It was the middle of June 1965, and Camp OAC had a problem. Camp was two weeks away, and the cook had just withdrawn after the sudden loss of her husband. Finding someone in the Okanagan to cook for a camp full of hungry children, on that kind of notice, seemed impossible.
The camp's chair, a young priest named Ray Turner, had one idea left. He called his mother.
Maggie Turner was 60 years old. She had raised six children, but she had never cooked for a crowd, let alone a summer camp. She said yes anyway.
By the end of that first summer, she had a new name. To campers and staff she was simply "Cookie," and she became far more than the person behind the serving counter. She was the one who noticed the homesick camper, the one with a kind word and a little extra at mealtime, an unofficial Camp Mother to a whole generation of kids.
Deborah McGovern, who went to Camp OAC in the 1960s and still remembers it well.
“I was one of six kids, so we didn’t get those kinds of treats at home,” she says. “Cookie made a lot of cookies. Cookies and hot chocolate at night was the routine, and that was a big deal. We thought, ‘Wow, we get to eat cookies!’”
When the season ended, Cookie asked if she could come back. She did, summer after summer, for nearly a decade, until she retired at 70. She called those years at Camp OAC the happiest of her life.
A family woven into camp
Cookie's influence didn't stop at the kitchen door. Every one of her six children went on to serve the church, among them Ray, who has now served as a priest in the Diocese of Kootenay for 63 years. Camp OAC became part of the family's story, too. Two of Maggie's granddaughters were married in the camp's outdoor chapel, and another family wedding was planned there before the 2023 wildfire.
That's the quiet power of a place like Camp OAC. It gets passed down. Parents who were campers send their children. Grandparents who volunteered in the kitchen cheer on grandchildren at the campfire. Faith, friendship and belonging travel from one generation to the next.
Feeding the next generation
Now Maggie's children, Joe, Alfred, Mary, Stan, Ray and Louise, are honouring her in the most fitting way imaginable. With the help of friends, they are raising funds for the new kitchen at Camp OAC, so that the place where Cookie fed so many will once again feed the campers of tomorrow.
Thank you to the Turner family for sharing Cookie with us, and for reminding us that camp is built by people as much as by buildings.