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Our game went awry with the FBI
By Edward Ordman MARCH 24, 2003
To the best of my knowledge, my family has only once
been officially suspected of conspiring against the president of
the United States. And since I was only 9 at the time and did not
know what was going on, I found it rather pleasant, even if it did
bring out both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Marines
- and terrify my parents for a couple of hours.
It was the fall of 1953. My parents belonged to a
group of perhaps two or three dozen young families in Washington,
D.C., called National Campers. They organized weekend camping
trips to the cabin campsites in nearby state parks in Virginia and
Maryland.
One sunny Saturday afternoon at Catoctin Mountain
Park, in Thurmont, Md., someone organized a scavenger hunt. You
probably know the game - whichever team is first to locate five
different wildflowers, a 1950 nickel, and so on, wins.
The list of things to collect was made by throwing a
lot of suggestions into a hat and drawing out several. One of the
young fathers present happened to be George Marder, then a
reporter and radio commentator for United Press. We guessed later
that he was probably the one who contributed the following odd
item to the list of things we needed in order to win: "The next
camp down the road has recently been remodeled. There is a new
sign at the entrance, a gallows type sign, vertical post with a
horizontal post, a few links of chain holding a board with the new
name of the camp. How many links are in the chain?"
So while we kids went out searching for the five
different wildflowers, and our mothers searched their handbags for
1950 nickels, my father and his friends piled into two cars to go
investigate the new sign.
They drove out of the camp driveway and down the
mountain road, then into the driveway to the next camp and up to
the front gate. They all piled out, through all eight doors of the
two cars at once, to look at the newly installed sign. It said:
"Camp David." And they were immediately surrounded by US Marines,
well-armed.
President Eisenhower had taken over what had been
Roosevelt's secret "Camp Shangri-la." He had renamed it after his
grandson David. And the president was, as it happened, there that
weekend.
The group of eight or 10 rather unkempt young men
tried to explain to the Marines why they had just rushed the gate
of Camp David. You can picture how well their explanation must
have satisfied the guards on duty.
Let's fast forward a few hours. Back at our
campsite, every team had located five wildflowers and a 1950
nickel, and we kids were aware that our mothers were getting
worried. Had the men gone too fast around that curve at the top of
the steep hill? Did they take the wrong turn at the fork and wind
up in a sporting-goods store in the next town? They weren't people
who usually did that sort of thing. But then a car we didn't
recognize came up the road into camp.
It was a whole carload of men in business suits, and
our mothers were now in absolute terror. The men came out of the
car and displayed credentials. They were FBI agents, who had
driven all the way up from Washington. They asked questions
instead of answering them:
Were we really having a scavenger hunt?
Who was in charge?
Were the rules written down? They asked to see the
lists of what we had to collect.
Who had composed the lists?
They carefully examined each team's collections of
1950 nickels and asked to see our five wildflowers.
I don't think they were very happy about being
called out on a weekend. It was rather hot and those business
suits really weren't the right outfit in which to enjoy a long
drive in the country on a hot day, especially before car air
conditioners became commonplace. Still, they eventually finished
their questions and went away. Shortly thereafter the marines let
the captives go, and our fathers came back to camp, resolved not
to make that mistake again.
There were no further complications. In hindsight, I
feel a little sorry for those FBI men who lost a whole weekend
afternoon at home with their own families. (Had television
football been invented by then? I was too young to know.) The
memory reminds me that 50 years later, investigating possible
conspiracies is a more common and less pleasant job, both for the
suspects and the investigators.
My image of FBI agents has been colored ever since
by my recollection of that very nice man who was so interested in
where I had found all the wildflowers. And I somehow understood
that an important part of his job was to get my father to come
back, safely, in time for dinner.
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