Jack's Coming of Age Series

Blue-jean cutoffs and bikinis, Top 40s on a transistor radio, rooting for your school’s team, and trading rings with your boyfriend/girlfriend, but also teenage heartbreak and fights between rival schools. On one level, this is a lighthearted story about romance and rivalry among church youth groups the summer of 1968 during a campout at a state park.

But 1968 was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, and thousands of soldiers and civilians were dying weekly in the Vietnam War while antiwar protests and riots sparked by racial injustice broke out in cities across the United States. And so, on a deeper level, the story is about developing community solidarity and the danger of intolerant tribalism.

Those deeper concerns were not in the minds of the teenagers in two church groups when they met up on the beach in Pokagon Park in northeastern Indiana. What was on their minds? Well, hiking woody trails, dancing to Top 40s tunes, and finding the right boy/girl to go steady with. The boys also wanted to prove their manhood, raid the girls' tents, and show up the other youth group. And the girls wanted to attract boys, but limit their attention to first base, while making friends with kids in the other youth group. The initial goal of the youth pastors was to build bonds of Christian fellowship among the campers. By the end of the weekend, they just wanted to survive and to bring home their hormonally amped-up teenage parishioners.

The story is inspired by an actual experience of the author, during a church youth-group campout in Pokagon State Park. The book is a work of autofiction, meaning there is a kernel of truthiness in the narrative.