TORONTO — Though Camp Green Acres founder Eddy Bogomolny won’t reveal his precise age, he amiably chuckles that he launched the camp at its original Montreal site in 1966 when he was “somewhere in his 20s.”
This summer, Green Acres, which Bogomolny established at its current Toronto location in 1987, celebrates 50 years in existence.
Located just north of Markham on the grounds of a former dairy farm, Green Acres has grown into an extensive, multi-facility operation that’s one of the largest private day camps in the country.
Bogomolny, the child of Jewish eastern European immigrants, grew up in Niagara Falls hearing his contemporaries rave about summer camp.
Though his parents couldn’t afford to send him as a camper, Bogomolny was determined to experience what camp was all about.
As a teenager, he spent numerous summers on staff at various overnight camps, including Camp Ogama (now Winnebago) and Camp Wahanowin, which was started by his brother-in-law and sister and is today a sister camp of Green Acres.
From that point on, he was hooked.
“People ask me what makes camp so exciting. For me, it’s exhilarating to see children being children, being themselves. At camp they get to bond, develop friendships and self-confidence and learn new activities,” Bogomolny said.
While he was in his 20s, an opportunity arose to rent land for a camp on the premises of a defunct swim and cabana club outside Montreal, on the condition that if he and his then-business partner were successful, they’d purchase it for the following season.
This early incarnation of Green Acres, which Bogomolny said was “99.9 per cent Jewish,” became the first day camp in Montreal to bring city kids into the country.
“I’ve always tried to be inventive, to go a little beyond what everyone else was doing,” Bogomolny said.
In the early 1980s, the camp’s land was expropriated by the government in development related to Montreal’s Mirabel Airport, which has since closed.
“When the federal government tells you to leave, you pack your bags and leave,” Bogomolny said cheerfully.
He began looking for a site in Toronto, studying the growth pattern of other camps and infrastructural developments in the area before settling on the dairy farm he described as “200 cows and me, plus a barn and a house.”
Building Green Acres into what it is today, a 108-acre camp that accommodates several hundred campers and runs a multitude of programs for kids aged 2.5 to 15, was a labour of love, he stressed, noting that the influx of Montrealers who moved to Toronto in the 1980s helped him overcome the challenge of being the new camp in town.
Despite having hired two directors to help run the camp – his daughter Lori Bogomolny, who’s spent nearly every summer of her life at Green Acres, and Darren Greenspoon, who’s worked there in some capacity for 19 years – Bogomolny remains active in day-to-day operations.
Green Acres boasts amenities like a water park, a rock-climbing wall, mountain bike trails, tennis courts, a ball hockey rink and a recording studio.
Campers can dabble in traditional camp activities like swimming, arts and crafts or archery or streamline their day to focus on specific things like horseback riding or sports.
“We’re extremely flexible in letting kids pursue what they want to do,” emphasized Greenspoon.
Though Green Acres has no explicit Jewish component, today about 70 per cent of its campers are Jewish. Greenspoon said that as the camp has expanded, the number of Jewish campers has actually increased, but shifting demographics in Richmond Hill and Markham has seen parents from a variety of backgrounds also sending their kids to the camp.
“I tried initially to incorporate Jewish content… but found no matter what I did it was considered either ‘too Jewish’ or ‘not Jewish enough,’” Bogomolny said.
It’s clear his sense of passion for the camp experience has hardly dissipated, and Lori said her father is something of a celebrity among campers.
“You see kids get off the bus every day running up to him to give him hugs or shake his hand. When they see him, their eyes light up.”