Tippy Canoe: A Lake Garfield Romance

I grew up in Northern California hearing the many stories of how my grandparents, Edward A. Stickles and Olive (Walker) Stickles, met at Camp Fernway on Lake Garfield.

My grandmother, from New Hartford, Connecticut, first met my grandfather when she attended Camp Fernway as a camper. My grandfather, from nearby Pittsfield/Lenox, Massachusetts, worked at the camp during the summers to help pay his tuition at Ohio Northern University. He loved to recount that he was the only young man at an all-girls camp—the only other man being the older caretaker and camp cook. The son of a caretaker himself, my grandfather was a multi-sport athlete in high school and college and, by my grandmother’s account, a very good-looking young man. She told me all the girls at camp were smitten with him. But he had strict orders: no fraternizing with the campers!

My grandmother eventually returned to Camp Fernway as a counselor, and that was when their relationship became romantic. One of their favorite stories was how the counselors would sneak out after the campers were asleep and canoe across Lake Garfield by moonlight. They named one particularly unstable canoe “Tippy Canoe,” because it capsized so easily—all part of the fun. The name was also a play on “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” the famous 1840 presidential campaign slogan.

My grandparents later married and moved to a small apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where they lived during the Depression. Toward the end of the Depression, my grandfather found work as credit manager for Bonds Clothing, a men’s clothing company in New York. The company eventually sent him west to help open stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

They settled in San Francisco in the late 1930s and later moved to nearby San Mateo, where they raised two world-class swimmers: my mother, Terri Stickles, a world-record holder and Olympic medalist at the 1964 Tokyo Games, and my uncle Ted Stickles, also a world-record holder. My grandmother worked for the March of Dimes in San Francisco, while my grandfather continued his career with Bond Clothing.

They eventually retired to Santa Rosa, California, where they spent most of the rest of their lives—and where I spent every summer and nearly every school holiday with them.

And to think, none of it would have happened had they not found each other at Camp Fernway—and shared those moonlit adventures in “Tippy Canoe” on Lake Garfield. — Chris Mejia