Camp Spearhead’s lessons touched staff, too
The Greenville News – Greenville, S.C. Date: Apr 18, 2004
Start Page: B.1 Section: Metro
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Jeanne Brooks jbrooks@greenvllenews.com Columnist
Not quite old enough for most paying jobs, Bob Bierman wound up a volunteer at a camp that first summer, now something like 20 years ago. Camp Spearhead was still at Paris Mountain State Park then. Bierman brought a headful of typical young-teen ideas about life, what’s geeky or cool. “There was a whole group of us,” he remembers. “Young people still shaping our views of the world.”
They all likely thought they had a pretty good grasp of what’s important, what’s prized, what matters. Spearhead had some lessons from them. Spearhead would be, Bierman says, where they hit the reset button. Run by the Greenville County Disabilities and Special Needs Board, it wasn’t like other summer camps. He’s never forgotten what Chuck Luttrell, camp director, told the young counselors and volunteers right off.
Luttrell said a lot of people might look at a Spearhead camper and say, “That kid can’t shoot a basketball.” But before going to camp, maybe that same kid couldn’t even pick up a ball, Luttrell told them, and now he could bounce it once. The truth for anyone is that progress is measured from where you start, not by somebody else’s yardstick. This was one of Spearhead’s lessons. Bierman, these days executive director of multimedia and conferences for Fortune magazine, says he’s told the basketball story to just about every team of colleagues he’s worked with over the years since that summer.
People talk about what Camp Spearhead does for the campers, Bierman says. It does as much for the ones who work there. The chance to do something that genuinely helps somebody is a privilege. And there’s the deeply satisfying reward of sharing in another person’s joy of accomplishment.
Once, Bierman took a kid with a lot of problems down to the lake’s edge. “He actually got in the water and started to wade around.” When Bierman looked up, he saw the whole camp had turned out to watch.
The young volunteer soon knew that working at Spearhead “was a very special thing to do. Everybody had this feeling. It wasn’t that we went there with some big sense of mission. (But) it’s hard for it not to become a calling.” The campers, he says, “don’t expect anything, so just about anything makes them happy.” Relationships are built on kindness.
Bierman spent six summers at Spearhead. He drove a bus. He was a lifeguard. He worked on programs. “I couldn’t make myself quit,” he recalls. “I loved it. It didn’t pay well. It paid horribly. The first year, it paid nothing.” But “there was the feeling that you were actually doing something. You really were part of something, as opposed to just flipping hamburgers somewhere.”
Lessons learned at Spearhead have remained like treasures to Bierman. He now lives in Manhattan. “The balance of life is such that it’s easy to get tangled up in careers.” There are days he sits and thinks back. “You think about a kid singing a song or clapping his hands. I could use a dose of that every summer.” If the fight between the disabilities board and the property’s owner, Civitan Charities, jeopardizes Camp Spearhead, “it would be a shame,” Bierman says.
Imagine all you think could be lost. Double that. More than double that.