History

SUMMARY

While most ventures are the result of careful planning, summer programs for boys being no exception, the Berwick Boys Foundation sprang into being spontaneously.  Two struggling young doctors, Dr. H. Meredith Berry and Dr. Walter Wichern ("Doc" and "Wick" as we know them) however have drawn upon their experiences with programs such as the Boys Scouts of America and the Big Brother Program, to guide the growth of the Berwick program which began so unexpectedly some nearly 60 years ago.  The result has been the growth which has assumed the use of a 750 acre island two miles off the coast of Maine where teenage boys build and direct their own camp and learn the necessity of cooperation for survival.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

The two doctors met in New York City in 1946 at Roosevelt Hospital. Doc had just returned from World War II service as a Major and a Surgeon and Wick was serving his term as an Intern. Although Doc was Wick's immediate superior, he had been away from organized medicine for three and a half years, and the younger Wick was more thoroughly acquainted with new medicines and procedures. Consequently, the two worked closely, each benefiting from the other. Outside their duties they also found much in common. Both felt stifled by the City because they had been familiar with outdoor life and the pleasures of hunting and fishing. Doc had spent his summers as a boy on a lake in Pennsylvania and later became active with the Boys Scouts program and a summer camp on Long Island. Dr. Wichern had spent one summer on Forbes Island working with a professor of anatomy who was making a study of deer antlers.  In medical school, Wick had studied and spent leisure time on Naushon Island off Cape Cod. Such mutual interests led the two to search for a place where they could escape the city, hunt fish, and "raise Cain" where nobody would be bothered and where nobody would bother them. Such conditions meant owning a lake and the surrounding shoreline or an island. In summer during their two week vacation, they began their search for a place where they could relax in piece and quiet.

To find an Island, the two doctors began searching the newspaper advertisements, as real estate listings were too expensive. At long last they saw an advertisement "For Sale: Dyer Island off the coast of Maine, owned by the Maine Seaboard Paper Company. Pulp wood supply has been cut. Will sell the 1000 acres." Correspondence went back and forth until the young doctors who were making a combined income of $50/month, agreed to pay twenty five dollars each on a ten year lease towards buying their dream island.

After much futile searching for a site they found the Maine Seaboard Company listed in the yellow pages of the New York Phone book. A phone call revealed the existence of an available piece of real estate, Dyer Island in Harrington, Maine.

It was on Dyer Island that the doctors began formulating ideas. Dr. Berry was already interested in the Big Brother program, which was natural to him because his parents who were teachers often brought home to their table boys having difficulty with their studies or with classmates. 

Through the Big Brother Program, the Doctors became interested in a boy whose past-time was running away from home. They decided to put him on the Island for the summer.