An estimated 400 people, many of them proud “Haranders” – the affectionate name adopted by alumni of the Harand Camp of the Theatre Arts in Evanston – turned out at a memorial service in Skokie last week to pay tribute to Sulie Harand Friedman, co-founder of the camp and its longtime leader.
Campers from different eras gathered in the Chicago Jewish Funeral Services chapel at 8851 Skokie Blvd. Thursday, Aug. 11, to share memories of Friedman, an innovator in performing arts education. Friedman, an Evanston resident, died Saturday, Aug. 6. She was 97.
The overnight theater camp she helped establish with her sister Pearl in Elkhart Lake, Wis., in 1955 where “No Man is An Island” and “everyone is a star” became a core philosophy, helping thousands of young people develop poise and confidence over the years.
Sulie “was passionate about helping all campers – not only those performing at a high level,” said speaker Jeff Pepowski, who had started as a counselor and ended up as the Camp Harand business manager in his 35 years with the camp.
She saw camp as a place for young people “to grow socially, emotionally, using the theater as a venue,” he said.
Campers bunked in cabins designated by the names of musicals, such as Brigadoon, and Carousel and South Pacific. The camp curriculum struck a balance between the arts and traditional camp activities, camp goers recalled.
For many young Jewish Chicagoans, the camp represented an important step in self development and forging relationships that would last a lifetime.
Rick Weil, one of the speakers last week, said he had seen Friedman, an accomplished performer in one-person shows of classical musicals, when his mother had dragged him to a performance when he was 9 years old, he recalled. He was “mesmerized,” he said.
Then, a few days later, a man had come down his walk, lugging a 50-pound projector and toting a valise seemingly containing nearly “every paper in North America,” to make a recruiting pitch, he recalled.
He “spun a tale” about the camp’s attributes, Weil recalled. Star-dazed, “at the end of an hour I ended up joining the Harand Camp family.”
At camp, “everyone was a star,” including “the least talented, the person who had never seen a stage in their life,” he said.
Mary Beth Liss, another speaker, said she attended the camp in the one-week session for adults held after the regular camp season ended.
Actors came up from the city and occupied the cabins, she said.
During their short stay the actors rehearsed and performed a Broadway musical such as “Camelot” or “South Pacific.”
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“In one week we did it,” she said.
Sulie “was in command – in every inch a diva,” she recalled. At Liss’s first rehearsal, she stood nearby, saying “all right, Miss Liss, let’s see what you can do,’ and I sang my heart out,” Liss recalled.
Errol Pearlman, one of the original campers at the camp and also an accompanist, said he was once asked by his granddaughter, “Would you have met grandmother if you didn’t go to camp?”
“I sat there for a second and said, ‘Sweetheart, probably not,'” he said, speaking at the memorial service.
Sulie “had an incredible memory” for detail of the musicals she performed. “I could never figure out how she did it,” he said.
Some Haranders in the audience also spoke afterward of Sulie’s influence.
Sue Masaracchia-Roberts, a Vernon Hills resident and a member of the audience at last week’s memorial, remembered Harand as a “magical place.”
“I was a counselor there in 1969 and 1970, and my daughters went there in 1988 and 1989,” she said. “It was really a one-of-a-kind place.”
“Their theme song was ‘No Man Is An Island’ and it was pervasive throughout the whole camp,” Masaracchia-Roberts said. “Everybody was equal, everybody got along, and it was just really incredible learning experience.
Jane Waller, a Logan Square resident and social worker, attended the camp in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was part of a group which went every year, she said.
Listening to the speakers and joining in song she realized, “I thought I learned everything I knew from my parents and early years and social work,” she said. “But what I really realized today was everything I learned was from Sulie and Pearl. They were all about peace and love before we could even articulate the words.”
The Harand family would sell their camp property in 1989, with the camp taking up new residence in Wayland Academy, a preparatory school in Beaver Dam, Wis., the family said. In 2005, the camp relocated to Carthage College in Kenosha.
Despite the changes, the spirit of Harand and Sulie’s philosophy never changed, Pepowski said.
“Sulie positively influenced thousands of lives over the years with her determination, passion and her teaching,” he said. “Her legacy at Harand Camp will live on forever.”
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