Celebrating 100 years: Suburban Girl Scouts to mark centennial of regional campground

Not every place that’s helped build the childhoods of suburban residents is actually in the suburbs.

One such place — Camp Juniper Knoll in East Troy, Wisconsin — has been serving Girl Scouts of the Chicago area for exactly 100 years.

This momentous birthday will be celebrated on Sept. 7. But Diane Rack of Hoffman Estates, a lifelong supporter of the organization, was a key figure in the camp’s surviving the greatest threat to its existence back in 1998.

“I was on the board of directors at the time,” Rack said. “The board thought it was financially unsustainable, but the volunteers resisted.”

By being a director who sided with the volunteers, Rack believes her role throughout the four- to six-month struggle was likely pivotal to the camp’s upcoming centennial.

“Do not take camp away from a child,” Rack said. “The kids need camp. I believe it helps your mental health.”

Her passion for the importance of Camp Juniper Knoll wasn’t based on the intellectual insight of the adult leader she was then, but from having experienced it for the first time as a child from the North Side of Chicago in 1969.

“When I was about 7 years old, I had the opportunity to go to JK, as we called it,” she said. “Those days, money was very tight. A lot of girls I knew and hung out with couldn’t go, and I couldn’t go all the time.”

But those precious days of her girlhood created many of her favorite memories. And she knows she’s not alone.

“JK has some meaning for a lot of people,” Rack said. “Some people have their ashes buried at the camp. You can’t get a camping experience in Chicago proper. I think the number one thing is camaraderie. There is so much to offer, it’s amazing!”

While the camp was specifically owned by the Girl Scouts of Chicago during her childhood, it has since become the property of the seven merged chapters now known as the Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, Rack said.

“Diane is correct, the area we serve has expanded,” CEO Nancy Wright said. “We celebrate our history, but we are thrilled that Camp Juniper Knoll’s legacy will benefit Girl Scouts in the future.”

Rack’s own time as a Girl Scout ended in 1979, but she became an assistant leader in 1980 and has held a variety of leadership and organizational roles ever since, despite not having kids of her own.

Among the skills she learned was cooking — allowing her to surpass her mother in the kitchen — while the organizational and temperamental discipline proved useful to her professional career as a medical secretary to a spinal surgeon.

Though all the milestone anniversaries of Camp Juniper Knoll have been honored since 1998, this is going to be the biggest of all, Rack said.

“The event that’s coming up, I’m so thrilled to be a part of,” she added.

But the celebration of the camp’s birthday is but another step in Rack’s ongoing dedication to the organization itself.

“People ask me all the time why I have stayed in Scouting as long as I have,” she said. “And my response is they haven't made a badge on how to get out of Scouts.”