Retiring after 48 years with Horsham camps, Frank Gerome starting biking program endowment

When Frank Gerome retires May 31 as executive director of the College Settlement Camp and the Kuhn Day Camp in Horsham, he’ll leave with 48 years of memories and a legacy for the future.

Gerome, who began as a counselor in 1965 at what then was known as the College Settlement Farm Camp, is creating an endowment to support the camps’ biking program. With a personal contribution of $5,000, Gerome is establishing the fund in memory of his mother, the late Mary K. Mariotti, who raised her family in South Philadelphia where community settlement houses were an integral part of the neighborhoods. They provided social, cultural, recreational and educational programs to immigrants and the generations that followed. The College Settlement Farm Camp was begun by the College Settlement House which was located not far from Gerome’s home. Both the College Settlement Camp and the Kuhn Day Camp serve financially disadvantaged youth from the greater Philadelphia area.

Gerome is hoping the endowment will grow so it can pay the program’s annual operating costs, which include repairs and tune-ups, replacing parts such as pedals, tires, chains, tubes and air pumps, and purchasing water bottles.   

The biking program is close to Gerome’s heart. He started it in 1971 as part of a senior camp program he initiated for older children – now the Teen Adventure Program. He was a unit leader, then, and supervised overnight biking trips for which College Settlement had to rent bikes or use “clunkers” people had donated.

Gerome grew to love biking, he said, and has been an avid cyclist for many years. He credits it – and the physicality of camp work – with transforming  an “overweight kid” into an athletic adult.

Before he associated with College Settlement at the age of 18 – the youngest counselor at the time - Gerome worked for two summers at “Crum Creek,” the Reed Street Settlement House’s camp in Newtown Square. Reed Street was his neighborhood settlement house and he worked at its after-school program throughout high school (South Philadelphia High) and college (West Chester).

Gerome said his Garrett Street neighborhood, where everyone spoke Italian and “we addressed the senior men as ‘Signore’ and the women as ‘Donna,’” provided “a very supportive, loving community” which gave him a “solid foundation.” It also gave him a respect for authority, structure and organization, he said, which served him well, first as a teacher, then throughout his career in camp management.  

He started at College Settlement full-time in 1973 and was tasked with running the summer camps and launching an “Outdoor School,” an environmental education program offered in the spring and fall for 5^th through 8^th  grade classes from area public and private schools.

Gerome moved into the 500-square-foot “Lawnside Cottage,” on the camps’ 235-acre property off Witmer Road, his home for the next 27 years. He shared space with three “Westie” terriers, and, though his living quarters were small, his time at the cottage provided “some of the happiest days of my life,” he said.

Gerome was named executive director in 1982 and eventually moved into Laurel House, considerably increasing his living space.

College Settlement was “very different” back then and also “very much the same” as today, he said. “In 1982, there were two maintenance employees, a part time secretary and the executive director. We were servicing about the same amount of campers (approximately 560). There have been remarkable changes since then but what has not changed in all that time are our values.

 “I suppose if Leonard (Leonard Ferguson, his predecessor) or Anna Freeman Davies, the founder of the Camp, were to come back, they would immediately recognize what we are doing and I am sure there would be big smiles.

            “It has been a wonderful run,” Gerome said. “As I look back on my 48-year connection with the camps, I feel I have been so very lucky - a little, overweight Italian kid from a row house in South Philly, growing up and being given the opportunity to be the executive director of probably the oldest and certainly the best Settlement House movement in the country. I hope I have poised the camps for the next exciting step in their history. I will be with them in spirit.”

            Gerome may be leaving College Settlement, but he’ll still be involved in the greater Horsham community. In July, he’ll take the reins of the Rotary Club of Horsham and will continue to be involved in area activities.

            Anyone wishing to contribute to the biking program endowment to honor Gerome may send a check, made payable to College Settlement of Philadelphia, to the College Settlement office, 600 Witmer Road Horsham, PA, 19044.  For additional information about the endowment, contact Jan Finnegan, College Settlement director of development, at 215-542-7974 or jan@campmanagement.org.