This is for former campers. I'd like to propose a simple and compact way of specifying which "group" you were in at Camp Robinson Crusoe - "group" in the sense of group of campers that stayed together as they advanced through the various camp levels (Junior, Sub-inter, Intermediate, and so on). My proposal:

Think of this as sort of your "graduating class" (from the main camp), just as people have a graduating class from College. I propose abbreviating this with a "CRC-" prefix.

For example, I was a "Super Senior" in 1955. Thus my "CRC group" was "CRC-55". If you were ever a Super Senior, the last two digits of that year specify your "CRC group". Your Super Senior year is sort of the year of your "graduation" from the main camp (by that analogy, Primitive is like graduate school).

It's a tiny bit trickier for someone who was never actually a Super Senior. Suppose a camper started at camp as a "Junior" in 1963, and attended for three years (Junior, Sub-inter, and Inter). Then that person's "group" would be designated "CRC-68". Although that camper did not attend long enough to actually become a "Super Senior", he or she would have been a "Super Senior" in 1968. After all, someone could have entered college as part of the "Class of 2000". Even if he left after only two years, he was still in the Class of 2000.

Your "CRC group" can be followed by the actual years you attended, in parentheses. I attended the camp from 1952 through 1959, so I could specify my time at camp as "CRC-55(52-59)". That tells both what "group" I was in, and when I was there.

Campers who share the same "CRC group" were in the same group of campers as it moved from one level to the next (or were in corresponding groups of the opposite sex).

Your "CRC group" does reveal your age, of course. You were born in the year 1887+(CRC group) or 1888+(CRC group). In my case, I was born in the year 1887 + 55 = 1942.

I'm proposing this convention because when writing about their camp experiences, former campers have been inconsistent about how they describe when they were at the camp, and what group they were a part of.

Here's my recollection of the camp level designations:

"Trainee" and "Forrester" were two levels of counselor-in-training. I didn't use the Primitive years as a reference point, because it turns out that the use of the various Primitive sites changed over the years. For a brief time, some campers used the "Wee Butte" site as a third year of Primitive. In later years, Primitive 1 made use of both the Squantum and Trout Pond sites (later only the Trout Pond site), and Primitive 2 moved to Wee Butte.

I'm not suggesting that people need to identify their group with every posting about their camp experience on Facebook. I just thought that there ought to be a compact, agreed-upon way in which one COULD identify his or her group.

Over the years, people have written things like "I was at the camp in 1955 and 1956", which always struck me as uninformative. Were you a Junior and Sub-Inter in those years? Or were you a Senior and Super Senior? If the former, I wouldn't have known you, even though we overlapped. If the latter, you were one group younger than I, and I might want to correspond more.

My theory is, if you're going to give information, try to give enough information to be useful. I'm just trying to help by suggesting a uniform way of doing it.

Some of you are no doubt thinking, "MIT brain at work." Some of you are thinking, "This guy is insane." But to me, this simplifies specifying my camp "cohort". What "group" was I in at Camp Robinson Crusoe? I was in "CRC-55" - the "CRC class of '55".