Headquartered in Evanston, Il, Harand Camp has grown over two generations from a risky experiment into a one-of-a-kind midwest institution. Its mission has been simple: mixing the instruction of music, drama, and dance into the usual summer camp agenda of athletics and arts and crafts. The talented Harand sisters were entertainers, but they've left their mark as teachers, instilling in their students the humanist optimism that distinguished the golden age of the American musical.

Half a century ago the Harand sisters made their names here staging inventive solo shows at conventions, ladies' clubs, churches, and synagogues, as well as theaters all around the country. Audiences who saw them in their prime--Sulie in her one-woman adaptation of West Side Story, for instance, and Pearl in her tragicomic solo rendition of Fiddler on the Roof --remember them as dynamic, expressive performers who combined skill and talent with extraordinary force of personality. "Sulie and Pearl made a tremendous contribution to arts education,"says Lois Weisberg, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and a former acting teacher at the camp.

"The Harands' approach should be reinvented today in the public schools. Their model is an extraordinary model for teaching." "I can't believe this camp even existed," says actor Jeremy Piven, who was a Harand camper as a teenager in the late 70s.

In the mid-40s the Harands' solo musical-theater pieces had turned the sisters into minor celebrities who were never at a loss for work...."Wherever we went, parents would ask us, 'Can you teach my children to do that?' says Pearl. "But it was Byron (Sulie's husband) who eventually came up with the idea for the studio. The Harand     sisters' first studio opened in 1952 near the Allerton Hotel. Three other locations followed, including one in the Fine Arts Building, another on Superior Street, and a satellite facility in Glencoe. The studio became a prototype for Harand Camp.

Pearl taught drama; Sulie taught voice; and Byron acted as the business manager. They hired additional staff--drama coaches, dance instructors, musical accompanists--to help develop their inter-disciplinary curriculum. From the start an emphasis was placed both on equal opportunity (three classes cost all of five dollars) and on musical comedy; students ages 5 to 17 rehearsed shows, and the older ones occasionally performed at local high schools.

     The idea of the summer camp took root soon after the studio had opened.  Pearl and Sulie found their students tagging along with them after the last class had ended. "They would follow us all the way home,'" said Pearl. "When their parents would come to pick them up, they'd say, 'Why don't you open a summer camp? You're running one already.'"

     Built in 1885 by Otto and Paulina Osthoff, a German-American couple who also owned the Schlitz Palm Garden in Milwaukee, the resort comprised some 62 acres of beautiful lakefront property with a couple dozen faded white frame buildings. Byron and Sam (Pearl's husband),  immediately set about renovating the aged structures, and in the summer of 1955, with a staff and 87 campers siphoned mainly from the studio in Chicago, Harand Camp opened for business.

In 1979, Uncle Sam passed away at the end of the 25th anniversary season of the camp. Pearl, Sulie and Byron persevered, but in 1989--with town officials hinting at special assessments and the deteriorating buildings sorely in need of renovation--they sold the property at Elkhart Lake. This didn't stop the Harand Sisters, who immediately found another location and began plans to continue the program at Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam. Then in 1994, three weeks into the camp's 40th year, Uncle Byron passed away.

His death marked the end of an era, but, in the camp's new location of Beaver Dam, a younger generation of leaders--Pearl's daughters Nora and Janice and Sulie's daughter Judy-- emerged, even though Pearl and Sulie showed no signs of slowing down.

"Harand Camp will go on," said Pearl. In  March, 1999, Pearl Harand passed away after a long illness, but Harand Camp remains. There were originally four of us and now another four, our daughters Janice, Judy, Nora, Jackie and four grandchildren who will eventually continue in our tradition. Layers of life add up to who we are today. Now Sulie Harand is steering the helm, assisted by co-directors Nora, Judy and Janice.