For almost 40 years Joe Sener has been trekking to the Owasippe Scout Reservation in western Michigan to camp, fish, hike, and shoot at targets. And for the last few months he’s been fighting leaders of the Chicago Area Council of the Boy Scouts who want to sell the camp. “To me it’s unbelievable that anyone would even consider selling Owasippe,” says Sener, a 50-year-old corporate vice president with Baxter International who lives in the far western suburbs. “There are just some things that should never be put up for sale.”
Sener first visited the camp in 1964, when he was an 11-year-old kid from the southwest side. “I can’t really describe the beauty of Owasippe for a kid like me,” he says. “It’s more than the smell of the pines. It’s walking through the woods and watching the eagles soar overhead. It’s staying up at night and seeing the stars–thousands of stars. As a kid from the city I’d never even seen the stars. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. You take a Chicago kid, a working-class urban kid, and give him a chance to experience the outdoors–I mean, the real outdoors. Well, you’re giving him a chance to learn a whole lot about himself as well as about nature.”
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Over the past few years the Boy Scouts have also suffered because the national organization has refused to accept gays. In protest, foundations and corporate philanthropies have started withholding contributions, and churches and schools have dropped their scouting programs.
Sener, a member of the council, got wind of the proposed sale before the committee announced it to the larger scouting community. He says that council leaders like Stone and president Lewis Greenblatt were reluctant to go public with the plan because they knew it would create a storm of protest. “I met with Stone and others over breakfast on September 11, of all days,” he says. “They said, ‘We have decided to sell the camp, and we want you to help us sell the idea to the other scouts.’ My first reaction was ‘Are you on drugs?’ I mean, why would you sell your strongest asset? Why would you sell your land? The last I looked they weren’t making any more of it. They said they needed the money. I said, ‘I think your logic is flawed, your conclusions are faulty, and your approach is inappropriate.’”
No one knows for sure how much it would bring if it were sold, and Sener says that the housing market in this area of Michigan is currently soft. And last year, as part of a long-term plan to reduce sprawl, the township board rezoned the camp from residential to recreational, making it less valuable to developers. (The property taxes on it have also dropped, to $56,000 a year.)
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Bruce Powell, Jeff Juscak.
