about the Shane Diet Resorts yet, because they were kind of a side project in the world of Camp Shane and only ran for a handful of years. The Diet Resorts fell under the Camp Shane umbrella, but were designed for adults. One was in Texas, and one just a few miles from Ferndale in NY, both run out of upscale-ish hotels. The program supposedly offered a customized daily schedule, a variety of day trips, healthy meal options, classes, and activities. So this is what Harrison was told he would be working on. But he quickly got roped into doing marketing and additional administrative office work for the flagship Camp Shane as well. In fact, he was moved to the Camp Shane Ferndale location where he both worked on-site in the office and lived in a cabin on the premises. Marketing at camp seemed to entail a complex set of twists and turns. David’s marketed version of camp was let’s say… a little different from reality.
Camp Shane Archive (06:28):
So you laugh a lot when you’re at Camp. You really want to be here. You get up in the morning and you say it’s so awesome.
Kelsey Snelling (06:38):
Mmmmmmm awesome indeed. In some of these videos, it seems difficult to prompt happy responses out of campers.
Camp Shane Archive (06:49):
(Girls)We’re happy Camp Shaners how are you? We're great, we all love each other. (off camera voice) Say we love Camp Shane. (girls)We love Camp Shane! (off camera voice) what do you love about Camp Shane? (girls) The friends-the hot sauce that always runs out...the one bottle of it.
Kelsey Snelling (07:06):
One part of Harrison's job was editing out parts of
the promotional material that didn't fit Camp Shane's brand. The
videos sold a version of Camp that did not fully exist,
a version of Camp that had, wait for it, working
go karts.
Harrison (07:25):
There was a lot of activities that they promised in
their brochures and marketing that would cost money, and they
just didn't do them. I think Go Karts is probably
one of the best ones that never happened.
Kelsey Snelling (07:38):
As for the people riding the Go Karts, well, that
depended on who was allowed to be in the promotional materials.
Harrison said that in one of his videos, David asked
him to cut out a key member of the staff.
Harrison (07:53):
She didn't fit the body image of Camp Shane.
Kelsey Snelling (07:57):
Videos, brochures and the website also so guaranteed that there
would be a beautiful lake and other water activities. But
people like Nelson, the camper turned counselor who'd been at
camp for many years, knew this wasn't quite the case.
Nelson (08:13):
The one big thing is people were like, oh, we
were told that the lake was on Camp. No, it's
like a two mile drive away, Like you have to
load in a van and you have to get bussed there.
Kelsey Snelling (08:22):
Camp Shane also advertised an Olympic sized swimming pool, but
in twenty fourteen.
Nelson (08:28):
The pool water was the consistency of lake water because
it didn't have chlorine or any chemicals in it. It
was disgusting.
Kelsey Snelling (08:34):
And then there were the online reviews, which should have
been more reliable, but Nelson remembers that David would have
him write fake Yelp reviews about how amazing the camp was,
from different usernames and IP addresses, so that it looked
like they were done by real customers. We talked to
two staffers who say they were asked to do the
(08:54):
same thing.
Nelson (08:55):
He was obsessed with online reviews. So he would say, you know, write one at camp and then go down to McDonald's for another IP address and write another one.I remember telling him about Facebook reviews and his face dropped. He was like, you can review us on Facebook?!
Kelsey Snelling (09:13):
Clearly, Camp Shane’s marketing could be misleading. One particular example of this involved the medical support parents were told their children would be receiving while enrolled. When you logged onto Camp Shane’s website, it claimed to be a medically supervised camp. On the homepage, there were three professionals prominently featured
Harrison (10:47):
These experts, doctors and psychologists were giving their stamp of approval,
would come that one day to you know, talk to
the parents about all the important stuff, using their suppose
medical expertise, you know, all the letters after their name,
to give a verbal, you know, reassurance to the parents
(11:08):
that everything was great.
Kelsey Snelling (11:09):
So in the absence of an on-site Medical Advisor, Registered Dietician, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, who was actually on the ground, working day in- and -day out with these campers? Let’s start with the nutritionists. This role was filled by young college students with little to no official credentials or licenses. One former camper that spoke with me said she once learned to make a “healthy wrap” in nutrition class, which only consisted of raw carrots and cucumbers rolled into a tortilla with no dressing. Sounds like top-notch guidance to me! And the nurses? They were critical, because not only were kids exercising a lot, but some campers were coming in with heart conditions, diabetes, or asthma. While we do know that there were licensed nurses on site some years, there were others where the nurses weren’t around every day. And some years they weren’t on site at all..Sometimes David would claim that the nurse was “on their way,” and then no one would ever show up. Lastly, the Cognitive Behavioral Therapists. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT is a style of therapy that can be effective when done right. In fact, it’s one of the most effective evidence-based treatments for all eating disorders because it’s aimed at changing negative thought patterns, giving people with eating disorders tangible ways to overcome low self esteem and trauma. CBT was pitched to parents as equipping kids with “the tools for long-term success.” Maybe the idea of making fat kids slimmer was flawed to begin with, but if that's what parents and campers wanted, this feature of camp assured them that it was happening as safely as possible. However, the people who were supervising these therapy sessions were often inadequate. Like the nutritionist role, these were often filled by college kids. In my research, I only spoke with one CBT counselor who even claimed to be qualified for the role, and even she admitted that her own colleague that summer had no qualifications to be leading CBT sessions. Not only were kids at Ferndale most likely not receiving the therapy they’d signed up for, their parents were still paying extra money for it!
Harrison (13:37):
They billed the parents for this service, under the instructions of trained doctors and so on and so forth.So the parents were supposedly to be sent an invoice at the end of camp for all the sessions at the higher rate, which the parents could then turn into their own insurance companies with the hopes of getting reimbursement.
Kelsey Snelling (13:59):
We don’t actually know if anyone was successfully reimbursed, but Camp Shane claims on its website that sessions were reimbursable between 40 and 70%. And if insurance companies were indeed covering costs for therapy given by unqualified providers, that might be a little something called Insurance Fraud.And not only was Harrison watching this general dysfunction play out at camp. He himself was struggling. The combination of not eating enough and being overworked took its toll. Harrison’s mom even came up from Florida to visit him at camp because she was so concerned.
Harrison (14:39):
And she goes, you know, well, Harrison, I'm a little
concerned about you. Let me. You know, you look skinnier,
you do seem stressed. Let me come and check on you.
Kelsey Snelling (14:50):
She took Harrison out for a day in the city to go see a Broadway show, but he couldn’t stop checking his phone because he was getting blasted with texts from David and Ziporah. Even on this one day off.
Harrison (15:05):
I had already dropped a lot of weight, lost all
my muscle mass that I had gained in my college days,
and my hair was falling out. I remember her crying,
holding me, like what are they doing to you? Like
this isn't you.
Kelsey Snelling (15:24):
So that was twenty fourteen. It wasn't great. But remember
when I said that twenty fourteen was one for the books,
Well that's because twenty fifteen hadn't happened yet, and twenty fifteen, well,
it lit the books on fire. Even though twenty fourteen
(15:57):
was rough, to say the least. Simon Greenwood was still
at Camp as the director. As I've mentioned before, many
people I've talked to feel that Simon was what held
Camp together. Nelson is one of them.
Nelson (16:12):
He was an amazing director. He had so much knowledge
because he started there in like nineteen ninety and then
by the time he's director, he ran Camp. David ran
the business part for the most part, and then Simon
ran the day to day activities.
Kelsey Snelling (16:26):
However, by twenty fourteen, tension between Simon and David had
been mounting for quite some time. The last few years,
he and David would argue almost daily. Often I'm told
it was about how much to pay counselors. Other times
they argued more specifically about how much Simon was being paid.
(16:47):
According to staff who were there at the time, the
tension between the two reached a boiling point, and in
twenty fifteen, Simon did not return to Camp Shane. It's
unclear if Simon chose to leave or if he was
forced out by David. David, who hadn't fully managed day
(17:08):
to day operations in decades, took over Simon's role. He
was now acting as owner and director simultaneously.
Nelson (17:17):
That was the first summer that Simon was not there,
and you could tell.
Kelsey Snelling (17:21):
The camp was already on its last legs. And without Simon,
counselors like Nelson watched as Camp Shane limped onward.
Nelson (17:30):
All the good stuff was Simon, all the bad shit
was David, and as their relationship broke down and we
saw it, it was like a loveless marriage by the
time that they just went their separate ways.
Kelsey Snelling (17:41):
The facilities had been damaged and degrading for years, and
in twenty fifteen things got especially messy all because one
of the international campers plugged in a converter to charge
their phone, and well, the shit hit the fan or
I guess the cabin.
Nelson (18:04):
So the shit from eleven through seventeen year olds had backed up into my room, came up through my toilet, through the sink, and through the shower. Luckily I'm a slob and I had everything mostly on my bed… So my room is flooded, not with water. I wanna make this perfectly clear. Not with water, but with human shit and water. I see turds floating in the water in my, I'm like, what the fuck? It is disgusting.
Kelsey Snelling (18:35):
And when Nelson called David to tell him what happened,
this was the response he remembers getting.
Nelson (18:41):
He was like, oh my God. So he sends-I felt so bad for them- two women who were like the cleaners. Gave them masks and like some gloves to clean up the. And then I helped them clean.
Kelsey Snelling (18:53):
So that was at Ferndale. And it doesn’t seem like the other locations were much better. Counselors like Derek, who worked at the satellite camp in California in 2015, were thrown in the deep end without any warning. Derek is not this counselor's real name – he asked that we keep that information private. When Derek first arrived at camp, another staff member pulled him aside and told him something that freaked him out:
Derek (19:20):
She was like, don't believe everything you've read about David,
And at this point, I haven't read anything about David.
And then she tells us that he went to prison,
and were like, what what happened?
Kelsey Snelling (19:32):
To be clear, David hadn't actually gone to prison, as
I mentioned before, He had been sentenced to four years
of probation and four hundred hours of community service in
two thousand and four for dodging income taxes related to
the camp. Nevertheless, Derek didn't really trust David. As he
tells it, Derek fought every day to keep the camp
(19:54):
afloat and the kids entertained without any training schedule or
guidance from the Ferndale headquarters.
Derek (20:01):
It felt like every day we'd sit down at breakfast
and be like, what on earth are we going to
do today?
Kelsey Snelling (20:07):
Derek and his fellow counselors weren't working with much.
Derek (20:10):
We opened the supply closet and it was literally a, a single rubber made container with like seven, you know, double XL, triple XL Camp Shane shirts, a promotional Frisbee, two baseball gloves, and then like a basketball that had, you know, literally survived the Reagan administration and was still kicking… And it's like, oh my God, we're in real trouble here. Like, we are in serious trouble. We have no idea how we're gonna do this for six weeks.
Kelsey Snelling (20:44):
And that equipment was supposed to be enough for the roughly 60 kids attending the California camp in 2015. Camp in California lasted six weeks that summer, and for each of those weeks Derek and his staff improvised. He told me that it was a lot of walking around aimlessly and a lot of basketball. But at least they kept the camp running.
Derek (21:07):
It's one of those things where I guess if you go and see like a, Blockbuster movie that comes out on July 4th weekend and it's got a $250 million budget, you're expecting these great things and like, it has to live up to that expectation. And so were we the summer blockbuster? No, absolutely not. But for what we had in the group of people that we had, like we were the, the indie picture that punched way above its budget, like, we somehow put something together.
Kelsey Snelling (21:39):
As counselors like Derek and Nelson struggled to navigate a path forward without Simon, Camp Shane’s happy facade was getting harder to maintain. Derek was barely holding Camp Shane California together but Shane’s other locations were also struggling. Kellye Holdridge saw through the facade the moment she brought her 10-year old daughter Sadie to the satellite camp in Florida. At drop off, Kellye and her husband John realized something was off.
Kellye (22:12):
They then called this little girl who was around Sadie's age and said, take Sadie to her room and show her parents around. So we found that very odd. So we went up to the dorm room and, the little girl was saying, I've been here almost all summer. She goes, I hate it. You’re gonna hate it. She goes, you know how they advertise on the pamphlet that you go horseback riding and you do this and you do that. She goes, you don't do any of those things.
Kelsey Snelling (22:37):
For Kellye, this was not a promising start. And it only got more ominous. A lot of the campers who were much older than Sadie seemed to be struggling with more than just their weight.
Kellye (22:49):
In the dorms, there were much older boys that had
their rooms like right down from her, and she said
that she had heard that one young man that he
was disturbed and that he was telling everybody that he
tried to kill his family, tried to set the house
on fire.
Kelsey Snelling (23:08):
Kellye begged her daughter to reconsider. But Sadie was determined to stay. It had actually been her idea to go to a weight loss camp in the first place. She told her parents she would be fine. So Kellye chose to trust her daughter and reluctantly left. She hoped she was overthinking it and things were better than they seemed. While Sadie was at camp, Kellye and John tried checking in. It was difficult for them to get in touch with their daughter. It seemed to them as though the communication between campers and parents was being monitored. Every time Kellye reached out to talk to Sadie, the person who answered the phone would just tell her that their daughter was doing great. They couldn’t even get ahold of Sadie on her birthday. Kellye didn’t hear from Sadie for about a week and grew increasingly anxious. Finally, after several long days with no communication, Sadie made contact.
Kellye (24:09):
Finally we got connected and Sadie is on the phone with her dad at the time, and she just breaks out crying, come get me, come get me, please come get me. She told her dad. She said she was scared. She said, I'm scared. And so he's like, oh my god, guys, I gotta go. I got, I was like, go, go, go.
Kelsey Snelling (24:36):
John raced from South Carolina back to Florida to get Sadie. The entire time he drove, neither parent could make contact with the main office in New York to get David on the line. Luckily, when John finally arrived, Sadie was safe. When he did eventually get David on the phone to demand a refund, David pushed back. As Kellye and John remember it, David insisted that it wasn’t the camp’s fault if certain children – like their daughter – couldn’t handle the “Camp Shane experience.” Kellye had been onto Camp Shane from the get go. She thought the business was a scam.
Kellye (25:13):
There was no guidance. It was more or less throw a bunch of kids at a place, call it a fitness camp by starving 'em. Naturally, they would lose some weight after two weeks.
Kelsey Snelling (25:23):
Sadie wasn't the only camper who left early. Derek had
a similar experience in California with one of his campers.
At this point, Derek was thinking about quitting his job
at camp, having grown so frustrated with the working conditions.
Around the time he decided to leave for good, a
camper in his care was also reaching a breaking point.
Derek (25:47):
The director and myself had taken a kid to the
hospital and the doctor said, like he's lost way too
much weight, he's extremely dehydrated. And like, if he's going
to stay at this camp, he needs to get supplemental nutrition.
Kelsey Snelling (26:02):
Derek figured the camper couldn't stay at Shane any longer,
so he went rogue.
Derek (26:11):
I had called the parent of this kid that had
gone to the hospital and I said, I don't think
your child is safe here. I think that he is
in risk of going to the hospital again because he's
being denied like the nutrition that he needs and the
calories he needs.
Kelsey Snelling (26:29):
And after that call, with parental permission, Derek and the
kid snuck out of camp.
Derek (26:37):
Everybody was asleep, and I went into this camper's room
and I said, pack your things, we're leaving.
Kelsey Snelling (26:45):
The duo escaped together to meet up with the camper's
father in West Hollywood. If a counselor and a camper
fleeing the premises isn't a sign that things were falling apart,
I don't know what is. Derek actually express his concerns
about the lack of care at Shane early on that
summer before he quit. When David asked him to be
(27:07):
the new director of the California Satellite Camp,
Derek (27:10):
I said, well one of my concerns, David, is that
you promised these parents that there was going to be
a nurse on staff and there's no medical personnel at all,
and me being the director, like, I don't have plausible deniability.
I sit at the top of this thing. The buck
stops with me.
Kelsey Snelling (27:29):
It may seem surprising that more parents didn't catch on sooner,
but it seems that communication was restricted at the satellite
camps in a similar fashion to the main camp in Ferndale.
It may have been hard for parents to know what
their children were experiencing.
Derek (27:45):
So you had five minutes to call your parents, and
the director from the New York office is if they
start to say anything negative about camp, you hang up
the call and move on to the next kid. And
that was like, that was the directive of what we
were supposed to do. So if a kid says like
I hated hear this or that, to hang up all right,
next person in the office.
Kelsey Snelling (28:06):
So yes, some of this stuff would have probably been impossible to know. Even a thorough parent could be tricked by advertising, Yelp reviews, and the reality that sometimes kids exaggerate about their experiences. And if this were any old camp, maybe parents WOULD have noticed the red flags sooner. But there’s another piece of this – a piece that I think has been pervading since well before 1968, when Selma Ettenberg first opened the doors of Camp Shane. It taps into one of society's longest-held insecurities.At a fundamental level, I believe Camp Shane held tremendous power over people– with the promise of a transformed life.
Tigress (28:54):
There's a huge amount of industry around weight and weight loss,
in the medical establishment and in the commercial diet industry,
and in the sort of like health and wellness world.
Kelsey Snelling (29:05):
That’s Tigress Osborn, the Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance or NAAFA, a non profit that advocates for fat peoples’ civil rights. She suspects that the longevity of a place like Camp Shane is all about our continual obsession with being thin.
Tigress (29:24):
Definitely one of the differences between body size and some other forms of discrimination is that people think you have a choice about it. That if you don't want to be discriminated against, if you don't wanna be treated poorly in your community, at your school, at your church, at your, you know, job, whatever, well then just change your body and then you won't have to worry about that anymore.
Kelsey Snelling (29:43):
But putting the burden of weight loss on the individual
doesn't address the root issues.
Tigress (29:49):
When we locate the problem in the body, not in
the discrimination. We do that across the life span of people,
all along the spectrum of your whole life. If you
are fat at one point on that spectrum, or if
you're fat for the whole spectrum, people will locate the
bad things that happened to you in you instead of
in the bad behavior that is happening to you.
Kelsey Snelling (30:12):
Nearly 50 years after it opened, Camp Shane was finding ways to exploit society’s obsession with weight, as well as the belief that it could and should be managed at an individual level. As long as that formula made sense, many people were willing to pursue thinness by any means necessary. In 2016, Nelson came back to work at Ferndale and, to him, it was pretty clear that Shane had not recovered from 2015. Barely any counselors had returned from the year prior and the crew was pretty inexperienced. Some may have been inebriated as well. Several people have told me that there was an irresponsible party and drinking culture among the counselors at that time. By now, Camp Shane and David were under a lot of pressure. Nelson started asking about the future of Camp. Knowing that it had struggled the summer before, he had questions.
Nelson (31:09):
Who's direct? Who's this? Who's doing, what happening? Blah Blah. He didn't hire the right people. Didn't hire enough people.
Kelsey Snelling (31:17):
As usual, it seemed like David was cutting corners. Not
to mention, David was also getting older. Counselors like Nelson
started to notice that he couldn't keep up with Camp
like Simon had.
Nelson (31:30):
It really went from someone with 20 years of experience who like ran that camp to David trying to step in and do something he hadn't done for 20 years at like 70 years old.There was a like few times where we were like, is David gonna make it? Like he's exhausted? And then there was, there was one time where I'm like, on the golf cart on the four wheeler and I see him just like, like leaned up against the building. I was like, is this guy gonna die? Like, does he have a heart attack?
Kelsey Snelling (31:54):
And like David, the camp seemed to be getting weaker too.
Nelson (32:01):
It was, like I said, slowly watching something you loved
in a place you'd called home like die in front
of you in real time.
Kelsey Snelling (32:08):
As Camp struggled onward, Nelson remembered a conversation he'd had
with Carl, another camper turned counselor years before.
Nelson (32:16):
I remember talking to Carl and I said, Carl, you
were here for so long. When did you know it
was time to leave? And Carl said, it's the summer
after the summer you spent trying to chase the
summer before.
Kelsey Snelling (32:29):
Simon was gone, buildings were in disrepair, and David was now in his 70s. Parents were getting fed up and children were getting hurt. 2018 was the last summer for Camp Shane in Ferndale, NY. What finally shut down Camp Shane is hard to say. Maybe it was the after effects of Simon leaving. Maybe it was Camp Shane’s focus on money over the wellbeing of the campers Shane claimed to serve. Maybe it was a changing culture that was starting to question this form of weight loss. Maybe it was doomed to fail from the beginning. Whatever the reason, it came to fruition in early 2019. That year, David sold the Ferndale property to a group of investors for over 6 million dollars. Selma originally bought the campgrounds in 1968 for about 50 thousand dollars. I think she would have been rolling in her grave if she knew how much money her son had made off of it, after—as she saw it— stealing the business and kicking her out. I don’t think the old Ettenberg family wounds ever healed. It’s spelled out on Selma and Irving’s headstones. Irving’s read “loving husband, father, and grandfather,” Selma’s has no mention of her role as a mother or grandmother. It simply reads “devoted wife.” Oof. For 50 years, the cabins at Shane had been filled with hopeful kids and raucous laughter. Now, they were silent. After the camp closed, Nelson went back one last time to say goodbye.
Nelson (34:26):
It was deserted. Like all the stuff in the office was gone. Everything that we like, knew and loved about it. Like all the plaques from all from like, from decades of college days and color war and the bunk plaque, everything gone.
Kelsey Snelling (34:40):
But maybe the utopia Nelson and others were mourning never
existed in the first place. Next time on Camp Shane.
Seth (34:57):
And he just kept chipping away and chipping away, chipping away,
and I really wish I could remember how it started,
and it's sort of escalated from there.
Kelsey Snelling (35:09):
We reached out to Simon Greenwood, David Ettenberg and his wife Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording we have not received a reply Camp Shame is a production of iHeartPodcasts. I’m your host, Kelsey Snelling. Camp Shame is produced by Brittany Martinez, Taylor Williamson, Sara Schleede, Luci Jones and Alyia Yates Grau. Our Editor is Courtenay Hameister with additional Editorial support from Lindsey Kratochwill and Grace Lynch. Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rudder and me, Kelsey Snelling. For iHeartMedia, our executive producer is Cristina Everett. Fact checking done by Madeline Goore, Luci Jones, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Lauren Williams and Fiona Pestana. Our theme music is produced by Sean Petell. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Instagram @CampShame – that's with an M!-- If you or anyone you know went to Camp Shane reach out with your camp stories
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