For Papa Viva, life goes on at summer camp
Boom! Inka-dinka
Tell me what you think-a
Feel the beat!
Stomp your feet!
Sis Boom Bah!
Viva Camp Viva Camp
Rah! Rah! Rah!
– The Camp Viva Cheer, abridged
It takes a happy camper to write a cheer like that. Tony Lembeck, even at 55, is one happy camper.
“I got sent away to camp at a very early age,” he says at his CEO”™s desk at Friedland Realty Inc. in Yonkers. Lembeck was 9 when his parents first dispatched him to a bunk bed in the distant wooded real estate of Maine. To the kid from Long Island, it seemed “a good idea” rather than mom and dad”™s cruel sentence to summer exile.
It was at his second camp, Camp Tomahawk in New Hampshire, that Lembeck blossomed, as some kids do at summer camp. “That camp, from the second I got off the bus, became my second home,” he says. “I waited like from the 26th of August to get back”¦It was like falling in love.”
That sports camp “taught me how to treat people, how to deal with the less fortunate, how to respect the talents of others” and their foibles, too. “Camp for me has a lot to do with my core being.”
In college, Lembeck was a counselor at the same New England camp that had turned a “scrawny, not very athletic kid” from Lawrence into a pretty fair tennis player. About 14 years ago, Lembeck, by then a lawyer turned commercial real estate broker, became a partner in a camp in Maine run by members of his adopted summer family at Camp Tomahawk. “This was the opportunity of a lifetime for me,” he says. “I was going to be the owner of a summer camp.”
Lembeck worked nine months of the year as a broker at Friedland Realty and three months at the camp in Maine. His summer absence was not much noticed in Yonkers. “The truth is that for the first two years I went away, I didn”™t tell anybody I was gone.”
But Lembeck and his partners lacked the financial resources to sustain the operation. They sold their Camp Cobbossee to CampGroup, a family-owned business here in Westchester.
The sale and transfer of camp duties did not end well for Lembeck. “Getting out of the camp was very hurtful,” he says, still nursing stubborn wounds.
It takes a happy camper, or a spurned lover, to hurt like that.
Yet Tony Lembeck”™s long love affair with summer camp did not end there. Even before his venture into camp ownership, the real estate CEO was wholeheartedly engaged in running a camp closer to home for one week each August. At Camp Viva in Rhinebeck, they call him “Papa Viva.”
That”™s Viva as in, Live, persons with HIV and AIDS. The privately funded camp, now in its 18th summer, is a place of respite and recreation for families in which a parent or child is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus or stricken with the full-blown disease. They are the low-income victims of HIV/AIDS in Westchester County.
The summer camp project began 19 years ago with a grant to Westchester County from the Ryan White Foundation, named after the Indiana teen who had succumbed to AIDS four years earlier. A hemophiliac who contracted HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion, White became the public face of the terrible new disease and a voice for its victims after he was expelled from middle school following his diagnosis.
A psychologist at Family Services of Westchester, the nonprofit agency that continues to operate Camp Viva, recruited Lembeck as his right-hand man to plan and run the camp program. Their connection went back to Camp Tomahawk, where Lembeck had been his counselor.
In the ”™80s, Lembeck, hoping for a career in theater law, had worked for a theater management company as AIDS first ravaged the industry. “People in the office were dying, and all were gay,” he recalls. Lembeck at the outset of the scourge was not immune to the “great paranoia” it caused.
“I had some connection to HIV and AIDS, and I also had an affinity for camping.” He accepted the offer from his fellow camp alumnus.
“The whole concept is that if the mother is HIV-positive and doesn”™t have much going for her, she has the opportunity to take her child to summer camp. Once they get there, they see the transformative power of camping. Their kids change and in many cases, so do they.”
“Nobody knew who was HIV-positive at camp, and they still don”™t. As far as we”™re concerned, everybody has HIV.”
At Camp Viva”™s start in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, its name might have seemed an exercise in irony or desperately wishful thinking. “The cases were so much more dire then because the stigma was so much more dire,” says Lembeck. “The ”˜cocktail”™ hadn”™t really been invented.”
In 1995, 35 volunteers with Family Services of Westchester welcomed the first group of 60 parents and kids to the camp, which now draws about 100 campers each summer. It was the same year that the HIV cocktail, a life-extending therapy that combined multiple antiretroviral drugs, offered hope to those diagnosed with what had been an inexorable death sentence.
“Very shortly after camp started, that combination of meds started taking a very positive effect” on the HIV/AIDS community, Lembeck recalls. Campers who before would have died before a second summer in Dutchess County were living longer. “We”™ve had to mold the program to deal with the people that keep coming back,” he says. “A majority of adult campers are healthier now than they were.”
“I have still today some campers who have been with us since the first summer. They’re grandparents now.”
Papa Viva too keeps coming back. His camp team of 10 volunteers meets at least monthly at his Yonkers office. These days, “It”™s hard to get the money” to cover the camp”™s $120,000 operating budget, he says, but Lembeck and the team find a way.
“Exit strategy? I don”™t really have an exit strategy,” says the still-happy camper. “Why would I want to leave? I get so much out of it. If I could make a living doing it, I don’t need real estate deals.”
At Camp Viva, “These are my family. It”™s fun to be the patriarch.”