The “Camp Fire Girls” Novels of
Cleveland Social Worker Hildegarde Gertrude Frey
An essay by Taft Eastman
Hildegarde Frey Biographical Sketch
Reprinted from the Spring 2003 Ohioana Quarterly
In November 1914, on a Saturday “as balmy as May,” a fictional launch
heads up Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.
The tiny craft nosed her way among giant steamers, six-hundred-
foot freighters, coal barges, lighters, fire boats, tugs, scows,
and all the other kinds of vessels that crowd the river-harbor of a
great lake port. Viewed from below, the steel structure of the
viaduct over the river stretched out like the monstrous skeleton of
some prehistoric beast . . . Over where the new bridge was being
constructed men stood on slender girders high in the air, catching
red-hot rivets that were being tossed them, while an automatic
riveting hammer filled the air with its nerve-destroying clamor.
Everywhere was bustle and confusion, and noise, noise, noise.
And in the midst of this tumult the tiny launch, filled with
laughing girls, threaded its way up the black river, flying the
Winnebago banner, while behind it trailed a birchbark canoe
(At School, 47).
The passengers, “clad in blue skirts and white middies and heavy sweaters,”
are the Winnebago group of Camp Fire Girls. Their leader is Elizabeth
Kent, camp name Nyoda (“face to the mountain” - an optimist), their
high school English teacher.
* * * * *
The scene is from the second in a series of ten Camp Fire Girls novels
published by A. L. Burt Company, New York, from 1916 through 1920.
The author was Hildegarde Gertrude Frey (1891-1957), a lifelong resident
of Cleveland (whose name is inexplicably spelled “Hildegard” on the
novels). She created the novels when she was between the ages of twenty-four
and twenty-eight.
All four of Frey’s grandparents were born in Germany, as was her father,
Otto, a dry goods salesman. Frey’s mother, born Emily Hunting in Ohio,
gave birth to Hildegarde in 1891, at 6 Professor Avenue on Cleveland’s
west side. A sister, Olga, was born two years earlier. The neighborhood
today is called Tremont.
Frey graduated in 1910 from
West High School, on Franklin
Boulevard at West 69th Street
(razed in 1970 to make way for
today’s Gallagher Intermediate
School). Her fictional equivalent,
“Washington High” in At School
and Larks and Pranks, has every
amenity a prosperous, Progressive
Era city can offer. Facilities include
an auditorium, a gymnasium, an
indoor swimming pool, and acres
of athletic fields. Activities include
a literary society, a dramatic club,
an orchestra, and a team in the
citywide girls’ basketball league.
Teachers are addressed as “professor”
(Larks and Pranks, 185). Even
the non-scholarly athlete character
takes Latin, German, and physics.
A college-bound hero also takes
geometry, French, “Senior Oratory”
(Larks and Pranks, 80), and
“Ancient, Medieval, and Modern
History” - three different courses
(At School, 190).
By Hildegarde’s high school years, the Frey family owned a house on
West 100th Street, near today’s corner with east-west Madison Avenue.
On their block, the two great divisions of the lower middle class - bluecollar
factory workers and white-collar office workers - lived side by side.
The neighborhood today is called Cudell. The house remained Frey’s
home for the rest of her life.
We don’t know how Frey spent the six years after high school until the
first four Camp Fire Girls novels were published in 1916 (giving the
publisher an instant series). There could be Frey stories waiting to be
discovered in newspapers or magazines from her high school years onward.
* * * * *
The Camp Fire Girls novels form a continuous narrative of five years in the
lives of their teen heroes. The books total 2,455 pages and 491,000 words.
They begin with a pattern. One volume takes the group into nature in
the summer to absorb the principles of Camp Fire. The next takes them
into civilization for the winter as they put the principles into practice.
Vacation alternates with school year, and there is a piquant sense of time
going by: “The air had the cool, crisp clearness of autumn. The sky had
become that deep blue which marks the passing of summer, and the clouds
seemed thicker in texture” (Maine Woods, 223).
As the series progresses, the summer-winter alternation continues, but
life and the world complicate the pattern. People move. Plans change. The
girls get older and more capable. Events have a real-life feel.
The series does not end with finality. The “little women” of Louisa May
Alcott, a clear Frey influence who wrote fifty years earlier, become parents
of a next generation. The Winnebagos are last seen, at about age twenty,
with their futures still largely undefined - an ending that may have encouraged
little “New Women” of the time.
* * * * *
Frey wrote, as her publisher advertised, for girls “12 to 16 years.” She
conveys the lives of her ensemble with exceptional empathy, humor, and
what adults today might see as an excess of adventure.
Underlying the melodrama, Frey’s aim was to dramatize the working of
Camp Fire “Law” and Christian spirituality.
Her deepest theme (most explicit in
Solve a Mystery) is the action of divine
power in her teen heroes’ ordinary world.
Frey wrote, in fact, as both a devout
Protestant and a social progressive, a mix
that in the 1910s could be seen in the former
president Theodore Roosevelt and the
current president, Woodrow Wilson. Her
fictional world includes God, but not
Satan. A believer in the New Testament
“great commandments” (Love God; Love
thy neighbor), she traces right behavior and
happiness to a divine source. But as a
novelist with a nonjudgmental, sociologist’s
eye, she traces wrong behavior and unhappiness
only to ignorance - the cures for
which are guidance and education.
For Frey, progressivism liberates. Of a conflict between Dorothy
Bradford, camp name Hinpoha (“curly haired”), and her Aunt Phoebe,
Frey writes that the aunt “was yet to learn that she could not force obsolete customs upon a girl who had lived for sixteen years in the sunlight of
modern ideas” (At School, 22).
Frey endorses absorption of all Americans into the Anglo-American
version of the middle class. But, perhaps because her city held dozens of
self-respecting nationality communities, the diversity from which the
Winnebagos assimilate is not of ethnicity but economic standing.
Elsie Gardiner, camp name Migwan (“quill pen”) lives with her family in
dire straits following the death of her father - until, having earned a Camp
Fire honor in bookkeeping (Maine Woods, 18), she learns to improve the
household finances by techniques such as buying potatoes in bulk (At
School, 34-38). Migwan’s way upward will be through college. Her struggle
to earn tuition is the premise of Onoway House.
With even farther to climb, but also targeting college, is “poor white”
Katherine Adams, from a “hard-upper” family in rural Arkansas (Open
Road, 16). She spends a year in Cleveland because her two-teacher high
school at home offers no senior year (Larks and Pranks , 60).
At the other economic extreme, Gladys Evans is the daughter of Helen
Evans, “a power in the community” (At School, 28), and wealthy Homer
Evans, who during the war is “head over heels in the manufacture of
munitions” (Do Their Bit, 13). Even so, she is in need of assimilation - those
above no less than those below need to learn right values from the middle.
* * * * *
For all her serious themes, Frey is a delight to read, not least because she
knew her age group’s sense of humor.
Her jokes can be visual and farcical. Girls speeding on a bobsled leave grim
Aunt Phoebe “sitting in the snowdrift with her lorgnette” (At School, 18).
They can be quick wordplay. A quarantined Winnebago is described in
passing as “the stricken mumpee” (Larks and Pranks, 191).
They are often literary. Trudging rhythmically through snow outside a
clothing store, cash-short Migwan recasts Tennyson’s tragic “Break, break,
break / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!” as the comic “Broke, broke, broke
/ And such clothes in the windows I see!” (At School, 81-82).
Frey’s descriptive skill conjures both wild nature and World War I era
Cleveland, among other settings, in memorable fragments.
From At School (76): “The street sloped down sharply, and the middle of
the road was filled with flying bobsleds, as the young people of the neighborhood
took advantage of the snowy crust . . . Down the long street they
shot, from one patch of light into another as they passed the lamp posts.”
From Maine Woods (74): “When she opened her eyes again the sun was
rising over the lake. No, there were two suns, one in the lake which was
making it boil and send up clouds of steam, and another in the sky which
was drawing up the vapor.”
From Larks and Pranks (101-102): “The Foreign Settlement . . . embraced
some three or four square miles of land adjacent to several large factories.
In it dwelt some few thousand Slovaks, Poles, and Bohemians, packed like
sardines in narrow quarters. The Settlement had its own churches, stores,
schools, theaters, dance halls and amusement gardens, and looked more
like an old world city than a section of a great American Metropolis, with
its queer houses and signs in every language but English.”
From Open Road (152): “The Osgood Harpers lived on the Heights in a
great colonial house set up high on a hill and approached by long, winding
walks. It was more than a mile from the street-car . . . . .”
That last is in a letter by Sarah Brewster, camp name Sahwah (“sunfish”),
out of school and freelancing as a stenographer. She adds, in her wise-gal
tone, “I couldn’t have served a tennis ball in any direction without hitting
a millionaire.”
* * * * *
At the same time, Frey remains a writer of ninety years ago. Her description
can fill nature with human feelings - though her humor stops her
short of being too sweet:
Over the treetops a big yellow hunter’s moon was rising; its
comical face grinning good-naturedly. It looked down on the dark
outlines of a large barn standing in the shadow of a tall tree and
the grin widened perceptibly. Evidently something was happening
on earth (Larks and Pranks, 3).
She renders in dialect all speech not “standard” English. That was part of
any writer’s tool kit (Mark Twain was proud of his dialects), and Frey
applies it alike to her lowest characters and her highest: the German-born
surgeon, Dr. Hoffman.
Her heroes can hold stereotypes of her era. In Open Road Katherine
speaks of “negros” in disparaging terms (49-51), and in Larks and Pranks
(219) she does a minstrel bit that amuses all the Winnebagos including
leader Nyoda. In Solve a Mystery (145) Nyoda, inspired by a Navajo
blanket, recites a “comic” rhyme about an “Injun.”
Such attitudes may have been Frey’s as well, but not necessarily. Sahwah,
during the war, makes a general statement that German Americans are
spies (Do Their Bit, 24). And farm girl Katherine so fears “Chinamen,” though she has never met one, that she can’t ask for help at a city laundry
when lost at night in a snowstorm (Solve a Mystery, 208). Frey’s black
characters are neither comic nor less dimensional than her others - only
uneducated, and hence, unfortunate.
If Frey does reveal a bias as her own, it may be a mainline Protestant
objection to what she calls “superstition” - whether in blacks who believe
in “the debbil” (Solve a Mystery, 99) or white Irish and Slovak Clevelanders
who believe in “the saints” (At School, 154-156).
* * * * *
Juvenile series of Frey’s time are studied today less as literature than, like
other elements of popular culture, incidental social history. Frey is a rich
source for that. But she also shows artistic vision that merits attention in
its own right. Frey’s novels create meaning out of the Progressive Era as
richly as Louisa May Alcott’s do out of the Victorian.
Alcott (1832-1888) published part one of Little Women in 1868. (The
edition cited is the 1983 Signet Classic from New American Library.) In it
the March sisters play an ongoing “game” that they are in Bunyan’s
seventeenth-century Pilgrim’s Progress. They play “in earnest” as a way to
“understand and control” their lives (Little Women 11, 13, 179).
For the Winnebagos, “bound by bonds closer than sisterhood” (Maine
Woods, 195), the game is Camp Fire Girls, created in 1910 -1912. Camp Fire
“Law” had seven points: seek beauty, give service, pursue knowledge, be
trustworthy, hold on to health, glorify work, be happy.
When Alcott’s future writer, Jo, lets younger sister Amy stray onto thin
ice because she burned Jo’s manuscript, Amy’s close call is both literal and
comprehensible as allegory: the hand of providence is guiding Jo’s project
of learning to control her temper (Little Women, 73-75).
When Frey’s future writer, Migwan, learns her younger sister has burned
her manuscript, it is Migwan who finds peril on ice. She flees from her
home to a bluff above Lake Erie:
The lake, to all appearances, was frozen solid out as far as the
one-mile crib. There was a curious stillness in the air, as when the
clock had stopped, due to the absence of the noise made by the
waves dashing on the rocks. Nothing had ever appealed so to
Migwan as did the absolute silence and solitude of that frozen lake
(At School, 99).
To be “enveloped in this solitude” and “get her feet off the earth altogether,”
Migwan walks out on the ice. She begins to fantasize happier times.
Her section of ice breaks free of the mainland. She faces death. The circumstance
approaches pure metaphor - that peculiar and powerful type of text
that cannot be literal because it is all predicate: its subject is elsewhere.
In Frey, such story moments admit mystery. They convey - on a page, in
a text - non-comprehensible drives becoming physical actions and conscious
emotions: the characteristic stuff of modernist literature.
* * * * *
In 1916-1920 Frey sold the copyrights to the ten Camp Fire Girls novels
to the A. L. Burt Company for perhaps $100 each.
In 1919, at age 28, she entered the College for Women at Western Reserve
University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. Tuition
there in 1920 was $175 per year. She reveled in undergraduate life, wrote
humor for college publications, and on graduation in 1923 was inducted
into Phi Beta Kappa.
Her degree was a Bachelor of Science - the college’s preparation for
social work, among other careers. That it was not an arts degree may be
predicted in the novels. Near the end of the final volume, its hero, a new
Winnebago named Agnes Wing, tells her adult confidante, the “famous
author” Miss Amesbury, about “the career of social service she had laid out
for herself ” (Camp Keewaydin, 42, 232).
Of her first seventeen years after college we know only that Frey took a
first job as a secretary, then at some point began a social service career,
probably with the Cleveland Department of Public Health and Welfare.
In June 1940, at the end of the Great Depression, Frey and a colleague at
the city’s Division of Relief, William Miller, drove to nine city facilities in
and around Cleveland where work-relief men performed gardening tasks.
Frey, then age forty-eight, wrote a forty-three-page typed report on the
tour, titled Work Relief Projects in Operation. The account exhibits the same
good humor and dramatic gifts that enliven the novels.
There followed a second seventeen-year period about which we again
have no information. Frey didn’t marry. She died, in 1957, at age 65. On her
death certificate her sister recorded her occupation as “social worker” and
her employer as the City of Cleveland.
* * * * *
Hildegarde Frey enriched her commercial genre. She wrote with a
visionary faith, sociologist’s eye, and gift for metaphorical incident that
lend unexpected breadth and depth to what even today is accomplished,
good-humored entertainment.
Migwan tells Hinpoha, “I’ll never be a great poet . . . but I may be able to
write stories in time, if I learn enough about composition” (Maine Woods,
77). Frey “gave service” by writing books that introduced girls to Camp
Fire. With them she earned the money for an education that would let her
aid the less fortunate of her city. In the process, on her best pages, she also
created memorable literary art.
This article was first published in the spring 2003 issue of the Ohioana Quarterly.
At the time of the article, Taft Eastman was working on a full-length biography of Frey.
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