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