This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.

We also mention specific weight and weight loss numbers.

This language could be sensitive for some listeners so please take care.

Selma has such a near and dear place in my heart.

She wanted this to be a haven.

I think she was well ahead of her time in that she recognized that creating a society that was positive around weight loss somehow made weight loss better or more palatable.

If anyone had good intentions, it was her.

Selma was born in 1923 to a Jewish immigrant household in Brooklyn, New York.

As she entered her hormonal teenage years — you know, the ones we all know and hate — she started to fill out in less-than-desirable ways.

At least, according to the beauty standards of the time.

She, I think, had amazingly good positive intentions.

And part of that was, you know, making kids normal weight or as close to normal weight as you possibly can.

In her early 20s, Selma married Irving Ettenberg.

The couple had three children; Lesley, Diana, and their only boy, David.

Throughout early motherhood, Selma kept the weight off.

Maybe because of her method or maybe because the pressure to be thin only got worse as the years went on.

There were appetite suppressants advertised in the 1940s, then the rise of gyms and fitness TV programs in the 50s,

And now here is the man who will show you how to feel better, look better, Jack LaLanne.

There was the birth of Weight Watchers in the 60s,

On today’s Weight Watchers program you can eat foods like this, and this, and this within limits, and learn to lose weight.

And of course, the first diet soda marketed specifically for weight control.

When you’re watching your weight, too much of a good thing can even be a “no no”.

That’s why there’s diet rite cola.

Society was obsessed with size and weight management for men and women alike, and the messaging was everywhere.

Iced cold Coca-cola!

There’s no waist line worry with Coca Cola you know.

Actually this individual sized bottle has no more calories than half a grapefruit.

Selma, now thin and fully on board with this sort of messaging, started working as a head counselor at a summer camp in 1955.

It was her first camp experience.

Selma didn’t come from money, so one of the perks of working at a summer camp was bringing her three children along with her.

The kids were able to get the full camp experience of living in a community and spending time in nature.

She, I think, you know, had this vision, she called it Shane, you know, it was Shayna Punim, the, like, beautiful face.

As Sue said, “Sheyn” is a Yiddish word for beautiful.

And Selma’s beautiful vision was to create a summer camp that bigger children didn’t have to shy away from.

I had been going to sleepaway summer camp since I was five years old.

You know, we were New York Jews and New York Jews send their kids to summer camp.

So that was sort of the norm.

What wasn't the norm was me looking through sort of the back of the New York Times magazine, which is where we got all of our suggestions for camps.

And there were, at that time, two or three weight loss camps in operation.

And I picked Camp Shane because the advertisement actually had the largest number of weight loss possible.

So the other two, you know, guaranteed anywhere from five to maybe 25 pounds in a summer lost.

And Camp Shane, I think, you know, had said up to let's say 35 pounds.

And since that was a larger number, I picked Camp Shane and I begged my parents to go.

But not every kid was begging their parents to send them to Shane.

In fact, some were begging them not to.

Mark Rothenberg was 12 years old when his mom came to him with a proposition.

My mother said to me, I have a friend whose son has gone to this wonderful camp, and you'll have a great time I think, and would you like to talk to him about it?

And they have go-karts and they have computer games, and it's wonderful and you’re gonna go and it’s up in New York.

And there's go-karts.

She must have said, go-karts, like 30 times.

I'm pretty sure my mother thought she would walk in, say the word go-kart.

And I would be packing my bags that day.

Mark's mom proceeded to show him some Camp Shane promotional materials.

I saw that incredibly seductive imagery that Camp Shane has, which is the before and the after.

So the before picture, the after picture, you've got the miserable little boy without his shirt on.

He's got the boy boobies, and he's got the love handles.

He's got the double chin.

He has this vacant expression, this, this pained expression.

And then you have the after picture where he's doing the Superman pose, right?

His chest is thrusted out, and he's got this big, beautiful smile on his face.

Twelve year old Mark immediately saw through the BS.

And I knew instantly that this was a weight loss camp.

I knew what it was.

It was clear as day to me that this was a fat camp.

And I looked at my mother and I said, “Absolutely not.

I don't want to go.

No thank you.”

Mark’s campaign against Camp Shane was justified, he just didn’t know it yet.

They weighed you in once a week on one of those doctor scales.

That’s Kenny Ritzer.

He was a camper in 1974.

There was no electronic scales or anything.

So it was, you know, the detecto slide rule scale.

I guess you figure if it was accurate at your doctor's office, it must be accurate at camp.

Each week, counselors gathered their bunk group and went down to the gymnasium for their weigh-in.

In front of the other bunks waiting their turn, every kid would have to go up to be weighed and measured.

They measured their calves, thighs, waist, and chest.

I think most of us were a little embarrassed and, and of course, Selma had this habit of saying your weight and telling you how much you lost.

Now, telling your weight out loud where other people could hear it would be embarrassing.

At least for me it was.

But then if they said, okay, you lost two pounds this week, you were actually elated.

By 1974, there were around 175 campers at Shane.

As far as the serving size, it was small, and we always walked away a little bit hungry But it was portion control.

I really couldn't tell you exactly how many calories they had us on per day, but it really wasn’t enough.

At the time, Camp Shane followed the New York State Board of Health diet that only allowed between 12-1400 calories per day.

Then nine to 10 might be at the gym, playing basketball or doing aerobic exercises.

And then you might have from 10 to 11, uh, a free swim.

Other activities included tennis, football, and gymnastics.

Campers broke to refuel around 12:30.

Lunch could be a serving of chicken chow mein on a bed of rice with ice milk, hot tea, and pineapple.

Then campers got a chance to rest before resuming their afternoon activities.

Maybe afternoon after 12 when you had lunch, THERE might be softball or, um, something to that effect, or just even just walking what they called the triangle, which was a track in the shape of a triangle in the middle of camp.

And sometimes that was your exercise.

In addition to sports, there could be a late afternoon hike.

And then around 5:30, campers had a free period which many used to write letters home.

It was mandatory to write, you know, a letter, I think two or three times a week to family.

Finally, dinner was served at 6:30, typically consisting of something like spaghetti or a baked potato with salad, fruit, and skim milk.

After dinner:

Sometimes in the evening they had activities, um, maybe a, a movie or maybe some, uh, get together with, uh, like a little dance in the gymnasium with the guys and the girls.

And that was, uh, pretty much what the daily life was for maybe seven weeks or eight weeks.

Kids were kept busy for the entirety of those weeks.

That was strategic.

Selma wanted to keep kids so busy, they didn’t think about food.

And when they did have a chance to think about food, it would be in a controlled, educational setting.

She gave nutrition classes on calorie counting and substitution.

She taught kids how to plan what they were eating so they could go back home with the tools to implement what they learned at camp.

From an article in the Philadelphia Daily News, we know that Selma cared about the reason behind their actions, and not just the result of their actions.

She asked them when they eat the most, and more often than not the answer was, quote, “They eat when they’re bored.

And somehow they’ve come to believe that food will make them happier.” Selma Ettenburg’s Camp Shane philosophy had a three-pronged approach: take off weight scientifically, educate kids to keep it off when they returned home, and make campers happier and more confident.

She had hired Terry Brody to sort of be the henchman.

She would, you know, come and punish.

I remember, you know, cubbies that weren't clean or not folded perfectly, would get dumped over.

Sue had a disciplinary run-in with Selma and Terry one summer.

I was, you know, 10, 11, 12, maybe at the most.

And one of the big, um, rules at camp was that you weren't allowed to chew gum.

Remember how we talked about gum being contraband in episode 1?

Selma had her reasons.

She said that there was research that indicated that the salivary glands would be started if you were to chew gum, even sugar-free gum.

And that, that actually made you more hungry.

And she was, out of the kindness of our heart, making sure that we were not overly hungry and trying to suppress our appetite by having this rule that we could not chew gum.

That might not have been the only reason though.

There was, like, a secondary rumor that went around that said in the earlier years, even before me, that kids would chew gum and they'd put it on Charlie, the dog.

And you could imagine that gum in Charlie would've, you know, caused a problem.

And if Selma loved Irving, I don't know, but boy did she love Charlie the dog.

Sue tested her luck with the gum anyway.

She and Terry Brody were sitting on the porch of this house at the top of Lover's Lane.

Lover’s Lane was a tree-covered path that started at the pool and ran slightly uphill to the nutrition room.

Kids would go there to make out in secret under the coverage of the trees.

And I was walking up Lover's Lane, apparently chewing my gum, large enough so that Selma had seen it.

And when I got to the top of Lover's Lane, and she looked at me and she said, you know, come here.

And as I was going up the stairs to the porch, I swallowed my gum because that's of course what you do.

And she said, spit out your gum.

And I said, what gum?

And she turned to Terry Brody, and she goes, “told you she was gonna swallow it.” And I just remember, like, the fear.

Selma was in charge.

She was the disciplinarian, and I was in fucking trouble.

So she was a force.

She was a force.

That's the best way to describe her.

From the bottom up, Selma’s staff had her back.

First came counselors-in-training, or CITs.

Then the basic cabin counselors; they reported up to the group leaders.

Next, there were the head counselors (one for boys camp, one for girls).

And above them was the camp director, which in the 70s was Selma herself.

The big rumor always at camp was Selma had spies all throughout the county.

Kenny witnessed this firsthand.

His parents came to visit him one weekend, and the rules were that he wasn’t allowed off campus because it wasn’t a Selma-sanctioned parent visiting day.

But Kenny and his parents had other plans.

We just took off.

And we went to Monticello, which was only maybe five miles away.

Monticello, New York.

And we went to a deli called Kaplan’s.

And my favorite thing in the world, probably to this day, is a roast beef on rye.

That's my favorite sandwich.

And that's what I had there, which you’d never get at camp.

Ever.

And I ate it, and I was happy.

And we went back to camp after I spent a couple hours with my parents.

And Selma, I don't know how she knew I had a roast beef sandwich.

Because of all her weird rules, Selma had created a culture of covert mischief.

And Shaners were happy to take part.

Before they figured out how to sneak food through the 12-foot fence, campers were left with no choice but to sneak out to get the sweets and treats they were desperately missing.

You would wake up in the, in the middle of the night as a camper.

And the back of your bunk was a wooded area, maybe 10 or 20 yards deep of woods maybe.

And you'd run down the hill through the woods to the street and down the street to the market.

And you would get a box of Charles Freihofer chocolate chip cookies, which were the most delicious chocolate chip cookie.

To this day, I would say it's my favorite cookie, if I could get it.

And then you would eat it on the way back because you couldn't really sneak it back in, or it was very difficult.

Those must have been some damn good cookies if Kenny was willing to run that risk.

He knew Selma could be….harsh.

Strict.

Particular.

She was much the same with her own family.

Selma had started Camp Shane I believe, wholeheartedly…

Sue Steinberg, again.

…because she cared for fat kids and wanted them, of course, to be thinner, but wanted them to succeed or be successful.

After her time as a camper, Sue worked at Shane as a camp lifeguard and a swim instructor.

Selma had the best interest of the kids in mind.

I think she was doing the best she could with the information that people had at that point.

Selma saw firsthand what weight loss had done for her, and wanted to give the same to as many kids as possible.

She fully believed that losing weight was the key to happier, more successful lives for these kids.

I would describe Selma as a very shrewd businesswoman, very successful.

That's Kenny again.

When I say shrewd, I mean cheap.

I thought she was a little bit shady, to be honest with you.

After his time as a camper, Kenny went back as a counselor in training, or CIT, in 1976.

It’s common practice for summer camps to pay CITs.

Maybe not much, but they do usually get a paycheck for the summer.

But Camp Shane was not like most camps.

And at some point early on, Selma decided CITs wouldn’t get paid.

They were reaping the benefits of attending a fat camp, after all.

I didn't like the way I was being handled anyway, because it was pretty much against the law to have a CIT take care of six kids.

I had six kids.

The youngest actually only being four, who was only there because 'cause his sister was a little chubby.

Four to maybe six years old was my bunk.

And I was only 16.

I wasn't of age to take care of these kids.

But Selma had found a workaround.

Well at night, we have a regular counselor in there.

The regular counselor was usually a specialist.

Okay, so some context: A specialist was different from a regular or "general counselor," as they were called.

The general counselors and CITs, like Kenny, were assigned to a bunk and were responsible for that specific group of campers all day long.

Specialists, on the other hand, were hired to teach … well … specialties, like swimming, ceramics, or the ropes course.

I myself was an arts and crafts specialist during my time at Camp Shane.

Specialists didn't see their bunk group for most of the day because they were busy instructing, but they’d join them for meals and evening activity and of course, would sleep in the bunks overnight.

So, back to Kenny:

In our case, I had, um, a gentleman that was from Europe.

My guy was a soccer coach.

Essentially, Selma justified having a 16-year-old supervise such young kids by putting an older counselor in the bunk, even though he was really only there at night.

That wasn’t okay with Kenny.

I loved the kids.

They were great little kids.

I didn't like that arrangement.

And what happened was I opened my mouth being the wise guy and told her it wasn't even legal.

And I knew it wasn't legal because my father was an attorney.

Kenny packed his bags and stayed at a motel in town while he figured out how to get home.

Selma didn’t come looking for him.

It's not okay to leave kids, young kids, even teenage kids with somebody who's not responsible.

I think she was just trying to save money by not having to pay the CITs and, um, not have to pay the counselors extra for being there all the time.

Selma also saved on labor using another method.

She broke up staff paychecks into two amounts, one to be received midsummer and one at the end of the season.

She was notorious for firing counselors she didn’t like shortly before payday so she didn’t have to pay them in full.

So how’d you gain the weight?

I ate a lot.

No, no, no you said 50 pounds, you shouldn’t let that happen to you.

You’re pretty.

No, I don’t want to hear it.

Let me tell you something —

You’re a pretty girl and you’re single.

You must lose the weight!

The audacity.

I petitioned him.

I said, “Zadie,” my grandfather.

I said, “I don't wanna do this.” And he came from Poland where he had known starvation.

He thought this was the most absurd, ludicrous, ridiculous thing in his life.

“You're gonna spend money to, to not feed this kid?

Like, I don't understand this.” In Fiddler on the Roof, you know, the song, if I were a rich man, he says, “I want my wife to have a proper double chin.”

Mark’s grandfather came from a world where a few extra pounds meant health and wealth.

Within just one generation, that had changed.

I remember the car pulled up and I knew that my father was just going to get outta there as quickly as possible.

We barely spoke in the car.

And so we pulled up to the gate and it was, you know, it's, it's terrible to think in these terms, but having grown up in a Jewish household and, and there was so much Holocaust education, I almost had these just terrible thoughts of, it's like I'm going up to the gates of a camp.

I mean, it's just terrible.

Um, I was so miserable in the car, and I just felt so dejected.

I felt that my parents just don't want me, and they've thrown me away, and I'm repulsive and horrible, and here I am, I'm in this camp.

Mark felt rejected.

He knew that sleepaway camp was not the answer to his weight struggles, but now the situation was out of his hands.

His fate was with the Ettenbergs.

At this point in 1982, Selma’s son David had become camp director.

But he still worked under his mother’s thumb.

It reeked of, of urine and, and must, and it just had this musky, wet smell.

And I've been to sleepaway camp before.

I know it's not the Four Seasons, but this just didn't smell right.

It didn't feel right.

It didn't look right.

These cabins were never…upscale.

Most campers told me the bunks were rustic, but overall fine for the summer.

Mark, however, had a different experience.

And I kind of looked around this cabin that I'm now gonna be spending my summer in.

And it was sort of like a cheap linoleum floor.

The tiles were curling.

You could see mold growing under them.

There was like a, a cheap kind of wood.

It's the kind of wood that you buy at Home Depot when you're boarding up a broken window.

Went into the bathroom and, and the floors were unfinished.

You could see right down into the, into the ground, through the slits.

There was no insulation.

And the janitor was working on the toilets.

And he kind of saw me and said, “Hey, I'm, I'm just working on these toilets.” His advice to me, “don't flush the toilet while you're sitting down because you don't want to know what's gonna happen.”

Unfortunately for Mark, things didn’t get much better from there.

Compared to the decade before, the food didn’t sound as nutritious as it once had.

I remember the, the food was just uniformly horrible.

And again, this is not an elitist snob who expected caviar.

I was not expecting high quality food.

But, you know, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would've been fine.

And those fun camp activities from the brochure?

Well, those leading them were not always the most qualified to do so.

I remember even some of the counselors didn't know we had archery once.

For the whole summer, we had it once.

Um, the counselor knew nothing about archery, didn't even have know where the key was to open up the, the storage cabinet, for the, uh, bows and arrows.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a rustic, minimalist environment, especially for kids who’ve never had that experience.

But for what families were paying, this was hardly acceptable.

By the 80s, campers could choose between staying for three weeks, six weeks, or nine weeks.

And the cost was proportional: a little over $1,000 for 3-weeks, $2,100 for six weeks, and almost $3,000 for nine weeks which today would be $12,000.

Far too much for campers to basically not be fed and not have proper instruction.

The reason these kids are eating is because of something, whether it's a trauma or just some emotional problem.

And these kids have also developed these horrible self-confidence issues.

My biggest criticism of Camp Shane, and this is gonna make no sense, doesn't teach you how to be thin.

And people would say, oh, we, it's, it's the how to eat.

And I said, no, it has nothing to do with that.

When people pay me compliments, I don't know what to do with them because I don't believe them.

I don't know how to be thin.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know how not to want to eat everything in sight regardless of whether I'm 40 pounds lighter or not.

The camp didn't teach me that.

The nutrition classes that Selma once led had severely dropped off.

We had, um, occasionally, maybe once a week, once every other week we would sit down for about a half an hour with, I don't even think she was an actual nutritionist.

I think she was a counselor that maybe had some extra training.

But you know, she would, she would go over the basic food groups, talk about controlling your calories, eating smaller portions, dabbing your pizza with a napkin to soak up the grease.

That was it.

There was no gem or nugget of wisdom that we got from any of those sessions.

And it, it seemed readily apparent to us that whomever was teaching us, you know, was either just reading from a book or, or a pamphlet and didn’t seem to have a good grasp of what any of us were really dealing with.

Still, right or wrong, camp delivered on what was promised.

Kids lost weight.

And parents were ecstatic to see their kids in new bodies.

When I came back, my mother said to me, “oh, you walked right by me in the airport and I didn't even recognize you.” My father, I remember when I walked in the house, and he was in the pool, in his pool chair, and he looked up from his book and said, “Look at you.

You look great.

You came back a lean, mean fighting machine.

You look fantastic.”

But this positive feedback didn’t make Mark feel good.

Now, problem with, with Camp Shane, at least in, in my experience, was you took a kid who loathed himself.

He's now of the belief that is, he was repulsive and had to be sent thou– a thousand miles away for, for treatment, if you will.

And when my father or mother would say things like, you look great.

When it went through the filter in my head, it came out as: you were repulsive and had to be sent away.

And the word were, the past tense vanished.

So instead of you, you know, you were repulsive.

It remains, you are repulsive.

That kind of message is so harmful to a developing teen.

And it reinforces the need to drop pounds whenever the weight inevitably comes back.

It creates repeated cycles of weight loss and gain, or what we know as yo-yo dieting.

All of that fluctuation can be worse for your body than just maintaining a stable, higher weight.

It can lead to a range of negative health effects such as increased risk of heart disease, disrupted metabolism, and decreased muscle mass.

There was a losing weight facility in North Carolina, part of Duke University.

they had several programs.

So I was down there one time, and I walk into their gym and on the Schwinn Airdyne Bicycle, there she is, Selma Ettenberg.

And I was saying to myself, boy, she has some nerve trying to be on this program, losing weight, 'cause she had packed on some pounds.

But I was saying to myself, boy, that's funny.

Being the owner of a diet camp, she's on another diet program, not her own.

And I knew it was her and I wasn't gonna say anything to her 'cause I just was, well, stay away from her.

But she came up to me privately and said, “don't tell anybody that I was here.” Just like that.

And I laughed at that inside.

'cause I was like, yeah, what's she trying to hide?

You know?

Was it gonna get out to, you know, channel two news and that the owner of a fat camp, was at a fat camp?

The woman who believed in portion control, exercise, and sheer willpower, needed outside help.

She didn’t have all the answers.

I do remember more than one summer there being, um, anxiety, um, me being anxious, um, that I didn't know who I was working for.

There was at least one summer that I had two different contracts.

And I remember insisting on that because I was like, I need a contract from you, David, and I need a contract from you, Selma, because I don't really know who's gonna pay me, and I wanna make sure that I get paid.

The animosity between David and Selma spilled over into the day-to-day operations of camp.

Then there was one summer where in order to exert power over each other, they would put padlocks on the entrance or the gate to the pool.

And I didn't know whose padlock it was, so I had to get in touch with both of them.

And, you know, then one of them would complain, “oh, it must be so and so because I didn't do it,” and then I would have to go to the other one.

And that happened several times.

I know that sounds crazy.

The back and forth between Selma and David was only just beginning.

Camp Shane was growing, but only one Ettenberg could take it to the next level of success.

If David was going to fully take over, it wasn’t going to be without a fight.

And Selma fought dirty.

Next time, on Camp Shame…

If someone had said to me back in those days, um, “do you think that David will ever inherit the camp?” I probably would've told you Selma will never give it up.

We reached out to David Ettenberg and his wife Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording, we have not received a reply.