06/27/2021
SPOTLIGHT ON 💥📚
This week we are featuring Mark Goldblatt.
Mark Goldblatt, the author of the acclaimed Twerp series of middle grade novels (Random House), as well as a widely-published political columnist, spent his first summer at Rosmarins in 1969. It was in Bungalow 30B that he, his sister, and their parents watched the grainy images of the Apollo 11 moon landing that July. The Goldblatts returned for the next three years. But in 1973, when work obligations no longer allowed his parents to get out of the city, Mark, then 16, rented a bungalow with a friend he’d met at the colony. “That was the best summer of my life,” Mark recalls. “It was the first time I’d been on my own for more than a week. It was the summer of my first job (camp counselor). The summer of my first romance. Yeah, sure, the other moms on the colony were looking out for me and Jerry. They brought us care packages of leftover pot roast and chicken dinners. But that summer was…freedom. The summer of ’73 was the closest thing I ever had to a Summer of ’42.”
Friendships from that summer, including with a skinny local kid named Scott Rosmarin, have lasted a lifetime. Mark, Jerry, and Kenny—another friend from Rosmarins—were golfing together at the Monroe Country Club only last week.
Seventy-three turned out to be Mark’s last summer at Rosmarins—the need to earn money for college meant a full time job in June and July for the next few years—until 2019 when he decided once again to rent a bungalow. Getting out of the city, making new friends, re-kindling his love for softball and tennis, discovering a love for golf: it was a return to his youth. But it was also an oasis. “It’s hard to convey how great a place this is to write. It’s quiet when you want it to be quiet. It’s social when you need a break. No wonder the place is lousy with authors these days.”
The distance from Bungalow 30B to Bungalow 9, which Mark now rents with his significant other Linda, is a little over a hundred yards, and a little over 50 years. There’s a lot of joy in that distance.
