Gene

Gene

Noel Laflin

8-19-17

Tomorrow is the birthday of Gene Bergner.

Smokey, as he would eventually and affectionately be known by thousands, arrived as Ahwahnee's new camp ranger in the summer of 1969 - a camping season still beleaguered by the after effects of one of the worst winters to ever hit the mountain. Consequently it was also the summer of very bad food, as the kitchen had been leveled by heavy snow loads, and chow was being prepared in an upper parking lot building and trucked three times a day down to the dining hall, which had miraculously stayed intact. And although we were a lean and hungry staff, we still put on one hell of a good show for a couple of thousand Scouts that season.

It was also the summer of the moon landing, Viet Nam, and Woodstock. Credence Clearwater Revival was a new band on the rise and Elvis was making a comeback, or so we envisioned, as we listened to our tiny, tinny transistor radios up on Staff Hill, Lightningville, Sherwood Forest, or out in The Land of Nod.

But for the men of the Camp Ahwahnee Staff, it was a time to welcome a new guy and his wife to our humble abode, some sixty-seven hundred feet above sea level - some sixty-seven hundred feet above our ordinary lives down below.

Little did this sixteen-year-old realize at the time the role Gene Bergner would come to play in so many of our lives over the next decade. Little did any of us realize what a jewel of a man had suddenly appeared in our midst, and the loving shine he would give our land, up until the very last campfire had burned itself out.