Jeff Yahney didn’t mean to invent Coke and Pepsi.
He was just a teenager who’d lugged his record collection to a Brooklyn catering hall for a bar mitzvah gig. The fledgling DJ had a reputation in the local sweet sixteen circuit, but this was the first time Yahney, the son of two Borscht Belt ballroom dance teachers, had spun sweet tunes for a Jewish boy becoming a man.
When the kid’s family asked what games he had organized, Yahney drew a blank. All that came to his mind was a commercial, where a white-suited Geoffrey Holder pitched 7 UP, the clear, lemon-lime “Uncola,” as a superior alternative to Coke.
Then, he had an idea. Yahney told everyone on the dance floor to partner up and line opposite sides of the room. He called one side 7 UP and named the other after its carbonated nemesis, Pepsi-Cola. When Yahney yelled out the name of one drink, the group had to run to the corresponding side of the room.
Thus, the enduring party game was born.
“Everybody plays it, and they call it Coke and Pepsi, but it never started out that way. It was Pepsi-Cola and 7 UP because that was the rivalry,” Yahney said. “If you ask anybody, ‘What’s the origin of the game?’ they won’t tell you because they don’t know.”
Yaheny’s stories from his decades as a DJ sound like the stuff of legend. He spun records in the ‘80s “when Wall Street was rocking” at a party that got crashed by John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. He has a collection of custom jackets from a Greek tailor in the Garment District who once costumed Billy Crystal. He was inducted into the DJ Hall of Fame, an organization that describes each inductee as “his/her own Rembrandt.”
But since the ‘90s, Yahney has fashioned himself into a different kind of legend: DJ Jeff.
DJ Jeff is ageless. He’s the Guy Fieri of suburban simchas. He’s had frosted tips for at least 20 years and still makes them work. He tours sleepaway camps every summer, shooting custom neon merch redeemable for $100 at any DJ Jeff bar mitzvah out of a t-shirt cannon. One summer, a girl in my bunk caught a DJ Jeff t-shirt and treated it like a fabergé egg.
I first encountered DJ Jeff in 2010, toward the end of my first summer at KenWood Camp. But I’d been hearing whispers about him for weeks. By the time he entered the dining hall to a standing ovation, I concluded that he would do nothing short of transforming the indoor basketball courts on boys’ side into the tween nightclub of my dreams.
“He was more than a person,” said Callie Zola, who was in my bunk for six years. “He was a synonym for the big blowout party of the summer.”
Natasha Poster, who captained my Color War team to victory, concurs. “If you talk to someone who went to sleepaway camp — even if they didn’t go to your camp — and you bring him up, they don’t say ‘DJ…What was that guy’s name?’ They say DJ Jeff.”
Yahney started touring sleepaway camps in 1990, after getting a phone call from Peter Wayne, the owner of Camp Wayne. “It came out of nowhere,” said Yahney, who’d been doing parties in New York and on Long Island but hadn’t thought about camp gigs. Still, game for anything, he packed up a car and drove to northeastern Pennsylvania for the last night of the summer. When the kids got home and told their parents about DJ Jeff, the bar mitzvah requests started rolling in.
The next summer, he hired a van and a small tech crew to DJ parties at 20 sleepaway camps. A few years later, he toured 43 camps in 55 days.
“There was no fucking GPS,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was going.” Yahney bought some map books and calculated drive times from the Adirondacks to Pennsylvania or from the Berkshires to Maine and told camp directors when he’d be available.
As DJ Jeff played the same camps summer after summer, he ascended to the status of a sleepaway camp deity, a human hallmark of a night different from all other nights.
“We’re playing sports, and we’re in the woods, but then one day a year, we have this crazy party,” Callie recalled. “It was a rave for children.”
After we talked, Yahney sent me pictures and videos of his annual camp visits. In one, a group of teenagers cosplayed as him to herald his arrival. In another, a boy greeted him with a handmade poster that read: “JEFF IS GOD.” In a video from this summer at Camp Che-Na-Wah, he walks into the dining hall, and the first girl to see him leaps to her feet, clasps her hand to her mouth and screams “Oh my god!” Seconds later, the rest of the girls start screaming and chanting his name.
Looking back, I don’t understand why my bunk went feral for DJ Jeff when we couldn’t be bothered to wear shin guards at soccer. I asked Liza Pugh, my division leader, for insight. “We hype him up in advance of the day,” said Pugh, who was a camper from 1999 to 2005.
“When he comes into lunch earlier in the day and sees the campers for the first time, it’s almost like there’s a celebrity on camp, even for the campers that have never met him before,” she said. “People want his autograph.”
Now half a century into his career, Yahney considers himself in the business of making memories. “I have one shot to get it right,” he said.
He slots his clients 20 favorite songs into his act. He leads a group sing-along before the last dance. He captures every moment of his parties on video for future generations. Even with his slew of gimmicks – trivia games, novelty hats – DJ Jeff’s favorite part of any party is the hora. “When you hear a hora from me, it’s not a goyim hora,” Yahney said. “It’s ten minutes of nuts.”
Still, aging as a DJ has had its challenges for Yahney. “As I’ve gotten older, you experience ageism,” he said. “I never thought it would happen.”
Yahney works hard to keep up his youthful appearance by maintaining bleach-blonde tips, his mustache (“It takes work.”) and his life-of-the-party persona. “People can’t guess how old I am, and if they do, they’ll be off by a decade.”
“There are guys that are 40 years younger than me that are emcees at parties,” he said. Still, the DJ has no plans to retire. “I would go crazy if I didn’t have my music,” he said. “That’s my rush.”
