Home >  Local News

Monday, September 16, 2002

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

When Melba Kiefer-Polasheff was growing up on the South Side, scarcely a blade of grass grew in the poor neighborhood where she lived. There was one public pool, "but it was pretty much all cement and asphalt," she recalled.

	The Loving family, father Robert, sons Christopher, 14, and Celvin, 15, and mother Ruby, of Wilkinsburg, clowns around during camp at the Family Retreat Center in Marshall. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

But thanks to three childhood summers spent at a camp in Marshall, Kiefer-Polasheff, 59, can treasure memories of dappled shade, of long days filled with swimming or fishing or making crafts, hiking or just sitting under the trees.

"All the kids were poor, but we were treated just great," recalled Kiefer-Polasheff, who now lives in Monroeville. "We had kids of all races and colors there, and it really was just a chance to get out of the city and stretch our legs -- and to get to know what poison ivy looked like," she added with a laugh.

The 260-acre Family Retreat Center, which is now run by Family Resources Inc., a child-abuse prevention agency, is still going strong, and Sunday it will celebrate its 65th anniversary at its site in Cranberry and Marshall. It also has evolved from a retreat for poor children to a place where entire families can come year-round for workshops on parenting skills, neighborhood safety and leadership training -- in a setting that provides plenty of outdoor activities or time for reflection.

"The goal is to encourage positive interaction in a warm and nurturing atmosphere," said Walter Smith, executive director of Family Resources. "What we want to do is foster attachments between parents and kids and all family relationships, by taking them into a new environment."

The camp is actually older than 65; it was started in 1881 by a group of prominent Pittsburghers -- most of them women -- who wanted to give poor children a respite from summers in hot, crowded, unhealthy city neighborhoods.

"In the 19th century, women always were the organizers, while men belonged to the finance committee," said Smith of the strong role women played in developing the camp. "I was amazed at how committed these women were."

There was some big money behind the camp's beginnings: namely, two women from Pittsburgh's most high-profile families -- Louise Hills Herron and Mary Copley Thaw. Herron's family has a street in the Hill District named after it. Thaw's son, Harry, would go on to shoot noted architect, Stanford White, for canoodling with Thaw's wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. That scandal eventually found its way into the novel "Ragtime."

Children eagerly reach for fresh baked cookies at the Family Retreat Center in this undated file photo believed to date to the 1950s.

Horrified by the hunger and destitution they saw during an economic depression in 1874, Thaw and Herron had already founded the Pittsburgh Association for the Improvement of the Poor, which was the first formal organization in the city to provide social services to indigents, including a shelter for homeless men -- and whose building still stands in the Strip District today.

Then, in 1879, the association added "the committee of free excursions" to its list of projects. That year, about 4,000 children were taken on trips into the country, where they saw green hills and woods for the first time.

In 1882, a little tract of land in Shousetown, now Crescent, along the Ohio River was the site of the first camp, which moved to a 2 1/2-acre site in Oakmont in 1886. It eventually moved to its current site in 1937, growing from 50 acres then to about 260 acres in the 1970s.

The camp, initially called the Fresh Air Home, was part of a nationwide movement by social service agencies to send poor children out of the cities during the summers.

There was a strong moral component to the association's work. Drunks, panhandlers and "mendicants" were not beneficiaries of its largesse. "The association came together to decide who were the deserving poor," noted Mary Louise Green, Family Resources' development associate.

Certainly, children easily qualified as deserving.

"I remember it was always very cold in the morning, and oh, lordy, you really needed a wool blanket," said Kiefer-Polasheff, who first attended the camp when she was 6.

"We'd be up early, go right to the flagpole and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then go eat breakfast. And the chow hall always seemed huge to me. I remember leaning through my elbows and looking through the windows at the kitchen's four-slice toaster. I'd never seen such a toaster before. The food was always good, and there was plenty of it."

In 1986, the Improvement Association merged with the Child Abuse Prevention Center to become Family Resources Inc.; three years later, Smith decided that the children's camp needed to take on a different mission, "more in line with what we do for families."

Today, parents, children and staff from Healthy Start, Hill House Association, the YMCA, various churches and numerous family support groups use the center, although private companies also can rent it as a retreat for their employees.

There also are children-only programs at the camp -- about 700 young campers, ages 6 to 11, used it this summer. But its first purpose and priority is to serve families at risk.

"People need to know that there is this place in Pittsburgh where they'll have an experience they'll never forget," said Jack Stockman, the camp's director, who spoke to a reporter by cell phone while on a hayride with some campers.

"We don't just have beans and hot dogs here," he added. "Our cooks make really good food, and that eases some of the stress for the parents, knowing that they don't have to worry about preparing meals. It's all done for them."

Today, the camp looks much the same as it did in old photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. Simple white cabins with green shutters sit under tall trees, and the woods echo with laughter from children trying out a nearby obstacle course. In one sunny clearing on a recent weekend afternoon, a group of older women -- all grandmothers -- from Wilkinsburg watched contentedly as the children trooped off to test out the "zipline," a long rope strung between two trees.

"You're in the army now!" shouted one counselor playfully as Calvin Loving, 15, of Wilkinsburg sped along a rope-and-tire "confidence course" without a fall.

There's canoeing and nature walks, and in the winter, cross-country skiing and sledding. But on this 90-degree day, that was the farthest thing from Loving's mind. "I like it here because there's swimming and fishing," said the teen-ager. "There's no pool in Wilkinsburg for that."

The camp is funded with fees from private and corporate visitors -- about 6,000 people use it year-round -- and grants from the Howard Heinz Endowment, the Pittsburgh Foundation and other groups, as well as private donations.

Changes are afoot, too: the Olympic-size swimming pool is showing its age and will have to be replaced; the playgrounds need refurbishing, too.

But it's still the same place to Kiefer-Polasheff, who, as a supervisor in Allegheny County's Office of Children, Youth and Families, finds herself frequently making referrals to the camp. She is especially proud of one program she helped start with Smith -- a sibling camp for children in foster care, where youngsters who are placed in different families can be reunited.

"It's the only camp of that nature in the country, I think, where kids can get together and just be sisters and brothers. I sign permission forms for hundreds of kids to go to that camp. And every time I do, I think of that experience I had and how wonderful it was for me. It has stayed with me always."