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Kelsey Snelling: This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.

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Kelsey Snelling: We also mentioned specific weight and weight loss numbers. This

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Kelsey Snelling: language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please take care.

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Archival Tape from The Tyra Banks Show: Mikey agreed to go to Camp Shane, which is a

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Archival Tape from The Tyra Banks Show: weight loss camp for young kids, and Mikey is back.

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Archival Tape from The Tyra Banks Show: Come on out here, Mikey. Okay, because good too. Look

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Archival Tape from The Tyra Banks Show: we gotta pull that shirt back and see that. Tell me,

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Archival Tape from The Tyra Banks Show: look at that. Look at this, guys, look at this.

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Archival Tape from The Tyra Banks Show: This is crazy.

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Kelsey Snelling: If you didn't recognize that voice, you didn't watch enough

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Kelsey Snelling: America's next top model. What you just heard was Tyra

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Kelsey Snelling: Banks on her talk show Smiles and All, celebrating a

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Kelsey Snelling: twelve year old boy for his weight loss while fully

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Kelsey Snelling: patting his now much smaller stomach. In the two thousands,

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Kelsey Snelling: Camp Shane was riding high. It's message that weight loss

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Kelsey Snelling: was the key to health and happiness had made its

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Kelsey Snelling: way to TVs and magazines around the country. Enrollment was

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Kelsey Snelling: at its highest ever, and the media was obsessed with

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Kelsey Snelling: capturing it all.

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Camp Shane media waterfall: Welcome to Camp Shane. Camp Shane, Camp Shane.

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Kelsey Snelling: More than ever, popular culture was buying into the promise of Camp Shane – weight loss at any cost. The messages surrounding young people at the time were clear.  If you lose weight, society will love you more. 

Camp Shane gained new, magical traditions, and more campers than ever before. But it was also the point when the disillusioned counselors who made camp so special started leaving...  and the safe haven Selma built -- even with its flaws -- began slipping away.

This is Camp Shame. I’m your host, Kelsey Snelling. In this episode–Oprah, Tyra, and Dr. Oz join the Camp Shane bandwagon, new leadership elevates camp to unprecedented heights, and Shane becomes a household name in a decade of heinous body shaming.

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Reporter talking to Nicole Richie: Nicole Ritchie, you are a little fuller, a little bit

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Reporter talking to Nicole Richie: more thicker, and how do you feel about the fact

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Reporter talking to Nicole Richie: that maybe the thickness may hinder you from getting certain

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Reporter talking to Nicole Richie: parts and doing certain things.

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Reporter on Jessica Simpson: Jessica Simpson, people can't stop talking about it, saying she

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Reporter on Jessica Simpson: looks back.

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Howard Stern Clip: The way you dress and stuff. I don't think you're

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Howard Stern Clip: aware that you're a heavy set woman. That's what I said.

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Howard Stern Clip: So I was guessing your weight and I was going

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Howard Stern Clip: to say to you to today, can you please get

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Howard Stern Clip: on the scale and then we'll have an over under

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Howard Stern Clip: that's all.

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Kelsey Snelling: If you were a family member survived adolescence in the

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Kelsey Snelling: two thousands, you may be eligible for financial compensation. I

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Kelsey Snelling: remember it well, the era of flip phones, frosted tips,

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Kelsey Snelling: and physics defying low rise genes. It was also an

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Kelsey Snelling: era of rampant anti fat bias and body shaming. Somehow

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Kelsey Snelling: society felt more obsessed than ever with body image.

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Evette Dionne:: It was just popstars being splash on the covers of

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Evette Dionne:: magazines and tabloids, literally chronicling how big their bodies were.

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Evette Dionne:: It was young women being treated as commodities and not

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Evette Dionne:: human beings.

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Kelsey Snelling: That’s Evette Dionne. Evette is a culture journalist and pop culture critic who examines the world through the lenses of race, gender, and size.

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Evette Dionne:: I remember the quest was to be able to wear

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Evette Dionne:: genes that were so low that you couldn't see the underwear,

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Evette Dionne:: but you could see fully the abs of that time.

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Evette Dionne:: I just remember the two thousands being a time where

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Evette Dionne:: young people were encouraged to be hard on themselves and

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Evette Dionne:: hard on each other, and our pop culture reinforcing that,

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Evette Dionne:: our teachings enforcing that, everything that we were consuming enforcing that,

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Evette Dionne:: and really taking us to a place where none of

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Evette Dionne:: us were comfortable in our bodies.

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Kelsey Snelling: As someone who grew up in a bigger body, Yvette

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Kelsey Snelling: is all too familiar with the scrutiny that people face

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Kelsey Snelling: when their bodies don't meet the ideal, which was an

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Kelsey Snelling: impossible feat. In the two thousands, the beauty standards were

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Kelsey Snelling: honestly deranged. We saw it in reality TV makeover shows

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Kelsey Snelling: like The Swan.

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The Swan: Kathy's plan features several procedures starting with her face. She'll have a brow lift, nose job, lip enhancement, fat injected under her eyes cheek fat removal, a chemical peel, photofacial collagen, laser hair removal and LASIK eye surgery. For Kathy's body she'll have breast augmentation with nipple lift and liposuction in six different areas.

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Kelsey Snelling: Then there were shows like The Biggest Loser, which rewarded

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Kelsey Snelling: contestants for losing exorbitant amounts of weight with huge cash prizes.

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Tape from the Biggest Loser: Ten more, ten more, ten more, ten more, ten more

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Tape from the Biggest Loser: ten I don't know if Greg's proud of vomit or not,

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Tape from the Biggest Loser: but I'm proud that I made him vomit. Then that's

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Tape from the Biggest Loser: all that matters.

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Kelsey Snelling: Wait loss programs didn't just exist. They were now televised,

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Kelsey Snelling: and people weren't turned off by it. In fact, they

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Kelsey Snelling: couldn't get enough. And all of this seeped into the

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Kelsey Snelling: minds of young, impressionable Americans.

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MTV True Life: I'd like to look like britney spears. I’d like to have the buns of steel and abs of gold <laughter>, I wanna lose 30 lbs or 35 lbs.

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Kelsey Snelling: No matter where you turned, the media was overtly telling

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Kelsey Snelling: people famous and not that their bodies were wrong and

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Kelsey Snelling: needed to change. With this being the dominant message, a

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Kelsey Snelling: place like Shane was an attractive alternative to being bullied, judged,

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Kelsey Snelling: or ostra sized for your body size and all of

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Kelsey Snelling: the assumptions that came along with it.

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Carl: When you are heavy set, people can think you're dumb, right.

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Kelsey Snelling: That's Carl Evans. He was a sharer in the two thousands.

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Kelsey Snelling: As a black teenage boy, Carl was familiar with prejudice

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Kelsey Snelling: and he understood how the world felt and thought about

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Kelsey Snelling: fat people.

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Carl: But as a kid I sort of had this omnipresent sense of like my competency, um, intellectual competencies attached to it. And I was a kid who ended up in special ed for reasons that me and my parents and I still couldn't figure out

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Kelsey Snelling: What Carl's describing--that fatness, race, and intellect are intertwined--is a well-enduring stereotype.

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Dr. Erlanger: Societies across time and place have always had one type

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Dr. Erlanger: of body or another that they revere and others that

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Dr. Erlanger: you know is less acceptable.

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Kelsey Snelling: Dr. Lisa Erlanger, who you heard from last episode, is a weight-inclusive care doctor. She’s done her fair share of research into what’s contributed to these stereotypes around fatness – and one piece of that is race. 

In episode 2, we covered part of the history that led to fat being demonized. But the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War weren’t the only things to blame for that shift. Well  before those events, white Americans were looking for ways to create space between themselves and the societal connotations associated with enslaved Black people.

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Dr. Erlanger: The obsession with body size and the rise of that can really be traced in the United States to the time of chattel enslavement. And, um, in the United States, that's also when Protestantism characterized the white population and a desire to differentiate the white population from the enslaved population and to justify enslavement. And so enslaved people were also often described as being, you know, not slaves to their white masters, but rather to their sensuality. They couldn't stop eating, they couldn't stop having sex, they couldn't stop sleeping. And that therefore, without white control, they would become fat and lazy and dumb. And this was differentiated, especially from the, um, abstemious white woman who, controlled her sensuality and therefore achieves her moral superiority and thinness.

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Kelsey Snelling: These stereotypes were used to oppress enslaved people and justify

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Kelsey Snelling: the need for control by white masters. But as we

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Kelsey Snelling: all know, there is no link between fatness and intelligence,

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Kelsey Snelling: nor is there a link between race and intelligence. Unfortunately,

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Kelsey Snelling: stereotypes are persistent, and Carl was no stranger to them.

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Kelsey Snelling: Compelled by shame, Carl lied to his friends that he

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Kelsey Snelling: was spending the summer with his uncle. He then flew

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Kelsey Snelling: to New York and boarded a bus bound for Camp Shane.

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Carl: From the bus ride, I had the dumb privilege of being sitting near someone. It was right out of Heavyweights, sitting near a lifer at the camp, who immediately, because there weren't a lot of Black kids at the camp, immediately was like, Hey, you're new. And I'm like, yes. And he's like, where are you from? And I'm like, Chicago. And he is like, oh, great. And he's from like Miami, but there's not a lot of, most of the kids are from the east coast. So I stood out in two ways. He zeroed in on me. And why that's important is 'cause right when I got off the bus, I had my own like, camp lore guide.

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Kelsey Snelling: Having a camp lure guide at Shane was a privilege.

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Kelsey Snelling: Lifers knew stuff. They knew how to smuggle in food,

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Kelsey Snelling: they knew which counselors to go to for what, and

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Kelsey Snelling: they knew the ever so important camp traditions. That first

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Kelsey Snelling: year at Shane was pivotal for Carl.

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Carl: I, um, achieved quite a bit as a first year camper. I set the camp weight loss record that first summer. I did something that I was told was a first and that I won Camper of the Year as a first year camper, and I had begun to have a very professionally close relationship to Dave Ettenberg as a camper. And by the end of that first summer, anything Dave Ettenberg would've asked me to do, I would've done.

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl was completely sold.

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Kelsey Snelling: He loved camp and his parents loved the results even more.

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Kelsey Snelling: That summer, he lost eighty seven pounds.

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Carl: I came back in the fall of 2001 half of who I was and I looked completely different. And my parents just went up and down the family chain, sending pictures and oh my God, and dah dah dah. And this place was amazing.

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Kelsey Snelling: After his time as a camper, Carl became a full

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Kelsey Snelling: time counselor. He was something of a poster child for

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Kelsey Snelling: Camp Shane. After all, what was better for business than

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Kelsey Snelling: weight loss results like Carl's.

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Carl: After my first summers, I was a true convert. I restructured my whole life around a commitment to camp Shane so that any labor opportunities, college opportunities, any opportunity could not interfere with making sure I was back there in the summer. And as a counselor, my mission was to try to give kids the experience that I had that what I felt saved my life. And so those first summers that I was a counselor, I I was like, this is gonna be my life.

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Kelsey Snelling: And it did become his life. Whatever David needed to

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Kelsey Snelling: get or keep campers Carl was on it.

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Carl: As I went on as a counselor, I became a very centralized cheerleader and supporter of the Camp Shane recruitment and promotional strategy.

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl shared tips and tricks on how to retain campers

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Kelsey Snelling: with fellow staff, and he convinced parents to sign their

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Kelsey Snelling: kids up for next summer before the current summer was

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Kelsey Snelling: even over. Because of people like Carl proselytize about camp,

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Kelsey Snelling: the gospel of Shane spread far and wide.

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Carl: Dave would have me, kind of free FreeWheel around the camp and rope parents of target and see if I couldn't softly, passively, actively, close them on, you know, they're offering like half off if you lock in a deposit for next summer 'cause we know a lifer when we see one.

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Kelsey Snelling: Lifers were the kids that came back year after year

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Kelsey Snelling: and for whom Camp Shane was a part of their

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Kelsey Snelling: core identity. Carl was a proud lifer.

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Kelsey Snelling: He saw what he was doing as a mission for

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Kelsey Snelling: other kids to experience what he had.

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Carl: It’s the most truest piece of advertising that's ever existed is that Camp Shane isn't just a place, it's a feeling. That bubble helped me discover my sense of identity and craft and become a human being that I'm proud to be to this day.

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Kelsey Snelling: Being a lifer was a complicated badge of honor because it meant you knew camp’s ins and outs, but it also meant you probably weren’t keeping the weight off. Despite this, Carl was more than happy to support Camp Shane’s mission even in the off-season.

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Carl: In the off season I was doing anything Dave asked too, in terms of recruitment and promotion. We wrote letters and helped support and endorse and make connections to PR people.

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Kelsey Snelling: What Carl was doing could be called grassroots recruitment and a DIY PR campaign. And it worked; Camp Shane started to catch the attention of major media outlets and its visibility skyrocketed in the early 2000s. 

MTV True Life had a whole episode following campers at Shane.

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MTV True Life: That helps knowing that I’m not gonna be judged because of the fact I’m massive. It’s easy to meet the opposite sex here, it's not difficult. Like you could approach a girl with confidence. This is a meat market I guess.

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Kelsey Snelling: Merryl Winter, a staff member at Camp Shane from two

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Kelsey Snelling: thousand three until twenty fourteen, remembers a few others.

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Merryl Winter: And then we had TLC come and do a series

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Merryl Winter: where they followed kids around and track their progress throughout

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Merryl Winter: the summer,

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TLC: I’m Lindsey, I’m 17 years old and I’m from Seminole, Florida. I feel like Camp Shane’ll be the starting point. Just the push I need to get me started on the weight loss track.

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Merryl Winter: MTV came,

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MTV Made: they did made Meet Danielle. She's always been known as

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MTV Made: the fat girl. She's so much, but now she's tired

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MTV Made: of what she sees. I'm going to try to lose

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MTV Made: sixty pounds.

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Merryl Winter: Twenty twenty came. There was always some media coverage going on.

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Kelsey Snelling: Popular talk show hosts like Dr. Oz, Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters also praised the transformative power of Camp Shane. 
	
This was exactly what David needed. He was constantly on calls trying to secure media coverage. The attention did wonders for business, but it was spreading a harmful message; the message that if you’re fat, it’s a personal failure and only you are responsible for your excess weight. Places like fat camps profit tremendously off of this dominant belief. This is all so deeply baked into our culture that even the medical establishment seems incapable of recognizing how entrenched fatphobia is in our world. Camp Shane always benefited from this, but with the intensification of the quote "obesity epidemic” in the 2000s, many children were sent to fat camps at the recommendation of their doctors despite their actual health.

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Dr. Erlanger: Healthcare is almost symbolized by the ritual of stepping on

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Dr. Erlanger: a scale as the first thing we do

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Kelsey Snelling: Dr. Lisa Erlanger, again.

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Dr. Erlanger: So much so that a scale, that tall scale that we see in the doctor's office is even like emblematic of medical care itself. the visit then becomes a response to that number on the scale.

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Kelsey Snelling: The weight centric approach means providers can overlook other important

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Kelsey Snelling: health factors, leading to larger bodied patients getting misdiagnosed and

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Kelsey Snelling: potentially worsening their conditions.

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Dr. Erlanger: There are many, many more providers who see weight as

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Dr. Erlanger: an appropriate measure of health, an appropriate target for intervention,

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Dr. Erlanger: and an appropriate outcome measure for health interventions.

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Kelsey Snelling: The truly obnoxious part of all of this forced weighing is that weight does a pretty crap job at predicting health–we learned about this in episode 3 when we dove into BMI. We all know fat people who are healthy: think about all of the body diversity we see in top-performing athletes, like Olympians. And we all know thin people who are not. This is why it's so important that healthcare providers listen and believe fat people when they come in with issues not related to their weight. 

Back in the 2000s, the CDC reported that there was a 45% increase in childhood obesity between 1994 and 2002. Media coverage and public health campaigns exacerbated the issue. The number of children classified as overweight was rapidly climbing–might I add: in spite of decades of dieting.

Camp Shane was more en vogue than ever. And after the MTV True Life episode, there was a huge spike in enrollment. 

Since David was so busy with the business he needed someone on the ground, not afraid to get their hands dirty. Someone completely entrenched in the Camp Shane way of life. Someone who could hold it all together while keeping camp an engaging place for high-paying Shaners. Perhaps a charming and enthusiastic British former racecar driver? That would be Simon Greenwood. You remember Simon, the all-star Camp America counselor. Well in 2003, David promoted Simon to camp director. And people LOVED Simon.

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Carl: Simon was the glue of the camp. The campers understood Dave as the owner of the camp. But everyone from counselor to camper understood that Simon was the boss. Simon is always seen as the good guy. he knew what to do and he ordered everyone else to do it, and you did it and you didn't fuck around or goof off when Simon was around. You know what I mean? Simon had a mystique to him because Simon also assembled things like for the big games and the big events. You always saw Simon leading the charge on building this thing or that thing.

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon was especially influential for Carl. After Carl's first summers

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Kelsey Snelling: as a counselor, he said.

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Carl: I'm going to be doing what Simon Greenwood does one day,

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Carl: like five ten years from now, I'm going to be

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Carl: assistant director or director of this camp.

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Kelsey Snelling: There was a shift under Simon's leadership because, unlike David,

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon had his hand in everything.

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Carl: Every facet of the camp, he would be responsible from the kitchen staff to the laundry team to housekeeping, to maintenance, keeping an eye on making sure counselors were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be. And he was a very respectful but good solid leader about that stuff and enforcing the parameters.

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Kelsey Snelling: Camp had the potential to be so much better than

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Kelsey Snelling: what it was offering. If anyone could help turn things around,

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Kelsey Snelling: it was Simon. He started with the kitchen. As you

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Kelsey Snelling: know by now, the food at Camp was a disappointment

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Kelsey Snelling: at best.

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Carl: Food ordering was, uh, substandard quality basic. not that they promoted that they were giving Michelin star menus, but the food was always the bare, the bare basic.

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon made things better than they were. Even if he

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Kelsey Snelling: couldn't always get the money to support his ideas, he

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Kelsey Snelling: made it happen. He managed to do a lot with

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Kelsey Snelling: the little he was given. Meryl, who started working with

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon in two thousand and three, had the impression that

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Kelsey Snelling: he was really unhappy with the food quality at camp,

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Kelsey Snelling: but he wasn't working with a big budget.

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Merryl Winter: So he figured out a way to spend the same amount of money yet make the quality better. he went in and he found if he got the spinach salad and put the cranberries in it and whatever, and then he would sit and make all of us have taste tests to see if it, the quality was better if the kids would like it. And then he would have the kids rate, um, the food choices to see what they liked the most so he could add it on the menu. So he basically revamped the kitchen.

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Kelsey Snelling: Not gonna lie, I still dream of that spanich salad.

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon seemed to remember that summer camp, fat camp or

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Kelsey Snelling: not was all about fun and unforgettable memories. He went

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Kelsey Snelling: above and beyond to achieve this, even though he didn't

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Kelsey Snelling: have much to work with. Here's Carl again.

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Carl: I don't know the exact origin stories, but somehow he

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Carl: got a bug up his butt to build a water slide.

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon made something out of nothing by taking a bunch

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Kelsey Snelling: of drainage tubing, running it down a hill, and using

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Kelsey Snelling: water from the nearby water fountain for lubrication. But before

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Kelsey Snelling: he could send campers down, he needed a test dummy.

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Kelsey Snelling: In this instance, the best he could come up with

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Kelsey Snelling: was a counselor.

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Carl: They sent a counselor down. The counselor came down and was like, oh my, like, this was like a ribbed tubing. Okay. And it hurt. Like, he's like, this hurts a lot. But, but the water part did work. It was lubricated enough water to go down, but the ribbing just created a friction.

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Kelsey Snelling: After much trial and error, Simon and his crew put

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Kelsey Snelling: layers of plastic down to reduce the friction and give

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Kelsey Snelling: more padding, and voila. He had created a ten to

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Kelsey Snelling: fifteen yard water slide that became a camp staple.

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Carl: A delightful experience the kids got, because, you know, that's the best parts of Camp Shane were oftentimes these ad hoc things.

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Kelsey Snelling: Simon also used his craftiness to take one of Camp's

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Kelsey Snelling: most beloved traditions to new heights. Many summer camps are

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Kelsey Snelling: familiar with the tradition of color War. It happens the

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Kelsey Snelling: final week of the summer. The camp is divided into

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Kelsey Snelling: two teams, each represented by a color. In the case

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Kelsey Snelling: of Camp Shane, there was the Orange team and the

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Kelsey Snelling: Black team. Colour war had always been a big event

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Kelsey Snelling: at Shane, but Simon and his team brought it to

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Kelsey Snelling: the next level by adding an elaborate opening ceremony. The

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Kelsey Snelling: ceremony was always after dark. The entire camp would be

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Kelsey Snelling: sent to the soccer field and would sit with baited

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Kelsey Snelling: breath beneath the starry catskillskies. The only light came from

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Kelsey Snelling: tiki torches which surrounded the field and flickered in a magical,

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Kelsey Snelling: witchy sort of way. Then drums.

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Carl: You would have this thing where people dressed up in

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Carl: indigenous native garb would appear out of the forces like entities,

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Carl: and they'd be torch carrying. Building up this procession of

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Carl: the arrival of two competing tribes that were indigenous to

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Carl: the lands long ago. For the PC side, a gross

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Carl: appropriation of Native American, Polynesian and a few other indigenous

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Carl: tribal esthetics and ceremonial themes.

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Kelsey Snelling: Now, the two thousands weren't known for being politically correct,

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Kelsey Snelling: but I can't deny when I participated in my own

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Kelsey Snelling: Color War a few years later, the spectacle of it

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Kelsey Snelling: all was astounding.

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Carl: You see the fires pop up in the tree lines, these pitch black tree lines. And these people who were, once your counselors are dressed in these wild war paints and wearing the most minimal, minimal loin cloths and outfits And when they come out, they are game faced and they're intense. And you as a camper watch these people who are, once your counselors come out affecting these indigenous warriors carrying princesses and chieftains and, and they do these dances with fire, these fire dances and these beautifully choreographed uh, things to Enya soundtracks. And it's, it's bombastic and it's absurd. But man,, it's all practical effects, and it is magic. Me as a camper. I was like, this is the coolest thing. And regardless of what happens afterwards, the opening ceremony when done right, it was just a real piece of magic.

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Kelsey Snelling: This is what Simon did.

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Kelsey Snelling: He took the old standard camp traditions and transformed them

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Kelsey Snelling: into magical experiences. He really amped up the next part

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Kelsey Snelling: of Color War too.

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Carl: Simon would just come up with these ways of like reappropriating space, the creative things he would do during color wars where we're constructing things in the stadium for part of entertainment and showcasing some sort of narrative to that would be interactive for the campers. You think of a gym stadium, cut the gym stadium in half, and you have two teams of counselors who build some sort of theme with their half of the gym. And when I say build, I mean build. I mean you get to use real lumber, you can run electrical lines.

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Kelsey Snelling: Counselors would build entire worlds movie sets minus the movie,

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Kelsey Snelling: to perform skits and dances for their color War teams

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Kelsey Snelling: throughout the week. The theme might be Outer Space, under

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Kelsey Snelling: the Sea, or King Kong. They'd craft buildings, fountains, and murals.

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Kelsey Snelling: One year they even brought in live animals as part

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Kelsey Snelling: of their set. It was like a mini Disney World

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Kelsey Snelling: just for Shane.

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Carl: He could help facilitate sheer magic into being, he actively engaged in the creative side and, and programming side that helped counselors create experiences that would be life, you know, lifetime memories for campers.

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Speaker 3: Camp was making good on the promise of a magical summer but behind the scenes it was a nightmare for David Ettenberg. 


Meanwhile at Camp Shane, David still had his hands full with his mother. Yeah, that was still going on. To be clear: Selma hadn’t owned Shane for more than a decade at this point. But her pettiness was unmatched. From her house across the street, she would call the cops if staff used the PA system after 9pm. On family visiting day, if parents parked in the street illegally, she would have their cars towed. 

It was impossible for counselors to ignore the tension. Their family squabbles were on full display, but there were even bigger issues percolating to the surface: By 2004, enrollment had grown to its highest ever, and it put a serious strain on the staff and the infrastructure. Here’s Merryl again.

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Merryl Winter: We were busting at the seams. At that point. It

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Merryl Winter: was like five hundred and seventy five kids. We had

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Merryl Winter: over three hundred staff. It was a lot.

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Kelsey Snelling: It wasn't just the campers that felt these growing pains.

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Merryl Winter: Simon and his wife lived in like an apartment on

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Merryl Winter: the side of a building. He had to move out

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Merryl Winter: of those and those had to become bunks. We added

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Merryl Winter: bunk bed into places where they could fit one more.

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Merryl Winter: I think we had to bring in trailers to make bunks,

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Merryl Winter: and we couldn't even fit into the cafeteria. The whole

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Merryl Winter: camp was too big.

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Kelsey Snelling: But there was still an influx of cash and that was a good thing for David’s business. To be fair, he wasn’t the only one in the weight loss business making millions.

Here’s culture journalist Evette Dionne again.

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Evette Dionne:: In the society that we live in, diet culture is connected inherently to companies that profit from telling us that things are wrong with our bodies. And so the dieting industry is a billion dollar industry, meaning that these corporations earn billions of dollars telling us that our bodies are not good enough as they are. And so if you go to this class, or if you take this pill, or if you wear this waist trainer, you get to have this “ideal”, and I put that in quotation marks, body type. And we become ensnared in the system that's selling us our insecurities and then telling us they have the solution to fix the insecurity that they're telling us that we have.

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Kelsey Snelling: David was certainly making money by targeting children’s insecurities, but he was not always forthcoming about that money. And that got him into trouble.  

One day in the summer of 2000 two men in suits arrived at Camp Shane. They stood out among the basketball shorts and baggy teeshirts that were ubiquitous at camp. At first, David didn’t think much of it – occasionally, lawyers or case workers would show up to handle support issues with specific campers. Turns out, this time, they wanted to speak with David. They were representatives from the IRS, and it wasn’t good.

Remember, this was the most popular Shane had ever been. And a nine-week session cost a whopping $6,400. David was easily raking in $2 million a summer. 

That's a lot of money to be pulling in when the feds are watching you. And you best believe they were watching. In fact, the IRS had an investigation underway. They had reason to believe David wasn’t reporting all of his taxable income.

Still dealing with the constant feuding with his mother, David was convinced Selma had tipped them off. This wouldn’t have been the first time Selma tried to sabotage her son. As the former owner, Selma had more than enough inside knowledge to sell David out.

In September 2004, the IRS finished their investigation. They’d uncovered that David had been renting out the campgrounds to a church group and a school group in the off-season, and he had failed to report more than $100,000 in income. Soon after, he pled guilty to tax evasion and faced up to 14 months in prison. 

That left everybody at Shane with questions. With David gone, who would oversee camp? Who would manage the business? More importantly, would camp be shut down? 

Of course, David didn’t end up in prison. Not with our justice system. The judge who took his case believed Camp Shane to be a noble project. In his ruling, he said “Though there is no question that the offense is a serious one, given what I have come to learn about Mr. Ettenberg’s circumstances and his life of work, it would be a grave injustice and a shame if anything were done that would have a serious detrimental impact on Camp Shane.”

The judge gave David four years of probation and 400 hours of community service. He also made David pay nearly $60,000 in restitution and fees and ordered him to give 50 scholarships to underprivileged kids over the next four years.

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Kelsey Snelling: As a result of the conviction, the American Camp Association, or ACA, removed Camp Shane’s accreditation. This meant it no longer met the ACA’s guidelines for safety, health, program quality, and management practices. Shane could still operate, sure, but without that gold star, Camp Shane could lose the confidence of customers and the media that trusted the camp to uphold certain standards of care and safety. 

(Sidenote, this wasn’t the first time Shane had lost ACA accreditation. In 2001, it was temporarily revoked for “poor reviews and inspection results.” Yikes.)

Throughout the investigation, David basically had free legal counsel. His wife, Ziporah, a New York Bar-approved attorney, represented him. When the end of David’s probation was coming up, Ziporah wrote a letter requesting that David be released from probation early. They wanted their ACA accreditation back for the upcoming summer. As the camp owner, David needed to be off probation so that the ACA could come to do an inspection. According to Ziporah’s letter, which was written to the judge, the ACA withdrawal had far-reaching consequences, one being that quote, “Media that have been interested in doing programs and stories on the Camp have backed away. 

The letter worked. By now it was the mid-2000s. David was off the hook and went straight back to business.

Camp Shane began expanding beyond Ferndale, NY: In 2007, they started opening satellite camps. Small, resort-style versions of Camp Shane started popping up across the country – California, Georgia, and Wisconsin were just a few. These camps were very different from Ferndale. Instead of being in cabins surrounded by lush green woods, campers were usually on college campuses in dorms that were rented for the summer by Shane. This was one way for David to grow his empire without taking on too many extra costs.

Back at the main camp in Ferndale, though, the money wasn’t exactly trickling down. Some new cabins were built, but equipment was breaking down.

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Carl: Things would not be repaired for a very very long time,

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Carl: and not because Simon wasn't capable or didn't have it

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Carl: on his docket to do it. Was the stringency of

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Carl: the way the budget would be. Day would just stretch it.

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Carl: He would do without, so there were any number of

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Carl: places instruments on camp that sometimes when they broke, they

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Carl: were done. Go carts and Doom Buggi's is the most notorious,

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Carl: where they'd be running in fully operational at the start

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Carl: of the summer. A man, you get to anything that

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Carl: costs more than like twenty five bucks to fix or

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Carl: replace and Simon totally bagshu, but it's not getting replaced.

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Kelsey Snelling: These refusals to make seemingly small fixes were frustrating for

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl and other counselors, and they were starting to create

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Kelsey Snelling: tension between the staff and David.

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Carl: All these things that are happening that the answers are, we need more investment in the camp. You know what I mean, we could win this. Like we can get Dave to convert and open up the pocketbook he's being stubborn and whatever because it's his job to be conservative on the money and blah, blah, blah, blah.

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Kelsey Snelling: By 2007, there was what Carl described as a “war behind the scenes” between David and the staff. He said that David didn’t want to spend money, while the counselors advocated for some reinvestment in the camp.

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Carl: A complete and critical breakdown in, in the core cultural factors of the camp. You always had this core returning staff. What started to happen in the nineties and then fully exploded in my time was you also had the camper-counselor phenomenon where you,could have started as a lifer, as a camper and then became a counselor. So like by the late nineties and into the early two thousands, you saw people who had already put in six years as a camper became a counselor. And what that did is it it reinforced what was already a fraternal sororial sort of sense of the camp. You took ownership of the traditions, you really believed in them. So as staff investment cheaped out and you started to lose that.

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Kelsey Snelling: That, the passion that kept those lifers coming back year

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Kelsey Snelling: after year started waning. As their pay didn't reflect the time,

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Kelsey Snelling: sweat and energy they'd put into Shane, especially for as

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Kelsey Snelling: long as many of them had been there.

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Carl: Some counselors who were multiple year counselors were given the same static pay. Well, that's bullshit. And people are gonna gonna go somewhere, you know.

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Kelsey Snelling: Longtime staff stopped returning in bigger numbers and the new staff.

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Carl: Well, they were barely there for the campers, and they're

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Carl: more interested in hitting the bar.

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Kelsey Snelling: And the counselors who were sticking around and trying to be there for the kids found themselves taking on more and more specialized and haphazard responsibilities. Merryl Winter —who was still working as a group leader in 2008 —remembers once when the nurse took a day off. The sub never showed up so it was somehow Merryl’s job to fill in.

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Merryl Winter: I remember we were giving out the meds and they

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Merryl Winter: were some heavy duty meds. All the kids, thank god,

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Merryl Winter: got the right meds and everything was great, But it

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Merryl Winter: shouldn't have been me that was giving them out. That

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Merryl Winter: was a scary one.

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Kelsey Snelling: Counselors were also now working with a new demographic of camper who needed even more medical attention. To Merryl, it seemed like David was willing to let anyone in, just to make a few more dollars. Even if they were kids who Camp Shane couldn’t properly and responsibly take on.

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Merryl Winter: Kids would come straight from like rehab facilities. Not a lot, but it happened. Um, kids would be mentally unstable. They would come on meds that we couldn't get because they were from another country. Just certain things like that where, you know, he wouldn't have to deal with it, we would have to deal with it. And we would have to find a way to make life nice and safe.

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Kelsey Snelling: But making sure the counselors felt equipped to handle the

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Kelsey Snelling: needs of their campers wasn't David's concern.

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Merryl Winter: He was happy with bodies in camp, whether they'd be

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Merryl Winter: kids or counselors. You know, as long as the counselors

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Merryl Winter: were a body that was there and he met the

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Merryl Winter: ratio of how many staff to kids, he was happy.

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Merryl Winter: Didn't matter if they were doing things that were unethical

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Merryl Winter: or dangerous. And I don't mean he meant to put

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Merryl Winter: the kids at harm. He was just, you know, if

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Merryl Winter: it's let me just slide by the summer and we

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Merryl Winter: could start fresh next summer, you know.

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Kelsey Snelling: In two thousand and eight, Carl didn't feel that Camp

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Kelsey Snelling: Shane was equipped to care for campers with specialized medical needs.

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Kelsey Snelling: Although they advertised having psychology professionals, the people hired didn't

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Kelsey Snelling: always meet the required qualifications. They were often in training

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Kelsey Snelling: or in the process of getting their degrees.

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Carl: So there were kids who were living with mental health challenges and were on the spectrum, who should not come to a place that doesn't have the medical and clinical training to monitor them for 24 hours or 12 hours at a time. Kids who could not necessarily be legitimately autonomously living individuals. And that's what that was like, the final pressure breaker on Camp Shane.

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Kelsey Snelling: Maybe if camp had the qualified medical professionals that it

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Kelsey Snelling: claimed to have, it's possible they could have properly cared

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Kelsey Snelling: for these kids, but that wasn't the case.

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Carl: 2008 was the place where, like, we were still trying to run it as the feelgood happy time, but there were so many kids who had behavioral disorders, counselors didn't give a shit, campers who were super toxic that you were putting out fires every single day as opposed to putting joy into people's hearts. And so that was the real sort of like degrading of everything.

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl started to realize that Selma's safe haven, the one

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Kelsey Snelling: for kids growing up in an anti fat society, was

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Kelsey Snelling: beginning to slip away in.

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Carl: In the least amount of words possible, you had skinny kids coming who shouldn't be there, who you're probably generating you know, disordered thinking and unhealthy relationships to food by sending them to a fat camp. And they're just the kid with with the biggest waist size in their social group at home.it putrified the social environment because now you had skinny kids back in fields with obese kids and heavyweight kids.

it's high school, right? So the skinnier girls got all the attention it threw everything off.

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Kelsey Snelling: For someone who'd poured his heart and soul into camp,

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Kelsey Snelling: this breakdown really affected Carl.

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Carl: I had a really sad moment happened where I kind

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Carl: of knew it wasn't going to come back at the

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Carl: closing night of that summer where I was listening to

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Carl: a counselor, a first year counselor excitedly talk about man

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Carl: next year, and I realized, like, I have no excitement

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Carl: for next year. And that was the first time I

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Carl: never had ever felt that, And it was like feeling

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Carl: a trapdoor open in the bottom of your soul, like

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Carl: you know the way everyone felt when bingbong, like faded

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Carl: away in the middle of Inside Out.

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Bing Bong Inside Out Clip: Bing Bong, you made it. Go, go save Riley. Take her to the moon for me, okay?

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl returned one last time but it was more out

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Kelsey Snelling: of obligation than excitement, and he certainly didn't restructure his

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Kelsey Snelling: whole summer around camp like he used to. Here's how

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl remembers that final summer.

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Carl: In 2009. I came to help the camp halfway through the summer I could only do half a summer. And I came as maintenance and punched in, But I also did a huge amount of work as a counselor, basically as like a defacto like assistant head counselor. Well, at the end of the summer,I was waiting for my punch in pay when I clocked in and clocked out every day in the hour. And Dave was like, well, I thought you did this for free.

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Kelsey Snelling: Classic.

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Carl: I had watched and tried to advocate for counselors who felt they were underpaid. Okay. You know, like, Hey Dave, come on, let's talk about this. And he'd be, and we get heated privately, right? Well now I'm in, I had this conversation with Dave about justifying somebody's pay and he's looking at me despite an email thread that we had, me and Simon had, about discussing the rate, my hourly rate and what I’d be coming in at. And Dave just straight up said, well, um, I guess it's a misunderstanding.

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Kelsey Snelling: Surely Simon – who always had his staff’s back, who was rumored to “bleed” orange, and whom Carl idolized – would step in and save the day.

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Carl: and I'm having this argument with him. Well, Simon's sitting right next to him. So I looked at Simon, I said, bro, like you have the emails right there on your computer. And then Simon stops, looks at Dave, then looks back at me, you know, and makes me, you know, I'm trying not to cry. Like, and he's like, I think we've had a mistake. And Simon fricking sent me up the river too. Like he didn't, if Simon had put his foot down, I should have gotten the full pay. But he just like, oh, I guess it was a misunderstanding.

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Kelsey Snelling: Carl was on his own.

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Carl: So then Dave gets to look at me and be like, oh, well that's not my fault because whatever you and Simon talked about. I think the pay I would've been owed was something above 1100 bucks. I walked into that room feeling like a prostitute. 'cause he gave me like 300 bucks cash from like a petty, petty envelope, I gotta tell you, I never saw that coming. So that was, that was brutal.

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Kelsey Snelling: Here was Carl, former star camper and near celebrity counselor

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Kelsey Snelling: who recruited, marketed, and wholeheartedly believed in the Camp Shane mission,

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Kelsey Snelling: on the receiving end of David's penny pinching tendencies. Camp

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Kelsey Snelling: had turned into something he no longer recognized.

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Carl: The politics, all the bullshit, the that we had, some of us had thought it was fiscal conservancy. It came out as,these are dishonorable decisions, not miserly decisions, but dishonorable ones. And the curtain was down now. The bad things that were happening weren't happening because of like the innocence of tough financial decisions. Bad things were happening because Dave, a lot of us finally were realizing like, this is ethically not a good person.

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Kelsey Snelling: Next time on Camp Shame...

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Cole: We just were like, what do we do? it is our job to promote a camp now that is essentially condoning behavior that we don't agree with that is actually really fucked up behavior. Like, I just, I can't be here anymore. I have to go.

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Kelsey Snelling: We reached out to Simon Greenwood, David Ettenberg and his wife Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording, we have not received a reply.

Camp Shame is a production of iHeartPodcasts. I’m your host, Kelsey Snelling.
Camp Shame is produced by Brittany Martinez, – Taylor Williamson–, Sara Schleede, Luci Jones and Alyia Yates Grau. Our Editor is Courtenay Hameister. with additional Editorial support from Lindsey Kratochwill and Grace Lynch.
Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rudder and me, Kelsey Snelling. For iHeartMedia, our executive producer is Cristina Everett.
Fact checking done by Madeline Goore, Luci Jones, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Lauren Williams and Fiona Pestana.

Our theme music is produced by Sean Petell.

Special thanks to Loren Moffett, Naomi Harvey, Jenell Manzi, Ben Wong, Travis Prow, and Stephanie Malson.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram @CampShame – that's with an M!-- If you or anyone you know went to Camp Shane reach out with your camp stories