Recently, I heard from my college friend Jim Glover, a regular reader of my column and who drops me an email every once in a while.

He let me know that he was blogging and asked for some tips to help spread the word. I told him I didn’t know how much help I could be. It’s not like I have thousands of readers. It’s probably more like dozens … maybe only a dozen. Beyond that, as opposed to mine, his posts aren’t for the light at heart. They’re rants on the military industrial complex and the country’s military excursions. Although worthy, it’s heavy stuff for a retired recreation professor … and heavy stuff for a leisure time reader.

Jim’s email reminded me of getting to know him during a shared college internship. We became friends by accident. We took several classes together but didn’t really know each other. As I remember he was somewhat of a gym rat and played a lot of pick-up basketball, while I explored the woods and hills around Cortland County.

There are many different concentrations for recreation majors. While I knew I wanted to work in outdoor recreation, I pictured Jim as a community recreation guy and thought he might end up directing a YMCA or Boys Club. So, I was surprised when he showed up to do an internship with me at Green Lakes State Park east of Syracuse. We were supposed to work with school kids and teach them about nature and the outdoors. There was only one problem. There was no money to transport the students from school to our little outdoor center on the north end of the park.

Our supervisor was apologetic but he, like us, was a victim of the times. It was the fall of 1971 and a classic case of the Federal Government wanting to do something good but finding a way to screw it up. In the era of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” there was funding for an outdoor education program for Syracuse City Schools with a program director (our boss), but no funding for getting the students to the park. It reflected the times in that neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon wanted to raise taxes to fight the Vietnam War and wanted voter-friendly social programs as well.

So what did we do for eight weeks? The first couple of weeks we got oriented to our little building and took some nature walks around the park. In other words, not a whole lot. We read nature guides and tried identifying the trees in the area. We even created a light-up matching board based on plant seed dispersal. We spent quite a bit of our time researching, designing and building the electronic board. On the left were photos of plants ranging from maple trees to a burdock plant and on the right were photos of seeds and how they traveled. Students had to match the plant with the seed. If they did it successfully a light went off. It took a while to make, and it wasn’t until the thing was completed that we learned that there would be no students to share it with.

Two things salvaged the internship and made for a valuable learning experience. The first was being asked to create a one-day workshop for teachers. If you can’t get students, perhaps you can get teachers. We created an entire workshop on seed dispersal. We gave the teachers a lecture in the morning along with a chance to use our light board, and in the afternoon, they had to go out and find real-life examples of plants and their seeds. I think we learned more than the teachers, but that’s the nature of teaching.

The other thing that saved our internship was the Beaver Lake Nature Center, a fledgling nature center on the opposite side of the city. It turned out they had money for bussing. We got to drive from Fayetteville to Baldwinsville and actually led a group of elementary students on the Beaver Lake trails. We finally got some experience leading nature hikes.

The eight-week internship wasn’t the busiest educational experience I ever had, and it was frustrating that I didn’t get to lead and teach as many kids as I had hoped. But it whetted my appetite for teaching and for learning natural history. Although I became more of a wilderness instructor than a naturalist, natural history was always an important component of my training wilderness leaders.

During the internship every week for eight weeks we had to submit reports. Our internship supervisor wasn’t impressed with them because of how vague and superficial they were. Of course, they were vague and superficial because the school district couldn’t provide any students to work with. It was the equivalent of making beef stew without beef.

But there was one high point for me. While neither Jim nor I could write a decent report, at least I could type. So I got a better grade than him.

Which goes to show that in this case at least, my high school typing class was more important than my college recreation courses.