Community Builder
Hard work, hometown values, and helping hands have enabled Phil Camp (CGS’56, COM’58) to achieve in all his endeavors.
By Rob Zagarella
In accepting the highest honor at the 2007 College of General Studies Distinguished Alumni Award Reception, Phil Camp (CGS’56, COM’58) began to recount the story of his career: “I was a high school sophomore writing for the oldest weekly newspaper in the state of Vermont, the Vermont Standard, which ironically, I own today.”
His matter-of-fact delivery, without a hint of braggadocio, drew a burst of laughter from the audience. Camp’s career indeed started with, and has led back to, the Vermont Standard. Along the way he blazed trails in ski industry marketing, earning two lifetime achievement awards from major industry organizations as well as induction into the Vermont Ski Museum Hall of Fame. For all his success, however, Camp has never lost sight of the values he learned growing up in a tight-knit mountain community: value a love for your work more than the paycheck it brings; work hard; and accept a hand when it is offered and offer one whenever you can. It is the credo by which he runs his newspaper today.
Through curiosity, luck, or fate, Camp’s first break came one afternoon in 1952 when he wandered downstairs from his grandfather’s funeral home to the Vermont Standard offices. He ran into then-owner and publisher Benton Dryden, who sat him down in an old wooden chair and asked him what he liked and didn’t like about the paper. Camp, already a standout skier at Woodstock High School, noted the paper’s lack of sports coverage. Agreeing, Dryden offered him a job. “I was lucky to be able to spell my name right,” says Camp. “And I couldn’t type. But that same day I became the first-ever sports editor of the Vermont Standard.”
He covered sports for the paper typing with two fingers on an old Royal typewriter for the next two years, until he was ready to graduate from high school. With no vision of the future and no college plans, Camp figured his best option was to join the Army. Dryden, however, saw potential in his young apprentice and convinced him to give college a shot. He arranged for Camp to take the College Boards at nearby Dartmouth College. When Camp became frustrated and walked out halfway through, Dryden began calling colleges on his behalf. The only positive response he received was from Boston University’s Junior College, a predecessor of CGS, which agreed to accept him if he got two Cs in summer school.
“I guess I wasn’t a very safe bet,” Camp admits.
“I worked,” he says. “I sweated. I got a C and a C+. And the minute those marks were printed I grabbed them and ran across the Charles and plopped down my transcript.” Unfortunately, Camp’s elation would be short-lived. About three weeks into the fall semester, he was summoned to the office of a college administrator, who advised him that perhaps the smart thing to do would be to go home and join the family funeral business. “That conversation became the fabric of my being,” he says. “It rang in my ears.” Refusing to go home and admit defeat, he attacked his studies with renewed vigor. He would go on to make the Dean’s List all four years at BU and was voted president of his class, the student council, and his fraternity.
Camp credits the Junior College community with helping him to discover and achieve his full potential, noting the dean who knew students by name, professors who took him to their homes on the weekend to help him study, and a janitor named Tony Sousa who lent him $25 to take his girlfriend to the Valentine’s dance. “The fix was in,” says Camp. “We already knew the gal I was dating was going to be voted queen, so it would be tough not to go.” Camp helped pay for school, and pay back Sousa, by mopping floors and emptying wastebaskets as a janitor’s assistant for the remainder of his college career.
“Everybody was willing to help anyone who wanted to succeed,” says Camp. “Very few times in life can one look back and say with confidence and conviction, ‘This made the difference in my life.’ But I can when it comes to this place.”
Following college, Camp was hired as director of marketing for the Killington Ski Area, becoming the industry’s first-ever ski area marketing professional. His innovative concepts for promoting Killington included holding holiday events that prolonged ski season (such as free Thanksgiving dinners with each lift ticket and an annual Easter costume parade) and holding fashion shoots on the mountain. He was also a pioneer in market research, arranging for airplane flights over rival areas to monitor attendance and conducting exit polls to gather information on customer satisfaction. At one point under Camp’s direction, Killington had grown into the largest ski area in the country. His accomplishments proved to be no fluke when he took on a similar role with Sugarbush Resort, doubling its revenues in his two-year tenure.
Camp continued to break ground in the industry — in 1968 he founded the New England Ski Area Council (NESAC), which seeks to improve the reliability of snow-condition reporting and to educate and attract potential customers to the sport. Begun in Camp’s woodshed, heated by a potbelly stove, NESAC has grown into a vast network of computers, broadcast equipment and studios, and technical support professionals. Reports on ski and weather conditions are disseminated to media outlets worldwide, reaching an audience of more than twenty million.
He also founded and directed Phillip Camp Associates, a ski industry public relations firm, and Mountain News Services, a ski industry information dissemination service. In 1980 he served as press chief of alpine events for the Winter Olympics.
In 1981, in the midst of a career promoting the ski industry to an international audience, Camp was bothered by a lack of communication in his own community. Woodstock had just experienced a series of failed civic projects, leaving the town in discord. At about the same time, the owner of the Vermont Standard expressed interest in leaving the business, and Camp saw an opportunity to give back to his community through the same vehicle that had given him his start, so he purchased the paper. “I was frustrated that, in a community like this, there was no way for everybody’s point of view to be heard,” he says. “This is a community, not a boxing ring.”
Today, under Camp, the Standard maintains a local focus and serves as a conduit through which Woodstock residents can share their opinions. “We think locally, not globally,” he says. “This is not the New York Times of Woodstock, Vermont.”
In the spirit of easing community tensions and promoting cooperation among neighbors, the Standard recently cosponsored a series of public forums called Woodstock Today and Tomorrow. “We’ve been able to change the whole tenor of the community,” says Camp. “I talk a lot about how I was helped to reach my full potential. Now, being able to have people influence their own futures in my community because of the efforts we’ve gone to — that’s a reward I never expected.”
First published in the fall 2007 issue of Collegian, the alumni newsletter of the College of General Studies.