In the summer of 1969, my family took our first and only real vacation, a week at Myrtle Beach SC, at very nice hotel right on the beach and with a pool, two rooms with an ocean view. It was quite the adventure for me at 8 years old. My dad loaded the car, a big Chrysler he’d just gotten, a boat of a car and with air conditioning and power windows. We, my dad and mom and my older brother and my future SIL, left from Camp Hill PA at 2:00 AM on a Thursday morning and my dad drove pretty much straight through to Myrtle Beach. We made a couple of quick bathroom breaks, stopped at a dinner in Salisbury MD for breakfast where I ate grits for the first time, made a quick stop at the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel Bridge and got to Myrtle Beach later that afternoon.
In my 8 years of life thus far, I’d never been below the Mason Dixon Line before. And we lived in an all-white, very waspy neighborhood, there were no black kids in my elementary school.
When we got to the hotel, the manager (who may have been the owner) showed us around. When he took us to look at the pool, there were two black kids, about my same age, swimming in it. He started apologizing profusely, telling my dad not to get the wrong idea – “I won’t let any bleep stay here nor will any other place here in Myrtle Beach. But sometimes I let one of my maids, and she’s a good girl, has worked here for a long time, well I allow her kids to use the pool but before any guests arrive.” Then he yelled at them, and not very nicely, to get the hell out of the pool – “don’t you see the guests are here and these white folk don’t want to see you?” Then he reassured my dad that he kept the very pool clean and that those “bleep” kids were kept pretty clean by their mama but he always used extra pool cleaner after they were in there and that nobody ever caught anything from them. Seriously.
My dad wasn’t exactly a supporter of civil rights at the time, nor was my mom, but they were both taken back a bit.
What I really remember was wanting to go swimming and after we settled in our room talking my mother into letting me go to the pool. It was empty except for me. And I kept thinking how nice it would have been to have had some kids my age to play with and sad that it seemed that the only kids around had been kicked out, understanding that it was because they were black, but not really understanding why.
