ABSTRACT
Anyone who has spent time in Re-ED (the Project for the Re-Education of Emotionally Disturbed Children)1 during the late 60s and 70s knew of Campbell Loughmiller. His book, Wilderness Road (1965), was the fi rst book handed me when I became a teacher-counselor in Tennessee in 1970. Wilderness Road is the remarkable story of the fi rst 20 years of the Dallas Salesmanship Club Boys Camp, a unique treatment program for troubled boys established in the piney woods of East Texas in 1946. Loughmiller had been the director and prime mover of the program which, by the time of the book’s publication, had helped hundreds of boys overcome signifi cant emotional, behavioral, and learning diffi culties to gain new leases on life. Th e book was unlike any professional book I had ever encountered. Simple, straightforward and devoid of technical jargon, Wilderness Road was more a narrative than a treatise or text. Th e accounts of the boys, the staff , and the woods that served as their home and classroom cast therapeutic work in a whole new light for me. Th e book stirred my imagination, and as I prepared to face my fi rst group of troubled boys, my mind danced to the possibilities.
