08/02/2026
The Hot Flashz support the kids at Camp Boggy Creek!
There is a camp in the pine woods near Orlando that has never sent a family a bill.
Not once. Not in 30 years.
It started with a girl from Fort Lauderdale named Jennifer Masi. Diagnosed with cancer at three years old, she spent ten days at a camp in Connecticut built by a movie star - a place where kids with scars and chemo schedules got to just be kids. She came home and told her parents Florida needed one of its own.
Jennifer died at 14. Before a single cabin was built.
Her parents, Nick and Wendy Masi, refused to let the idea die with her. And the movie star answered.
Paul Newman had maybe the most famous face in America - the blue eyes, the Oscar, the race cars. He was also the man who put that face on salad dressing bottles for one reason: to give the profits away. More than 600 MILLION dollars, eventually. When Florida families started pushing for a camp of their own, Newman signed on as a co-founder to help build it.
So did a four-star general. Norman Schwarzkopf had commanded the Gulf War, retired to Tampa, and come through prostate cancer in 1993. The actor and the general led the charge together.
In 1996, Camp Boggy Creek opened on 232 acres in Eustis: 16 camper cabins with metal roofs and wraparound porches, a theater, a fishing lake, horses - and a 24-hour medical center called The Patch, staffed with pediatric doctors and nurses so that kids on chemo, kids with heart conditions, kids waiting on transplants could all come. Newman's vision for his camps was simple: seriously ill kids should get to "raise a little hell."
Here is what most people never knew about Paul Newman.
By the time he built camps for other people's children, he had already buried his own. His only son, Scott, died of an accidental overdose in November 1978, at 28. In his memoir, Newman wrote: "Many are the times I have gotten down on my knees and asked for Scott's forgiveness."
He never claimed the camps were about his son. The reason he gave was stranger and more honest. He built them, he wrote, "to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it."
Paul Newman died of cancer in September 2008. Norman Schwarzkopf followed in December 2012.
The bill still never came.
The luckiest man in America had spent his luck on children who had none.
The camp kept going. More than 95,000 campers and family members have come through the gates - every one of them free. Volunteers still make handmade bears for arriving campers.
And the kids who once slept in those cabins keep coming back. Noelle arrived at 13 with a heart condition; today she returns as a counselor, still in touch with her cabin mates from nine years ago. The camp's CEO says it plainly: "A lot of our volunteers are former campers."
Every Florida family knows a kid who got the diagnosis. The spaghetti-dinner fundraiser. The car wash in the church parking lot. The bracelet with a child's name on it.
This is where some of those kids went.
This year, Camp Boggy Creek turns 30. And this very week, the gates open again - a summer session for children with sickle cell disease starts Thursday. On the registration form, the price reads $0.00. It has been free since 1996.
Jennifer Masi never got to see her camp. But this week, somewhere in the pines near Eustis, a seriously ill child is fishing, riding a horse, raising a little hell. Some people acknowledge luck with a speech. Paul Newman acknowledged it with 232 acres and thirty years of free. The bill never comes.
