Polywogs and Russell Boatman

From Frank Bush: The picture above might need some explanation.

This is the first summer after the lake was built in the fall. The balance of nature had not yet kicked in. Frogs had no natural enemies this first summer. Our swimming area was filled with pollywogs. The only recourse we had was to seine them out. When the small bucket was filled, it was dumped into a 30 gallon drum. The first week of camp, we filled this drum 5 times. A nearby farmer took the pollywogs and dumped them into his pond. There was no swimming until we removed as many pollywogs as we could. Campers stepping on them was a worse mess.

One of the funny comments that was made was by Russell Boatman (seen at bat, above). After about two hours of seining, he straightened up from his stooped position and said, "Boys, I'm going to go back to my office and check my ordination certificate to see if it covers this."

From Paula Bush McElwee -- Dad, I remember one early camp season when there were thousands, maybe millions of the little ones newly changed from tadpole to hoppers and they were everywhere on the sand. Mike and I, in our lifevests, spent a lot of time on the beach or in the lake while you were faculty -- and this particular day we were fascinated (probably ages 5 and 7) by these things. Mike wanted to catch some but we couldn't think of any way to contain the active little things. Mike had an idea and ran up to the boys dorm and got your classy red LBI/LCC gym bag, which was leather I think and zipped closed at the top. It worked pretty well. We chased those little frogs, caught a few, and one held the zipper while the other dropped them in. We even figured out that if we kindof tapped them to the end we could get more in than hopped out.

We didn't figure out that, left zipped up in sun for the hours after we got bored with this game, they would die. I don't know if you ever got the stink out of the leather. I don't remember you ever using that bag again.