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GREENSBORO - Herman Weaver loved that camp.

He'd be somewhere, and he'd roll out some story for his only son - his only child - about how he hiked, played games and learned how to swim across a lake.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

All at Camp Herman, a spot used by kids of the employees of Cone Mills. Herman's own dad, a man with a sixth-grade education, started working at Cone Mills when he was 12. By the time he retired, Herman's dad worked his way to plant superintendent.

Herman himself never worked at Cone Mills. He helped build Greensboro. Yet, he never forgot those days at Camp Herman, the place near today's Bryan Park that polished his summers into a jewel in his memory.

Herman is gone. He died in 1987 at age 74. But Mike Weaver, his only son, his former business partner, knows those stories.

He remembers them when he spies that old picture of his dad, as an 11-year-old, grinning big. But lately, he remembers them when he walks or talks about that hidden parcel of land five minutes from the hum of Interstate 85.

Lately, that's happened every day.

He'll call up Jamie Cosson, the guy who lives out there. They talk every day. Then, every week or so, they'll spend hours walking and talking and seeing the construction going on almost everywhere they look.

It's a busy place, this spot just east of us near I-85. Stand by the lake, beneath the wooden contraption called The Blob, and you're bound to hear the back-up beeps of a Bobcat.

By June, kids are expected to see a new field, a new 300-seat amphitheater, a new staff house, a new hiking trail, two 32-camper cabins, and an enlarged 4½-acre lake, shaped like a fat tadpole with a skinny shark fin.

By June 2010, kids are expected to see a new pool, a new bathhouse, new offices and a new 25,000-square-foot pavilion.

The cost of construction:

$2 million, money provided by the Weaver Foundation, the philanthropic nonprofit Mike and his dad started in 1968 with an initial $50,000 earned from their successful construction business.

Today, the foundation's endowment has grown to $24 million.

The gift follows an initial $1.5 million grant from the Weaver Foundation. That money improved water and sewer connections and built new cabins and a dining hall. Essentially, it saved the place once known as Camp Tapawingo.

Today, Camp Tapawingo is known as Camp Weaver. It's run by the Greensboro YMCA. But it's named after Herman Weaver, the grinning mill kid who loved to swim.

"You've brought us off life support," Greg Jones, the president of the Greensboro YMCA, has told Mike. "We were hanging by a thread.''

Some quick history: Camp Tapawingo opened in 1955, but over the years, it became run down because of lack of money and initiative.

By 1985, when Mike Weaver was the YMCA's major gifts chairman, he tried to raise $200,000 for the camp. He only got $15,000. Nobody was interested.

Since then, every time he'd talk to the Y and ask about the camp, he'd get the same response: "Mike, it's terrible.''

So, in 2000, he funneled $1.5 million from his family's foundation toward the camp. Then another $1.1 million trickled in from donors and other local foundations, including Weaver.

Now comes the $2 million - the summer camp's largest gift. It's a chunk of Camp Weaver's proposed multiyear, $10 million plan intended to transform the 100-plus acres behind Tapawingo Trail.

It's a transformation steered by Weaver and Cosson, the camp director.

They see it in their walks. Cosson, the 37-year-old Australian, Weaver, the 71-year-old North Carolinian. These two men from different countries and different times talk about their shared vision for what Weaver calls the "weakest of the weak.''

Children.

"Gosh, they're at the center of all this,'' says Weaver, a grandfather of six, a father to two 11-year-old twin boys. "If we don't help them, who's going to?''

The grinning mill kid from Camp Herman believed that, too.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com