‘We Are Very Much a Family Business’: Camp Playland To Mark 60-Year Milestone

Walter Bloom had served as a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II and when he returned at its close to his young bride, Pearl, in their native Brooklyn, he set out to find a job.

A background from the Savage School for Physical Education and a bachelor’s degree in guidance from Rutgers University in hand, Bloom found work at a public school on Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn—and he stayed there until a kid pulled a knife on him while breaking up a fight, his widow recalled on a recent afternoon.

“He said, ‘I went through the war, I came out OK—I’m not going to stay here,’ ” Pearl Bloom recalled from the sunny living room of the combination home-and-camp-building where she and her husband would launch a beloved local business while raising their family—an overlapping work-life world that has served generations of New Canaanites well.

In 1947, the young couple moved out of the city and into Stamford’s Cove neighborhood. Walter Bloom found work as physical education director at the Stamford Jewish Center and, two years later, as a teacher at the newly built Dolan Middle School. It’s a job he would hold for 20 years while he and Pearl created and nurtured a new—and, everyone said, risky—business about which Walter Bloom long had dreamt.

“His dream was to have his own camp,” said his son, Gary, for four decades the owner-director of Camp Playland. “Everyone said he was crazy.”

Maybe he was—just two camps served the area at the time—but Walter Bloom also was determined as well as experienced, having directed summer camps for the Jewish Centers in Waterbury and Stamford.

And when it opens in a few months, Camp Playland will mark its 60^th summer. It’s a milestone that the Bloom family celebrates with its campers, counselors, parents and staff—a large and ever-growing group that’s become commingled as successive generations of campers often grow up to become counselors and see their own children and even grandchildren attending.

“We are very much a family business,” Gary Bloom said. “It’s important to us.”

Set on a sprawling 18 acres and featuring a slew of events and activities for campers, each with its own dedicated area and interconnected by paths—swimming, baseball, drama, music, tennis, gymnastics, karaoke, archery, fishing, lacrosse, science exploration, dance, tree-climbing, ropes and more—Camp Playland has carved out a special niche in New Canaan, a town to which the Bloom family has developed strong ties, and where half of its camper families live.

“New Canaan is a great town,” Gary Bloom said. “We meet a lot of people who are moving out of New York City, with young families and they come through here and I always commend them for choosing New Canaan, because New Canaan is a great town and it’s a great town to raise a family, and more so than ever before. I say that all the time. When I was a kid, you did not see families at restaurants. Now you go into town and see tons of families. Rather than getting babysitters, people bring their kids with them. New Canaan is a great town for young families, and with Waveny and all the other things that happen. We feel very much a part of that.”

And they are.

A member business of the New Canaan Chamber of Commerce, Camp Playland regularly supports events of the Young Women’s League and Newcomers Club of New Canaan. Gary’s son, Steven Bloom, attended New Canaan Country School, and now serves on its Board of Trustees, while his wife, Hayley, is a teacher there. The camp also has a business relationship with Tony’s Deli, which helps feed its campers through the summer.

In the summer of 1957, the time of the launch of Camp Playland—so named by Walter because he felt it had a positive connotation from nearby Rye Playland—it was Pearl Bloom making all the sandwiches. There were 65 kids in that initial class, she recalled, and Adele Breslow—wife of Dr. Seymour Breslow, a cousin of the Breslows that ran their eponymous and well-remembered variety shop on Elm Street—ran arts and crafts while the kids swam, played sports and ate under a large tent.

At that time, when Camp Playland opened, Walter and Pearl Bloom ran it on 10 acres. Dr. Breslow, a Stamford dentist, had put up money in a 50-50 partnership made on a handshake with the Blooms (Walter Bloom also had borrowed money from his father-in-law to help get Camp Playland off the ground), and they set about clearing parts of the woods to make room for a baseball field and swimming pool, and a place for the tent.

When the Blooms found that the camp was being vandalized in the evenings when they weren’t there, they decided to live there, and set about building two private homes on the property, Gary Bloom said.

Those houses are still standing—Walter and Pearl raised their family in one, and later, Gary Bloom and his wife, Barbara, raised their family in another.

New Canaan attorney Jerry Silverberg offered his counsel to help guide the Blooms through legal proceedings as they carved out the institutional use for the parcel, Pearl Bloom recalled, and their rather famous next-door neighbor to the north also was very supportive.

“Philip Johnson was a very good neighbor, because we wanted to build these big buildings out here, which was unique, and Philip Johnson would always write letters of support and he was a very supportive man,” Gary Bloom said. “It wasn’t really a personal relationship with him—he was in another world. Back then, he was only here on weekends, really. Philip Johnson would say, ‘Look, I’m not going to be your blood brother, but I am going to be your very good neighbor.’ And he was.”

And the Blooms said they have fostered positive relationships with their neighbors on Ponus Ridge ever since.

The single entrance and egress to the camp is down a hilly driveway that runs west off of the ridge, toward the Stamford side, and Steven and Hayley Bloom now are raising their own family in a house right beside it. Like his dad, Steven found, unlike his siblings, that he has a true vocation to help operate Camp Playland. He holds a master’s degree in camp administration and is currently work toward a second master’s degree, in educational leadership.

For Steven Bloom, what sustains him in the field and in Camp Playland specifically are the relationships fostered among campers, and the life skills the kids learn.

“It’s really all about the campers,” Steven Bloom said. “I have an affinity with Camp Playland, because I grew up on this property and I was always with the kids in the preschool and the camp. Always playing with kids, always with children. I was a counselor through high school and college.”

Camper-turned-counselor—it’s a regular evolution, and not just among Bloom family members themselves.

Matt Dudics, a Camp Playland director and facilities manager, said his father and mother both had worked at the camp for 25 years, and that he himself met his wife there, and plans to have his son start as a camper as soon as he’s of age (pre-K camp starts with 3-year-olds).

I remember doing hamburgers and hot dogs up on the trail,” Matt Dudics said with a smile. “I remember doing roller skating in the rink, swimming in the pool, going down to reservoir doing hikes in the woods.”

As Gary Bloom said: “This is very much a family affair.”

“At this point, having three generations of campers is not unusual. We have many families where the grandparents attended camp in the ’50s and ‘60s and then their children attended in the ‘90s and now their grandchildren are attending. So we have close relationships with the people. We have five or six couples that are married because they met their spouses here as counselors. So you do develop very strong relationships with the kids.”

If not for Gary Bloom’s intervention some 40 years ago, Camp Playland may not have survived—certainly not as the deeply family-oriented business it is today.

Gary Bloom had left home to attend the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 (he eventually would transfer within the university to its College of Arts & Sciences, and earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology), and a few years later, in the early 1970s, the Breslows decided to stop working at the camp.

“My father, who was working very hard, had had a heart attack previous to this, and he said, ‘OK let’s sell,’ but it’s not easy to sell,” Gary Bloom recalled. “I was in college at that time and I realized I did not want them to sell the camp. And so I told my father that I would like to buy the Breslows’ portion of the camp, and he helped me.”

He bought their share in 1973 and worked as a teacher at Turn of River Middle School in Stamford—eventually meeting Barbara, his would-be wife, who was teaching at Westover Elementary School in Stamford. In 1976, they opened Playland Nursery School with about 15 kids, and it has grown steadily into a well-respected preschool and business that’s operated during the non-summer-camp months.

In 1992, Pearl and Walter Bloom sold their share of Camp Playland to their son, and continued to live in the family’s house on the property.

“My father never really retired,” Gary Bloom said. “My father loved camp. He would always work here. He died in the year 2000, after camp was over. He held out that summer. He would not die during camp. He waited.”

Sustained, no doubt, by a family trait that Walter and Pearl passed on to Gary, and now to Steven Bloom.

As Gary Bloom said: “What keeps you going, and what makes every summer exciting, is when you see kids here having fun with friends and learning new skills.”