While most campers and parents anticipate the first summer at Dudley for months and prepare for weeks, #11871 Kevin McCormick arrived at Dudley in the Summer of 1975, three days after Dudleyite and YMCA Director Bob Stubbs offered him a scholarship position. He met the new Dudley director, Willie Schmidt, and was placed in Colgate cabin with a leader who was also new to Dudley, #11846 Tom Canning. It was the first of six summers of fun, growth, and broadening of horizons.

Three days after that final summer as a leader, Kevin was at Cornell University, where he studied biology, was a member of the swim team and met his wife Catherine “Kitty” Cantwell. He then moved south to Richmond where he found old Dudley friends and recruited a few new campers. In between Dudley Reunions, he picked up degrees in Gerontology, Anatomy, and Medicine before returning to New York for his residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Rochester. After completing a fellowship in Geriatrics, he joined the medical school faculty. He is still there caring for elderly patients, teaching, and providing administrative leadership. In recent years this has included serving as Chief Medical Officer for Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville, NY.

Says Kevin, “While I love many things about my career, one of the best perks is getting to come back to Dudley as the camp doctor for nearly two decades. (That’s a lot of Dudley T-shirts!) I also had the opportunity to serve on the Dudley Board from 2005-2009 and again from 2010-2012. Those were exciting days for Dudley. We finally expanded our mission to include girls and bought a beautiful camp for them, complete with a fantastic director! We found a new director for the boys too. We dealt with landslides on both sides of the lake and prepared for the H1N1 Flu epidemic; which looks pretty trivial these days. Serving on the board not only gave me more justification for spending time at Dudley, it gave me the opportunity to make many new Dudley friends and renew ties with old ones.”

“As a former camper, leader, Dudley parent (3 sons and 2 daughters), and camp doctor I will bring all those experiences to the board, not to recreate the Dudley of my youth but to meet current and future challenges so that diverse future generations will have the same opportunities I did, regardless of how they came to Dudley or on which side of the lake they spend their summers,” concluded Kevin.