Wawepex Through the Years

[Alan Bernheimer Jr]

My first experience of Wawepex was in the 1950s, when it was home each summer to the children's Nature Study courses. By the mid-1960s, the building had been condemned as a firetrap and was used to store spare furniture and mattresses. A teenager at the time, I nonetheless set up housekeeping there for several summers. We are lucky the building survived my squatting, since a stray cigarette ash from a party one night in the "mattress room" produced the usual result, and the morning sun rose on the sodden remains of the offending item, scattered on the lawn behind Jones lab, where we had dragged it into the spring and hacked it open with a Boy Scout hatchet.