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02/01/2017 07:00 AMRick Camp, the outgoing president of the Madison Historical Society, says that his work with the group is sort of like teaching music appreciation.
“I hear people say, ‘I hate classical music,’” he says, “and then all of a sudden somebody explains to them what’s going on in a particular piece of music: who it was that composed it and why and what he did and what’s different about it.
“You now have something that you know about that thing, and that helps you want to learn maybe more about something else of a related interest.”
The historical society, in Rick’s opinion, helps Madison residents appreciate both the past and the present.
“It’s our job to make sure that they know that the history of the town is important to them,” he says, “because it’s one of the reasons why they probably came here in the first place—not that they knew the history, but that they could see it all around them.”
That appreciation, Rick hopes, will strengthen residents’ commitment to preserving Madison’s historical character.
“The town has done a pretty good job of sort of freezing itself in a moment of time,” he says. “Not every New England town has been able to successfully do that.”
In 2017, the historical society’s outreach is taking the form of a little self-celebration. The society is marking its 100th anniversary with an ambitious slate of activities that will last through the year and beyond.
“You’re a hundred once, you know?” says Rick. “It gives us the opportunity to talk about ourselves and to make ourselves much more visible.
“We’re attempting to literally take over the town in the Fourth of July weekend,” he says. “The intention is to have some of our collection in virtually every store window that we can get it into.
“If there’s no window available to accommodate an object, we’re in the process now of gathering photographs of the buildings in their oldest state we can find. We will blow up these photographs and put them in the window.”
Also that weekend, Rick says, “we’ll be participating with the Madison Cultural Arts at the Concert on the Green. I’m working now with Phil Ventre, the conductor of the Wallingford Symphony, on what could be a musical trip over 100 years.”
The society will also be polling residents to nominate things that they love about Madison that will appear on an alphabetical poster.
“We would like the person whose recommendation is selected to help illustrate it or photograph it themselves,” says Rick.
“It’s a real attempt at bringing the community into the whole thing and making them ask the question ‘What is it that I love about this town?’
“In the fall,” Rick says, “we have planned a gala ball, which will be at the Madison Beach Hotel.”
And sometime when it’s still warm, the society will hold a fund-raiser called the Evening in White, a pop-up party in a tent in which the décor will be white and everyone will be asked to attend in white outfits.
Rick seems a little worried about overbooking, since the society will also be holding its annual house tour and its antiques show on the Green and will be continuing its exhibition and lecture series on Madison’s role in World War I.
Working with the schools, the Congregational Church, the Deacon John Grave House, and the Charlotte L. Evarts Memorial Archives, the historical society also provides annual tours of the Green and its environs for Madison 2nd and 5th graders. (“We start early,” says Rick, laughing.)
Rick praises the work of Bob Gundersen, a historical society board member who is gradually creating a photographic archive of the 4,000 to 5,000 items in the society’s collection. The results are posted in albums on the society’s Flickr page.
“By summer last year it had been up for not quite a year,” Rick says. “We’d already had a million hits, which is an astonishing feat for a small organization such as us.
“We have gotten feedback from people literally all over the world. The nice thing is that they’ll make comments. They’ll tell us where we may be wrong in our description of the item.”
Rick is approaching the end of his second two-year term as president of the society with some unfinished business. For example, the society has begun developing a mobile-phone-based tour of the historical areas around the Green.
Rick’s biggest ambition concerns the Allis-Bushnell House, one of two buildings owned by the society (the other is Lee Academy, on the Green).
“We have a house museum,” he says, “and house museums are dropping like flies. In the state of Connecticut, probably 25 years ago there were 250 house museums; we’re now down to maybe 60.
“And the reason why,” he says, “is nobody visits them, nobody cares. You’re sort of caught in the dilemma of ‘If you’re open they will come, but if they don’t come, why are you open?’
“My hope was to actually make more of a museum than a house museum out of the Allis-Bushnell house, making a flexible space so we can hold events in it, but by the same token have permanent exhibits of historically important things that we have from our collection that could rotate.
“But that kind of thing costs a lot of money, and it’s very, very difficult to get.”
In the meantime, the society has spent money on such projects as installing a modern kitchen for events, painting the house—it required lead remediation—and putting in a bathroom compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
When the roof needed replacing, Rick and the society decided to go with modern asphalt shingles, reasoning that the roof isn’t that visible from the street.
“Plus, the upkeep is much more with cedar,” Rick says, sounding a lot like anyone who is responsible for maintaining an older home.
“I have spent most of my time and effort working on these projects and trying to raise the money to pay for them,” Rick says. “All in all over the last four years, I think it’s been around 200-and-some thousand dollars. We’ve done a lot of grant writing.”
Rick acknowledges that he’s competing for donations with other local historical organizations, as well the town’s many traditional charities and service groups.
“All of us are out there trying to raise money from the same pool of 18,000 bodies in the town of Madison,” he says.
Rick’s knowledge and love of Madison history informs how he tells his own story. Born in 1944 in Long Island City, New York, he spent summers in Madison in homes owned by his mother’s family.
In 1950, his father, a reporter for The New York Times, built a home on Scotland Road, working with a local carpenter.
“At the time,” Rick says, “two cars could barely pass each other on Scotland Road. There was a Scotland Road dairy on what is now the corner of Hull Road. So we used to have our milk delivered from a quarter mile away.
“The population of the town was around 3,000 and around 6,500 in the summer, so literally it doubled.
“I was one of the first classes in the then brand-new Island Avenue School, and then came up to the Academy School for middle school, and then I was the second graduating class out of the then-new Daniel Hand High School, which is now Polson. My class was the class of ‘62, and there were only 50 kids in it.”
Upon graduating, Rick says, “I was given a greetings from Uncle Sam, so I went into the Air Force. I was in there from ‘63 to ‘67.”
For 18 months, Rick was attached to a squadron in Vietnam.
“I was in air-sea rescue,” he says. “Our job was to go and find the pilot.”
Rick earned a degree in medieval literature from the University of Connecticut, then pursued a PhD in the same field at the University of Washington, where he was also a teaching assistant.
“I left before completing my dissertation because I no longer had any money,” he says. “So I came back here and got a job in advertising, and I’ve pretty much I’ve been in advertising and marketing my entire life.”
He managed to build his career within commuting distance of Madison, working with companies including Reed’s Department Stores, Lender’s Bagels, and the First Constitution Bank.
While working in New Haven, Rick got deep into volunteer work.
“I was president of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven,” he says. “I was vice-president of the New Haven Symphony; I was on the board of the Schubert Theater and president of the Performance Studio.”
For a year in the early ‘90s, Rick was the publisher of a short-lived newspaper called New Times Connecticut. Since then, he has run his own marketing and advertising company out of his home, the one his father built in 1950.
He says, “I used to tell people the toughest part of my commute was not to step on the cat when I walked down the stairs.”
Prior to joining the Madison Historical Society, Rick was the treasurer of the Deacon John Grave Foundation.
“I left because I was on the track to be president,” he says, “and I did not want to be president.”
Then a past president of the historical society asked to pick Rick’s brains about the Allis-Bushnell House.
“From that,” Rick says, “I came on board as treasurer. And then when the current president was leaving town, I blinked.”
Rick, who is divorced, has one daughter, three grandchildren, and a great-grandson. He notes that that means five generations of the family has been in his Madison home.
He says he enjoys traveling with his “significant other,” Barbara Lessard, especially to Scotland. The couple visits her condominium in Florida, but Rick isn’t thinking of moving there soon.
“They don’t allow dogs over 25 pounds,” says Rick “and I have a golden retriever, and I ain’t leaving him behind.”
Leaving the presidency of the historical society will allow Rick more time both to travel and to enjoy Madison.
“This town is a very, very special town in the way it’s been preserved,” he says. “You know, you drive down, let’s say, Wall Street at dusk when the lights come on, there’s something very spellbinding, and when you go past the Green at dusk when the lights are starting to come on and the sun is going down, and you see that Green and that church, you know, you say, ‘Why would anybody want to live somewhere else?’”