August 21- The Last Team Game & Lenorlog entries

"On the Line, on the line, on the (beat) side of the line
We're cheerin' for the White Team in the rain or the shine!
The White Team in the rain, we love you just the same,
On the line, on the side of the line!
Oh, we are the halo and the glory be
The pride of Lenore and the whole country (A weird lyric, because the stress was off and it came out as LEN-ore)
The pride of Lenore and the whole country,]
Wrapped up into one happy fam-i-ly"
Repeat

This, was one of my favorite songs. Probably because it had hand motions that went with it. And, the funny thing is, after all this time, when I sang it again, all the motions miraclulously came back with the words...
On this day in August of '59, our team captain, Nora Roberts would have been trying to extract every last bit of effort from our team. This was our last opportunity to try and win Color War. The stakes couldn't have been higher... I'm sure that we all tried our hardest, too. After today, Color War would be history for another summer, and all we could do was wait for the Banquet to hear if our efforts had paid off.
In the meantime, other preparations were underway. As a former Lenorlog editor (1965), I can tell you that we would have been busy collecting accounts from our reporters of the various outings for the summer, and getting bunk "sayings", and last will and testaments from both the campers and the counselors. We also would have assembled a list of attributes for "The Perfect Counselor", and the "Perfect Camper", along with letters from the various team captains to their teams. These would usually be a surprise, since the last Lenorlog would often appear at the Final Banquet.
The 1959 Lenorlog had an unusual category called, "Pipe Prophesies," in which counselors were asked to "smoke" from an imaginary pipe and prophesize what their campers and the camp would be like in the future. Some counselors dutifully admitted that they didn't generally smoke pipes. Another, wrote that she "took a drag from a King-sized Kent" to induce a state condusive to prohesizing. Interestingly, entries forecasted anywhere from 10 years to 25 years ahead. The accounts were, of course, cheerfully optimistic: The counselor's entry from Bunk 25 predicted that her camper, Julie Marsh, would be "the first woman president of the U.S.!" How sad and ironic, that by the time most of those predicted dates were reached, Lenore would no longer exist.