Taking Roy for a Swim

Danny: The following is taken from my late father's autobiography "BY ALL MEANS RESUSCITATE!". I'm posting it here in honor of Martin Luther King Day. Our children, who think it wonderfully normal to have an African American President, need to know history, and some of the brave (or stupid) things that many people, including my father, did to try to change the world. The term "African American" was not part of my father's generation lexicon, and I've left his original wordings.

My hometown, Aliquippa, should have been a true example of the melting pot which characterized the American dream. Though numerous ethnic groups settled the town, the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation (J&L) which enticed them from Europe and from the USA’s deep south, segregated them by nationality and color by selling each group houses on the various hills. The inhabitants did come together somewhat as mill workers: mid-Europeans were laborers while office and foreman jobs generally were assigned to Anglo-Saxons. Mixing of cultures was more complete in the public schools though a small number of students went to Catholic schools. By 1956, when I returned with my family to live in Aliquippa, most neighborhoods had become integrated except for the continued exclusion of Blacks. It took well more than a decade for that particular wall to come down.

From the days of my childhood to the year of my return to Aliquippa, three public swimming pools existed in the town. The largest was in Plan 12, a predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighborhood, serving several other Plans within a mile or two – for me, about a mile. There was a second pool across the railroad tracks in West Aliquippa, which housed predominantly Poles and Italians. The third pool in Plan 11 Extension, was exclusively for Blacks. The latter were not to be found in the other two pools, at least not until the seventies. There was also a small private pool for more affluent residents of Hillcrest.

Private neighborhood pools were becoming fashionable in the fifties. Soon after we moved into our house on Hospital Drive in 1958, my neighbor, Ed Nanasi, and I approached the DiMattias, builders of all the houses in the neighborhood, to request a parcel of ground for the purpose of building a pool. They made the gift on condition that the pool be named for their son, Daniel, who was killed in an accident not long before. We promised; the honor was ours.

Ed and I invited neighbors to my house one evening. From this meeting grew an organization with elected officers and committees. Membership grew to include first-and-second-generation Italians, Poles, Ukranians, Greeks, Serbians, Croatians, Germans, and Irish – all Caucasian. There were also Jews, Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics, and Protestants. Knowledge of democratic process was well-known since many of those involved were active in the steelworkers’ and teachers’ unions. At one meeting I had my comeuppance after making what I thought was a suggestion to streamline our proceedings. A coarse-looking steelworker shouted, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re out of order;” he was correct.

The organizational details escape my memory except for several significant incidents. Mother’s Day in 1960 was never to be forgotten. Volunteers assembled to construct the pool clubhouse. The foundation had been laid; it was now a bricklaying job. There were Ed, a paint chemist, and I, a Harvard internist, making cement (mud) – my only relatives who did this were delivered from Egypt by Moses – carrying it in hods to five professional bricklayers.

We had considerable difficulty keeping up with the demands of “More mud! Get a move on!” After about forty-five minutes of me being pilloried with expletives, one of the bricklayers, an elderly, old-school Italian gentleman, discovered that I was “Dr. Chamovitz.” His embarrassment, his mortification (no pun intended), were touching. To him I was the Professor Doctor equal to a priest in stature. It took a while for me to reassure him that I loved the anonymity and the sharing of this venture, like homesteaders of bygone days raising a neighbor’s barn on the wild prairie. After this dramatic interlude, construction progressed, though at a slower pace out of respect for the doctor.

Marcia served on the bylaws committee. As to membership she suggested the phrase, “regardless of race, creed, or color.” Resistance was heated. “Why bother with ‘color’ since no Blacks live in our area?” was the response.  Residing within walking distance of the pool was a substitute precondition. Marcia kept pushing but to no avail. The committee decided, “We’ll handle the matter when a problem arises.” Marcia was not reassured.

When Roy Hart and family, a Black family with two sons, moved within a stone’s throw of the pool, they applied for membership. Their application was summarily rejected. The father Roy was a steelworker as were most of the pool members. “You know he was accused of using J&L telephones for personal calls,” hardly a capital offense among speeding ticket fixers, numbers writers, and God knows what else. It seemed to Marcia and me that our dream of neighborliness was being vandalized.

These were the dreadful years of the sixties when Detroit was burning from race riots. During an annual Brotherhood meeting I rose to confront the political leaders and clergy who were spewing forth platitudes that had characterized so many fatuous showpiece gatherings.

The following day I was confronted by phone by a Black steelworker, James Downing. “Did you mean what you said last night or are you just another smooth talking White liberal?” That was the moment “to put up or shut up.” I could hear Dad saying, “Just be a good doctor,” as James and I planned our first interracial meeting. It was to be held in my living room. “You bring six Whites and I’ll bring six Blacks.”

One of my six was Eric Garing, my high-school teacher of American Civics. To me he was the epitome of morality, a preacher of excellence in scholarship and justice in human behavior. All that had been twenty years earlier. He was dumbfounded at the opening meeting when he heard angry Blacks attacking the City Council, the schools, and white society in general. His naiveté reminded me of my own childhood acceptance of Negroes sitting upstairs in the theater balcony. Mr. Garing’s reaction paralleled that of visitors to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. They shake their heads from side-to-side in disbelief and say, “I didn’t know.” He was humiliated by these same Blacks who had been his admiring students or so I had assumed.

The most enlightened member of my group was Father Phil Schaffer, a young pastor of the Episcopalian Church. Shortly after we began our deliberations, Father Phil was inspired to remove his clerical garb and go to live for two weeks in a Chicago slum. The experience for him was earth-shattering; he now had a new calling. And for these efforts his congregation ran him out of town. “We want a minister who will devote himself to religion,” was their excuse. I wish I could say I never heard such a remark in a synagogue.

I don’t recall that our group accomplished anything of significance other than meeting alternately in White-and-Black homes. Many Whites had never been in a Black home, let alone been to Plan 11 or Plan 11 Extension, a mix of low-to-middle-class homes bordering the town’s garbage dump. If Blacks had been in a White home, it would have been only with mop and pail in hand. But one of our group’s Blacks was Roy Hart who, as previously mentioned, had moved into a house near the pool.

One morning without any advanced planning, without consulting either the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or any other civil rights group, I called Roy to ask if he felt like taking a swim. Without hesitation he accepted an invitation to be my guest at the Daniel DiMattia Swimming Pool.

Accompanied by Marcia and Danny and attired in bathing suits, Roy and I drove to the pool, walked through the gate, and within minutes, were in the water. Little did I realize that for us it was hot water. But why should that be? Wasn’t I Dr. Chamovitz, physician to many of the members? Wasn’t I one of the pool’s founding fathers? How vindicated I felt not seeing any bather jump out of the water. Nor did any mother haul her child from infested waters. Surely my action would be universally approved.

Hardly! It and we were universally denounced.

That afternoon with only Amy at home, I was visited by three members of the pool board. Poor Amy, sitting on the stairs outside the living room, heard them threaten me “If you ever to do this again, ...” The threat to do what was open-ended. I dared not ask.

When they left, Amy rushed into my arms sobbing, “Daddy, can’t you do something?” Like call the police? How could I explain to my daughter that most of the police were friends and relatives of my attackers? I was paralyzed with the shock, the embarrassment at my naiveté about how far my patients’ goodwill would carry me. It really was sheer arrogance that I hadn’t done my homework to prepare a plan of action, or to consult with the ACLU, for example.

That same afternoon the pool board canceled all guest privileges. Soon after, they were restored, though to blood relatives only.

Almost everyone was scornful in varying degrees of my blatant move to integrate the pool. Marvin Neft, a member of our Jewish congregation, called to offer endorsement. Only Steve Plodinec, an older Serbian friend and businessman, called, saying, “Call me if there’s trouble.”

I remember having visions of burning crosses in the yard. Poor Amy must have suffered even worse fantasies. Raina remembers only being proud of her parents. We had anonymous threatening phone calls but there were no dirty tricks. We did feel isolated from our neighbors. For months I could not escape the feeling that my family and I were in physical jeopardy.

A few days after the event my sister-in-law Irma was having her hair trimmed in Sewickley by a former Aliquippian. He asked Irma if she had heard what her brother-in-law had done. “Yes,” she knew.

He continued. “Can you imagine the kind of Negro he took to the pool, a real shady character?”

Irma replied, with tongue in cheek, “He tried inviting Ralph Bunche, (a famous American United Nations diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) but he was busy.”

The hairdresser asked, “Who’s Ralph Bunche?”

Did we accomplish anything worthwhile? One teenager, a stranger to us, related some years later that she got into an argument with her parents when she expressed admiration of us. Did we liberate her? Are Roy Hart’s sons less prone to be racists because of one white family’s courage? Did we delay integration that might have come from more considered action? The Plan 12 pool did become integrated several years later when economics forced the closure of the pool on Plan 11. By this time there were a number of neighborhood pools that presumably siphoned off a significant number of politically strong opponents of integration.

Our standing at the Pool had hardly been enhanced by a poolside discussion regarding intermarriage with Marcia participating. This was prompted by the elopement of our baby-sitter, Donna. She had run off with a local Black after prolonged and futile attempts to have her family accept him. Her father was a devoted cardiac patient of mine, an Italian immigrant whose self-image was already marred by a congenital clubfoot. Marcia posited that a shared philosophy of life was more important as a basic ingredient to a happy marriage than was matching skin color. A Catholic worrying about his soul burning in hell would find little solace from a Jewish spouse for whom the concept had no meaning. Similarly, a couple harboring strong but opposing political opinions might tangle over them. Marcia’s conclusion: “Better for a white Jew to marry a black Jew than a white Christian.” So much for intellectual pursuit of the good life. Word went around town that the Chamovitzes were “nigger lovers” and Christian haters.

I did have the shallow satisfaction of confronting my neighbors at a dinner in 1980 when I received the Aliquippa Chamber of Commerce Brotherhood Award. Dad had been the recipient in 1960. (Dad’s fourth-grade English bested many of the college-educated speakers on the program.) He and I were the only Jewish Brotherhood awardees since its inception in 1958.

After introducing my family and giving the perfunctory “Thank Yous,” I lashed out: “And where were you when I needed you, when I ran for Democratic delegate in the Presidential year meant to bring down Richard Nixon (I came in ninth in a field of twelve aspirants beating one Governor Wallace and my two fellow Senator McGovern candidates) and where were you when Roy Hart and my family went for a swim in the Daniel DiMattia Pool?” By then Roy was a county detective; I had him stand up. Dad used to quote a Harry Truman supporter who shouted, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” That’s what I was doing, but for whose benefit? Surprisingly the award wasn’t rescinded. Only Racheal, Marcia, and Danny acknowledged my remarks.

Soon after, we resigned from the pool, but only after Danny stopped using it. We are still awaiting the refund of our building assessment fee as mandated in the bylaws. In January 2000 I wrote a letter to Roy to remind him of that epical moment in our lives. In return I received a video cassette, a promotional message advocating Roy’s candidacy for the United States Congress. He presented the image of an elder statesman. I doubt that it would have helped his case for membership in the DiMattia Pool.