Old School or Man for All Seasons?
Roy Cammer milks Catskills farm life coming and going
By Trish Adams
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| THE LONG WAY HOME - Roy's perspective on farming is somehow neither jaded nor romanticized. His wry and irreverent wit also comes with something deeper: "Christmas morning is my favorite moment on a farm. The kids are in the house sleeping or playing, and just to be in the barn, with the animals and the quiet, that's my favorite time." |
“Get a move on, Grandma!” is a phrase you’ll often hear at Manhattan Country School Farm in Roxbury, but rest assured, it’s not elder abuse. It’s just Farmwork teacher Roy Cammer, affectionately prodding some 10-year-old to muck out a stall with a little more enthusiasm than a glacier.
Roy’s been teaching lessons in hard work at this progressive education campus for 13 years. But in some ways, he’s been on this farm all his life. As he steps down this month to let daughter Cathy take the teaching by the horns, his path and his personality both present a rich compost of Catskills contradictions.
The Manhattan Country School (MCS) in New York City and its idyllic farm campus in Meeker Hollow are about as cutting-edge as modern education can get: founded during the righteous days of the Civil Rights movement, the school has no ethnic majority among its kindergarten to eighth-grade classes. Children make regular trips here from the city to experience sustainable farming and domestic self sufficiency right alongside their arithmetic and global studies.
That may sound like an uncomfortable fit for Roy, whose lineage here is many generations deep and who has lived his life as many do here, as a builder and man of many trades. But the MCS Farm is also his childhood: his grandparents Orley and Efie Slauson and his uncles owned this dairy farm for decades. Roy visited here often as a little boy. His mother Bertha moved to this spot 80 years ago, and one of Roy’s older sisters was born upstairs where students from the city now bunk down — in bunks that Roy built for them.
Roy never romanticizes the hard work of farm life or animal care. He was raised on a dairy farm on the old Gould homestead and his father’s early death when Roy was just 11 left him and his siblings with a heavy load. Roy didn’t want to pursue the rigors of farming life and neither did his brothers, and the family moved into the village when Roy was 15. Back then, he remembers “Everyone had dairy farms and so not many of us kids wanted to do it.” He wasn’t drawn to city life either, taking (and leaving) his first glimpse of Manhattan from a cauliflower truck at 19. No, Roy the RCS varsity basketball player, was content to settle down with Debbie Decker, the cheerleader from Grand Gorge, and raise a family.
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| RCS Varsity Basketball, 1962-63 -- Roy is in the lower left corner. |
One wonders how in 1993, in his late 40s, Roy managed the transition from that time — when children did as they were told, no questions asked, and boys and girls were dismissed from their classrooms separately — to this new world, where fresh, independent-minded kids from every cultural background were learning from the most progressive textbook imaginable. Maybe, you start to think, there’s more to Roy than the comically (and deliberately) mispronounced names, the gruff two-word sentences and folksy, rakish charm.
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| SETTING HENS - Just when you think you have Roy's number,
he throws you for a loop. "Yank my thumb!" is not his version
of the "Pull my finger" joke, it's Roy's
way of starting your first lesson in milking. Students are in awe of
how hard he works (he started at seven years old with the chore of stoking
the wood stove each morning) but he's always the one who starts
the snowball fights. - Photos by Trish Adams |
On the farm, young students quickly discover Roy’s dichotomies for themselves, as soon as they get over being a little scared of him. “Roy has a commanding presence,” explains one eighth-grader, but quickly qualifies it, “He’s also freaky and funny.” Will (aka “Wilbur”) will sit you down to wax eloquent about Roy: “He’s not like your usual teacher, he has a way of making everyone like him. There’s a fun side to him and a ‘bad’ side to him. He has a way of playing his ‘mean self,’ but he’s really a lovable guy.” Other students confirm that Roy is “not an ordinary teacher. He is a character.” They intuit that he often mispronounces their names so they’ll get over themselves. “He accepts all different sorts of people,” says Liam. “He gets to know them in different ways.”
And don’t let his folksiness fool you, not many Catskill natives could have had the flexibility to manage this journey. Roy can tell you which kid has ADD and students admit he knows more about their classmates than they’ve gleaned from years of daily intimacy. “He knows stuff about us we didn’t even know,” one student puts it.
Ironically, one reason Roy didn’t like the idea of farming was all the regulations that came along when he was a young adult. Now, he’s become a popular, if unorthodox teacher in a profession that has more regulations than you can shake a stick at. And he hasn’t needed any degrees to do it. “You don’t need a B.A. to teach manure shoveling,” he maintains, and even though he knows all the fancy diagnostic acronyms, he also believes that “kids are always the same, no matter where they come from.”
“You’ve got to love the kids and the animals, otherwise, there’s no point,” Roy notes, ready to admit that he, like any teacher, has his favorites. Pigs rate high on his list for their intelligence and their clean, orderly living habits. “Taking responsibility for caring for the animals,” is for Roy, the most important lesson children learn from the farm, but from him they also learn not to take themselves too seriously. Once Katie, Darcy and Gwendolyn are christened Stubby, Mugwamp and Tinkerbell (a name often reserved for the tallest kid), they truly ingest the philosophy of MCS Farm and that of family farming as well: we’re all in this together and it isn’t all about you — and that just when the work has become a real drag, that’s the perfect time to go take a jump in the hay loft.
It’s that ethos than Roy refers to when he says that the communal MCS farm experience “is about as close as you can get these days to a family farm” — perhaps in large part because Roy has helped to make it so.
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