Noni Waite-Kucera (’83, P ’14, P ’14); above, canoeing in 1982 Photos courtesy of Waite-Kucera

Noni Waite-Kucera (’83, P ’14, P ’14) spent time outside of class at Wake Forest helping fellow students get ready for outdoor adventures in the Outing Club and, in College Union, planning campuswide events such as Springfest and concerts featuring the likes of Pat Benatar and other rock stars.

She was well versed in creating the magic. She had spent years staging skits and braving whitewater canoeing excursions at Eagle’s Nest Camp in Pisgah Forest, North Carolina, not far from Asheville, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

“I was drawn to getting groups of people together and having fun and working hard to make something happen,” says Waite-Kucera, who majored in anthropology.

While her time at Wake Forest lasted the typical four years, that was not the case at Eagle’s Nest. Waite-Kucera has spent almost every summer of her life there, and in her decades at the camp, she’s served in nearly every role, transitioning from camper and counselor to business manager and camp director. 

This fall, after nearly 25 years as executive director of Eagle’s Nest Foundation, Waite-Kucera will retire and transition to a new role — camp grandma. 

It will be a major change for the camp, which has had a Waite family member at the helm for nearly 80 years. But Waite-Kucera is leaving it in a strong position, says Will Abberger, a longtime board member, thanks to her commitment to Eagle’s Nest’s mission — providing ”experiential education for young people, promoting the natural world and the betterment of human character.”

“The betterment of human character is a pretty lofty goal,” Abberger says. “But that has always been at the center of every decision Noni’s made in her tenure as executive director.” 

‘Sinking in’ to camp routines

Waite-Kucera’s paternal grandfather, Alex Waite, first took the family to Eagle’s Nest in the 1940s. Waite, a professor of child psychology at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and a former assistant football coach at Duke, was keen to teach kids teamwork and community building through the summer camp experience. The Waites bought the camp, founded in 1927, with other investors in 1945. In 1950, the Waites chartered the camp as a nonprofit educational organization.

Eagle’s Nest campers on an outing to DuPont State Recreational Forest

Waite-Kucera visited her grandparents at camp as an infant and toddler. She became a full-fledged camper at only 6 years old with an unusual kind of homesickness — for her life abroad. She had spent the previous two years in the Netherlands, speaking Dutch, while her father, Benjamin Moseley “Mo” Waite (P ’83, P ’85), longtime chair of biochemistry at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, was completing post-doctoral training there.

Waite-Kucera’s grandparents helped ease the transition. So did digging into Eagle’s Nest’s routines and traditions, all aimed at building a deep appreciation of the land and nurturing a strong community where everybody lends a helping hand.

“It’s learning the ropes of how to live in a cabin with a bunch of other kids and your counselors,” Waite-Kucera says. “You quickly sink into that.”

As a kid, she and her brother, Alex Waite (’85), reveled in the summer camp experience. Waite-Kucera discovered her passions for horseback riding and whitewater canoeing. 

When Waite-Kucera was in high school, her mother, Helen Waite (P ’83, ’85), became Eagle’s Nest’s director, and her father began serving as a longtime trustee. At camp, Waite-Kucera would get to know her future husband, Gregory Kucera (Ph.D. ’87, P ’14, ’14), now a professor of hematology and oncology at Wake Forest. At a faculty party, Waite-Kucera’s father had a chance conversation with Greg Kucera’s father, Louis Kucera (P ’87), a professor of microbiology and immunology.

Greg Kucera had just graduated from high school with no summer plans — other than to work on his Jeep — before heading to college. “My parents went to a party at Noni’s parents’ house,” he recalls. “My mom came back and said, ‘I got a job for you. You’re working at a summer camp.’”

The eventual couple bonded over a love of adventure, music and clogging at Eagle’s Nest. “She was very confident,” Greg Kucera remembers. “Always in charge. And that’s what I liked about her. Currently, we make decisions together, but she tells it how it is, the way (she thinks) it should be done. And that’s what she’s done throughout her whole career — make good decisions and be somebody in charge and somebody that people look up to and respect.”

More than a camp  

Whatever her role, Waite-Kucera has always been involved in every facet of camp life, comforting homesick kids, leading excursions or dressing up for Final Banquet, which features a full-scale, campuswide theatrical event. She played Lady Marmalade one year and a bat another year.

Her daughter, Cecilia (Kucera) Schaaf (’14), a research fellow at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, remembers watching her mom oversee the camp’s weekly ceremony in a little clearing in the woods, accessed through a tunnel of rhododendrons.

“We have this quiet moment of solitude; we’re setting this intention to have time for reflection upon this week and setting goals for the upcoming week,” says Schaaf, who trains the camp’s riding staff each summer and, as a veterinarian, helps guide horse care. “And (she could) get 6-year-olds to sit quietly in the woods for an hour … to really be present in the moment.” 

By the time Waite-Kucera took over as executive director in 2000, Eagle’s Nest was far more than a summer camp. Waite-Kucera’s mother as director had helped lead the creation of the Eagle’s Nest Foundation in 1993, which includes the camp and its Hante Adventures, a three-week-long adventure trip for teens in spots around the world.

The foundation also encompasses The Outdoor Academy, a semester-long boarding school for high school students in 10th and 11th grades that allows for yearlong use of the property and focuses on wilderness experiences, environmental education, creative arts and personal and social growth through community building.

Since 2000, Waite-Kucera has been focused on ensuring that Eagle’s Nest exists for future generations. In 2016, the camp placed most of its land, about 143 acres, under a conservation easement to protect it in perpetuity. And Waite-Kucera secured funding when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the camp during summer 2020. 

“There are moments in time where you just do a lot of scrambling and learning a lot of things you don’t know about how to keep things together,” Waite-Kucera says. 

But the importance of the camp’s mission was hammered home amid the pandemic, which upended kids’ normal routines and communities, she says. Witnessing children’s growing needs has only helped to further inspire Waite-Kucera’s work. That includes securing Eagle’s Nest for the future and raising money for scholarships. About 20% of Eagle’s Nest campers wouldn’t be able to attend camp without financial aid.

“Kids are really struggling these days,” Waite-Kucera says. “They see the world going up in flames, and they feel like they have no control over that. Helping them find things that they can be in control of for themselves, that’s critical.”

Wake Forest to Eagle’s Nest

The route between Winston-Salem and Eagle’s Nest is well worn, thanks to Waite-Kucera’s work at camp and the extended Waite and Kucera families’ education, teaching and research at Wake Forest. They count some 200 years of service or study at Wake Forest, and many have spent at least a few days up to entire summers at Eagle’s Nest. Other Demon Deacon connections include Waite-Kucera’s son, Walter Kucera (MD ’14), and her son-in-law, George Schaaf, an assistant professor of pathology-comparative medicine at the School of Medicine. 

That long history, Cecilia Schaaf says, might come in part from sharing similar missions: Wake Forest’s Pro Humanitate motto and Eagle’s Nest’s aim for the “betterment of human character.” They “fit together,” she says. 

“Eagle’s Nest and the whole Wake Forest idea is for building better community and for reaching out and going beyond just yourself and your ambitions,” Schaaf says. “The Eagle’s Nest side of it was just ingrained in me from the get-go. Maybe, in part, that’s what pulled me to Wake, too.” 

At Wake Forest, Waite-Kucera remembers feeling a strong sense of community. The anthropology department, where she dove into her interests in biological anthropology, felt like a family in which professors cared about students as individuals. “They really wanted you to do great things,” she says. 

And while she might be retiring, Waite-Kucera won’t be leaving the community she’s helped nurture for so long at Eagle’s Nest. In just a few years, her three grandchildren will be old enough to start making summer camp memories of their own there. “I won’t be disappearing,” Waite-Kucera says. “I don’t think I could.” 

Sarah Lindenfeld Hall is a longtime North Carolina-based journalist, former staff writer for the Winston-Salem Journal and The (Raleigh) News & Observer and founding editor of WRAL-TV’s popular parenting website. Today, she’s a freelance writer, regularly diving into stories about interesting people and parenting, health, education, business and technology topics.