Late-night campfires at Camp Erdman. Insanely elaborate skits and musical routines. Service projects and beer bashes, at least when the drinking age was 18. A clique so large and inclusive that it would swallow up an entire wing of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Campus Center on a daily basis.

Is it any wonder some called it “A-House”?

Part frat house and part community service club, the Atherton YMCA and its signature Frosh Camp have been major threads in the UH social fabric across multiple generations of students. Based at Atherton House just across the street from the Manoa campus, the “Y” was sometimes considered the oddball stepchild to both UH, where it thrived despite operating outside the university system, and to the YMCA of Honolulu, whose other branches focused mostly on youth and healthy-living programs.

Kiman Wong, 57, said “A-House,” as it was known to some, was a welcome respite from the dry engineering classes he was taking in the late 1970s. “This was a really good balance for me,” he said.

“I would go to class, and then after class I would be at the Y for the rest of the day — and nights, too,” said Wong, who now sits on the board of directors. “I didn’t dorm, but I spent so much time there it seemed like I was dorming.”

In November the YMCA of Honolulu announced it was divesting itself of the Atherton House property, offering it up for sale or lease. Talks are underway with a prospective buyer, but a YMCA official said the branch will continue to offer programs.

In the meantime an enthusiastic group of alumni has organized a first-ever reunion for all former and current Atherton Y members to help commemorate the impending end of Atherton House as a cornerstone of campus life for 80 years. Saturday’s gathering will include dinner and a slide show, plus traditional Frosh Camp activities like trust-building games and campfire songs.

Reunion organizers, made up largely of Y members from the 1970s through 1990s, had forgotten many of the activities but found a treasure trove of programs and song sheets while going through the Atherton basement.

While Atherton House served as a home away from home for the students who lived there, the Atherton Y’s more enduring legacy may be the programs like Frosh Camp, where thousands of students formed lifelong friendships, got a taste of community service, learned leadership skills and began to find themselves.

Sherry Tanaka Teruya, 49, an administrative assistant, was a somewhat shy incoming freshman recently graduated from Roosevelt High School in the mid-1980s when she rode the chartered bus to the YMCA’s Camp Erdman in Mokuleia. Upon arrival she immediately became enveloped by the boisterous and helpful upperclassmen who served as camp counselors.

“It got me out of my shell,” said Teruya, who became a counselor herself.

Long before UH stepped up its freshman orientation program, it fell upon the Atherton Y and its camp counselors to instruct incoming students on how to register for classes, show them around the large Manoa campus and bring in different school resource speakers.

Former state lawmaker and past Board of Education member Nobu Yonamine, who attended UH in the 1950s and then returned to lead the Atherton Y in the mid-1980s, said that during his college years as many as 800 of the roughly 1,200 incoming UH students attended Frosh Camp.

Often irreverent and sometimes rowdy, the camp showed incoming students that college life didn’t need to be so intimidating and that they could always turn to the Y for support and a place to go. But the most important goal was to get students from different backgrounds to interact and form friendships, regardless of whether they chose to stick around Atherton House after camp, according to the 80-year-old Yonamine.

Those who did stick around joined various programs and fellowship groups, many of which dedicated ample time to helping immigrants, those with disabilities and other disadvantaged people.

Christine Fujikawa Urabe, an Atherton Y member and program director in the late 1980s, said she was amazed at how Frosh Camp and the Y brought people who normally wouldn’t cross paths together to help others and form lifetime relationships.

“It helped break down stereotypes,” said Urabe, 50, who works in information technology.

In turn, the students programs learned leadership skills that would aid them in later years, she said. Some became teachers or school counselors, others lawyers, police officers, doctors, journalists and politicians.

And then there was Lisa Matsumoto, the well-known local playwright and performing artist who sharpened her writing, musical and choreography skills during her years with Frosh Camp and other programs at the Atherton Y.

Zan DePeralta Timtim, a program coordinator for Communications Pacific, did not attend Frosh Camp, but was a member of the Y’s popular Showtime Express performing arts group that Matsumoto spearheaded. A member of the Y in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Timtim estimated she is among between 20 to 30 from Atherton who joined the ‘Ohi‘a Productions theater troupe Matsumoto formed with Michael Furuya. (Matsumoto died in 2007.)

“A lot of us still hang with each other now,” she said.

Timtim, 46, said she also took part in Y programs that helped special-needs kids and others. “It was a time in my life that was very influential and positive for me.”

By the 1990s and 2000s, UH had automated course registration and was playing a much larger role in prepping new students for college life. The impetus for Frosh Camp declined, and at the last camp, believed to have been held in 2000, there were more counselors than freshman campers, said Wong, one of the reunion organizers.

Atherton Y Executive Director Ananda Chou said the branch remains a vital part of the UH community, with community service programs that include mentoring homeless youths in Kakaako, shadowing and assisting doctors and nurses in Kalaupapa, and helping to restore elementary schools in the Philippines and Japan.

Among the Y’s centerpiece programs today is College Camp for disadvantaged public high school students entering their junior year. Over the course of a week, the teens learn about UH, dividing time between the Manoa campus and Camp Erdman. At each step, Y members serving as counselors assure them that college is an attainable and valuable aspiration, Chou said.

Louie Sicorsicon was a Farrington High School student in 2012 when he was among the first to take part in College Camp. Four summers later Sicorsicon returned as a counselor to this year’s campers.

The different community programs he’s been involved with at the Y helped motivate him to “look beyond myself and find ways to help others,” said the 19-year-old, who intends to do that as a physical therapist.

Depending on the final terms of the sale or lease, the Atherton Y might or might not continue at the current site, Chou said. Regardless, the YMCA of Honolulu board decided to continue programs that serve university students at UH and elsewhere on Oahu, she said.

Reunion organizers like Timtim were pleased to learn the parent Y intends to continue the Atherton branch. “Anything positive that can help college students engage with others in the community, that’s a good thing,” she said.