Howie Pike

Counselor, Assistant Head of Waiters, Kitchen Steward, The Hawk



When Howie was at Tyler Hill Camp in the early sixties, it didn't take long for him to establish himself as a hell-raiser. He was a Color War General in 1963, and upon hearing the score announced at the end of the Sing, indicating that his team had lost by a half point, he punched out one of the little windows of a Social Hall door. As the story goes, Bill went over to him, reached into his shirt pocket and said, "...have a cigar kid."

Howie went on to work for many years with Shelly Schneider, helping to run the Waiter Group. At that time he also began showing up around camp dressed up as "The Hawk," the rival counterpart to the Girls' hero, "The Cisco Kid," played by Artie Sunshine. In the days leading up to the breakout of Color War, when tension was high, these two characters would stage battles against each other, usually when the whole camp was around to watch. Howie, who could fall asleep standing up in the middle of Boys' campus (and he did), pulled off several outrageous stunts, including driving his MG into the dining room, and "flying" from bunks 9 & 10 to the Boys' HCO on a zip-line rig. He also stole the hatchet, right in the middle of the hunt, causing its cancellation, which infuriated Sy Sundick, especially since Howie, working as the Kitchen Steward, wasn't on a Color War team. Subsequently, the hiding places for the hatchet became even harder to locate, thanks to Pike.

Howie had left Tyler Hill Camp at the end of the sixties to work at another camp, but in the early Eighties, he returned to work behind the scenes as the Kitchen Steward, a job he held for most of that decade. Howie experienced a great deal of adversity in his later life, as his son Steven, a camper and a fine athlete at Tyler Hill Camp, developed cancer as a teenager. After a long battle, Steven passed away and Howie, his friends and his family were devastated. A few years later, Howie succumbed to pancreatic cancer, leaving many good friends to mourn him, a great deal of them from the Tyler Hill family.

He will be remembered by the alumni as a spirited part of the Golden Age of Tyler Hill Camp.

Video Clip: Howie takes a bite out of the "hatchet"!