01/17/2022
It is a sad, sad day for me. I have to tell everyone that OPsac is no more. We will no longer share our summer adventures with some of the greatest kids in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
21 years ago, we decided that our communities deserved the best programs for our kids. We began with our adventure camp sharing adventures that no other camp would even think about. We went paintballing, river rafting, to major amusement parks, to the zoo, the aquarium, Port Discovery and more. Each day was a new adventure.
Camp grew from 36 kids the first year, to more than a hundred campers a day, and continued that way until the recession of 2007, when our daily count of kids dropped to about 50. But the next summer, we began to see growth. We bought new buses, planned more trips, and had more fun.
Then came the dreaded virus, Covid 19, and our lives were changed forever. We continued camp for the summer of 2020. We all wore masks, we sanitized the buses daily, we had everyone use hand sanitizer every time they got on the bus. And we were blessed with no covid related issues for the kids or our staff.
By January of 2021, I became much more concerned about the health and wellbeing of our campers and staff. I spoke with several doctors and their advice was to not have camp. At that point, vaccines were not available for kids. The number if infections was growing daily. I was not comfortable with the problems we could face, because with more people suffering illness and the absolute impossibility of keeping kids socially distanced, (try that in a pool or playing soccer), I was afraid of spreading the virus from the kids to parents and grand parents not to mention staff. So, we decided to take a year off.
In the fall of 2021, my wife and I talked about camp and the toll it had taken on me physically (I’m not a youngster anymore). Because the buses sat for a year, they needed major work. Most of the places we wanted to go were still closed or running with limited programs. Even our favorite swimming pools were limiting entry. I prayed long and hard. I did not want to disappoint the kids. They deserve a summer camp program that exceeded everyone’s expectations.
By early December 2021, it became very obvious that the of work we would have to do, and the time it would take was next to impossible to accomplish.
So, by Christmas, we made the hard decision to end our program. Honestly, that decision hurt.
I want to express my thanks to the more than 4,000 unique kids we had in camp, more than 2000 families, and the more than 200 people that made up our staff. It was an honor and privilege to share years with you, and I can only hope and pray that we had a positive influence on all of you. We accomplished our goals of providing an adventure camp to challenge the kids to do things they had never done, to go places they had never been, and to learn to care about the other kids in camp.
At 75 years old, it is time to step back and enjoy my days as a grandfather.
Thank you for the privilege and opportunity to share your lives and I hope that we all learned to care about one another.
