Camps for Fun and Profit : Old-Fashioned Activities Make Return, Though Special Themes Are Still Popular

In a beautiful mountain valley east of Salt Lake City, youngsters are spending a week of their summer vacation at a camp where they can swim a little, join in a volleyball tournament and learn how to play the stock market.

Through a series of classes and games, the Young American Success Camp seeks to turn out young capitalists, said Donna Emch, who is organizing this year’s camp for the Jefferson Institute, the Springville, Utah-based educational arm of conservative investment guru Howard Ruff.

“We do a lot of work, but it’s a fun type of learning environment,” Emch said, noting that the weeklong camp, which started June 24, extols the virtues of a free-market economy more than the details of the Ruff philosophy.

“We don’t make any apologies for where we stand, as far as what we think the kids need to survive in society,” Emch added. (Ruff, publisher of the Ruff Times newsletter, for years has preached economic doom and advised his followers to stock up on precious metals.)

Such specialized sleep-over and day camps are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a warm summer evening. Parents can send their little ones to camps that push academics or stress fine arts. If your preteen is into pre-law, there’s a camp for it. Head in the clouds? Try Space Camp in Alabama.

Pudgettes can check into weight-loss camps, some affiliated with well-known diet programs. Then there are the many sports camps--baseball, football, golf, horseback riding, water sports, even sailing a tall ship.

“Whatever your interest, there’s probably a camp that caters to it,” said Gary Abell, spokesman for the American Camping Assn., a Martinsville, Ind., group that accredits summer camps. A total of 2,185 camps have met the group’s standards.

But in this decade--supposedly kinder and gentler--the latest trend in summer camping may be a return to plain old fun at general-interest camps, experts say. And camping definitely has become a growing business as two-career couples search for something to occupy the kids during the summer break.

Some 5 million young people attended day and resident summer camps last year, up from 4 million in the mid-1980s, Abell said.

Day camps have proven particularly popular for working parents because “they need something for their children to do during the day rather than sit around watching ‘The Price is Right,’ ” Abell said. Computer camps, he added, have all but disappeared because computers have become so common in schools and homes.

At the Encino offices of American College Placement Services, which helps parents find the right camp for their children as a sideline to its regular school-placement business, director Anne Kogen has discovered that “truly there is a trend back to general fun camps.”

“That’s good,” Kogen said. “Kids need to have fun in the summer.”

At one such facility, Cottontail Ranch in Malibu Canyon, business is booming, and there are waiting lists for some two-week sessions, said Milt Drucker, one of three former teachers who own the 34-year-old camp. The minimum two-week visit costs $1,000.

The camp, which can accommodate about 200 youngsters ages 6 to 16, is always evaluating its program, Drucker said. Last year, it added golf to offerings that include water sports, horseback riding, tennis, archery, gymnastics, fishing, computer classes and outings to area attractions.

“We like to think we keep up with the sophisticated youngster of Southern California as well as the kids we handle from all over the world,” Drucker said.

Despite the apparent revival of the fun camp, Nate Levine, director of Leonia, N.J.-based Advisory Council on Camps, which operates a free camp referral service for parents, said he still sees plenty of interest in specialty camps.

“The outdoors and the joy of learning a new game and the joy of learning to swim is not as prevalent as I think it should be,” he said. He added that some owners of general fun camps have felt pressure from parents to switch to more narrow programs.

Most of the youngsters who have attended the seven Young American Success Camps offered since 1986 come from families that subscribe to the Ruff Times newsletter, Emch said. Cost of the one-week camp is $1,950 for one camper and $1,250 for each additional person.

Among this year’s speakers will be two of the 383 young people who have graduated from the camp, where various activities can earn participants “Ruff Bucks.” The play money, which sports Howard Ruff’s likeness, can be redeemed for merchandise at week’s end.

One young graduate applied skills learned at the camp to start her own successful business at boarding school. The student made money by helping faraway parents select gifts for their children, her fellow students.

“Our bias is definitely toward free enterprise,” Emch said.