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be...@uncavx.unca.edu
FRANK D. "CHIEF" BELL, 1898-1993
Frank Bell died in his sleep on Thursday, October 28th, at a
nursing home near Lake Summit, NC. He was 95 years old.
Bell lived a productive and enormously influential life. I
say enormously influential, because if you live in western
North Carolina and love its rivers and wild places as much as
the readers of this newsletter do, the chances are good that
Chief's life has intersected yours in some way, direct or
indirect.
At the very least, you have come in contact with Chief's
legacy when you have run Frank Bell's Rapid on the French
Broad. The next time you approach the lip of that drop --
blind to the maneuvers required due to the gradient, hearing
only the oncoming roar and seeing only the mist thrown up from
the hole at the bottom left -- ask yourself the following
question: "What must this have been like in the 1920's,
paddling a wood and canvas canoe?"
Chief knew, because that's the way he first ran it, as part of
a group running the French Broad all the way to its confluence
with the Mississippi. He got hammered, too, taking the now-
famous "deep swim," and becoming the charter member of what is
now a large club with a rapidly growing membership.
Bell was an early exemplar of the Go for It attitude, an
attitude he carried into all his activities, from canoeing and
riding, to his truly terrifying jeep rides and light plane
flights -- activities he continued well into his eighties.
Above all else, however, Bell was an educator. As an educator
should be, he was passionately in love with the subject that
he taught, and capable of transmitting that passion to the
many students he encountered. His subject was the development
of better young people through the acquisition of outdoor
skills. The setting of his academy was the two camps he
founded -- Mondamin for boys, in 1922; and Green Cove, for
girls, in 1944.
Long before it was fashionable to participate in non-
competitive wilderness sports, Bell had made them the
cornerstone of his educational philosophy. He disliked the
competitive nature of conventional sports, something he felt
brought out the worst in both the designated winners and
losers, and sought instead those sports that developed within
an individual a reverence for the natural world and an
appreciation of the skills necessary for safe passage in that
world. As such, he was against specialization, encouraging
his campers to develop a basic competence in all wilderness
skills before choosing one in which to specialize.
Chief's influence on the thousands of young people who came
through his camps is impossible to measure, but it is accurate
to say that many of the camps run in the Southeast, as well as
institutions like the Nantahala Outdoor Center, National
Outdoor Leadership School, and Outward Bound have been staffed
and run by people who were shaped in large part by their
attendance at Mondamin and Green Cove.
An interesting development, and one not exactly to Bell's
taste, has been the success in competitive canoeing of many of
students of the programs he founded. Olympians Jamie McEwan
and John Burton, C-2 World Champions Lecky and Fritz Haller,
present C-1 Junior Team Members David and Andrew Bell (his
grandsons), and many other National Team members both past and
present, have passed through the Mondamin canoe program.
Though understandably proud of those efforts, he maintained to
the end that he was less concerned with the competitive
success of his students than with their love of their sport.
Bell travelled extensively: Alaska, North and South America,
Africa, and Antarctica, to name a few of the lands he visited.
Everywhere he went he saw the world with an intense
appreciation for its beauty, a beauty he wanted to experience
-- as with everything else -- first hand. His description of
storm clouds over the Amazon -- seen in his eighties -- reads
like the impassioned vision of much younger man. Chief loved
life and lived it as an intensely realized voyage of
discovery.
So, the next time you approach that big rapid on the French
Broad, squinting into the spray and late afternoon sun, tip
your hat or touch your helmet in memory of one who was there
before you: one who was there first of all.
Gordon Grant
A memorial paddle on the French Broad will be held Saturday,
November 20. A memorial service will be held at 2pm, Sunday,
November 21, at a location to be announced. For details call
Gordon: (704) 254-5181 or e-mail me (Chris Bell,
Be...@uncavx.unca.edu). Memorials may be made to a scholarship
fund c/o Camps Mondamin and Green Cove, PO BOX 8, Tuxedo, NC
28784.
This obituary will appear in the November issue of Messing
About, the newsletter of the Western Carolina Paddlers. The
November issue will also include an article on the inaugural
Papertown Slalom -- a citizen's canoe and kayak race organized
by incoming WCP president Penny Hess and Olympic gold medalist
Scott Strasbaugh, WCP safety and education chair Slim Ray's
monthly river safety column, a humorous look at "Shuttle
Puppies" and a description of the State of NC's planned
purchase of the river corridor containing the class IV Upper
Green, class V+ Green River Narrows and class II Lower Green.
E-mail me for a hard copy (Be...@uncavx.unca.edu).