You only turn 100 once, so it was important to properly celebrate this historic occasion! While it seemed impossible to cover all the decades of camp, we did our best to bring back as many memories as possible from the past century. We found many little ways to represent the history of camp each day.

Check out our list below of 4 awesome things we did each session to bring history to life for our campers…

100th Year Shirts

Foley has a long tradition of creating anniversary shirts for different milestones. We had shirts at our 85th summer in 2009 and 95th summer in 2019. This summer each camper received a special 100 year t-shirt that was worn during picture day and our traditional Founders Day ceremony. Counselors wore a Navy shirt with the same design, and it made our all camp pictures really pop. Each camper got to keep their shirts, and they are available for purchase at the camp store if you missed out and need to snag one!

 

Alpha Games Spirit Day

.Also known as the first special day of the session. This is the day all new campers get their team colors. This year to kickoff Alpha Games each session we played a game of Camp Foley Quidditch. This was started during the banquet era at Foley, and is an homage to the game made famous by Harry Potter. This is a chaotic game that involves campers playing ultimate frisbee, soccer, capture the flag, and tag all at the same time! The idea is that you never quite know the score or even what your teammates are doing until you catch the snitch. This game was originally invented by Alli Faricy, and had not been seen at camp since the early 2000s.

Founders Day

ITs pretty cool to think that we had the idea of hosting a Founder’s Day at camp in 2014, in order to get campers excited to celebrate 100 years of Foley 10 years later. Now this summer we actually got to celebrate our 100th year Founder’s Day, with many traditions started 10 years prior still present today! We started festivities with a wonderful lunch with foods the campers have come to expect each summer, Swedish meatballs, mozzarella sticks, pretzel bites, mashed potatoes and more. We also had the campers sit by gender, dividing the east and west ends of camp in the dining hall. This was a throwback to the 70s when camp first became co-ed. After Lunch we had our Talent show, which campers have also come to enjoy each summer, and then moved on to new activities specifically created to celebrate 100 years. Campers were all given postcards with different prompts and filled them out to place in the new time capsule. While singing all our traditional Founder’s Day songs like “Oh Clementine” and “Found a Peanut”, campers came up and signed a special guestbook. The book was modelled after the old ledger Father Foley kept of camp registrations. It was the perfect blend of old and new and was always followed by Ice Cream sundaes!

The Bucket List

We had an epic challenge for our campers that lasted the entire session! Each cabin competed against the other in 11 different bucket list items, one for each decade that camp has been in operation. The items were:

20s- 15 minutes of Calisthenics

30s- Military Cabin Inspection

40s- Polar Plunge

50s- Snipe Hunt

60s- Wake up to Bugle calls

70s- Play an Outdoor Education Game

80s- Celebrate your cabin theme

90s- Challenge another cabin to a game

00s- Dining Hall Hangout

10s- Hang out around a Fire Pit

20s- Each camper in cabin complete an Alpha Daily Challenge

It was awesome to see competition flourish between cabins throughout each session, and how the challenges became hilarious cabin traditions. Some cabins ended up doing the polar plunge everyday before breakfast! At the end of each session one cabin who had completed all (or the most) challenges won special throwback certificates that date back to before ribbon awards here at Foley.

 

Thank to all our campers who joined us this summer for Foley’s 100th year. Now just wait and see what 101 will be like!