My family in July of 1969, when I was in the third grade, we took our first and only real family vacation. My dad woke us up in the wee hours of the morning and drove us pretty much non-stop from Camp Hill PA to Myrtle Beach SC, a full week at a nice hotel right on the beach. Our first stop was in Salisbury MD at a diner for a quick breakfast where, not knowing what it was, I ordered “grits” – not a fan BTW.
We also made a quick roadside stop somewhere in NC to eat a bologna sandwich and use a Porta Potty and saw a sign stating the rest stop was “Whites Only” but I had to ask my dad what that meant as I naively thought it might have to do with the color of your vehicle.
When we got to the hotel just a bit after noon that Friday, it was well before the 3PM check in and we were the first guests of the week to arrive, but the manager let us check in early and took us on a tour.
When the hotel manager showed us the hotel’s swimming pool there was a Black woman sitting pool side and her two children in the pool, two kids about the same age I was.
The manager started yelling and cursing at them to get out and then profusely and repeatedly apologized to my parents, saying that he sometimes let his head house keeper and her kids us the pool before, but usually long before any guests arrived and he also assured my parents that he used lots of bleach and other chemicals to keep the pool clean and hygienic and that we wouldn’t be in any danger of catching anything from “them” like lice or “anything else those folks have” and further assured my parents that “I don’t rent rooms to niggers just so you y’all know and neither does anyone around here, in fact they aren’t even allowed on the beach or in any of the restaurants ‘round here, so don’t worry.” And the woman also apologized to “Mr. Jim” and to us saying she “over stayed her time” and that it wouldn’t happen again. My parents were sadly OK with this, but I didn’t understand.
But I will never forget the look on those two kid’s faces as they were told to get out of the pool because the “white folks” were here and as they walked by me - a look of both embarrassment and of resentment.
In truth when I saw two kids around my same age in the pool, I didn’t see them as “black”, I saw them as potential playmates.
A few days before we left on our vacation, that Wednesday, Apollo 11 launched and that Sunday while in Myrtle Beach, we landed on the Moon and I remember all of us glued to the TV watching the coverage.
Ironically, Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who among her many accomplishments, helped calculate the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, wouldn’t have been allowed to stay at this Myrtle Beach hotel in 1969 nor would she or her children be allowed to be in the pool after the “white” guests arrived or on the beach or to the same restaurants or even on the beach as us white folks.
Good post. Thanks for sharing that with us.
The moon landing is the first thing I can really remember as a kid history wise, I was very small. I do remember in the late 60’s going to visit my grandmothers brother who lived in Huntsville Alabama. When we got there, a car load of hillbillies from Kentucky we were introduced to the fact there was some demonstration going on somewhere in the town and some violence had occurred. We were like why is this happening and some of the neighbors who had come out to introduce themselves and who were quite concerned, explained the blacks were protesting about something and fighting with the police. You could hear sirens and commotion in the distance.
In our little town in the mountains we had integrated our little league team in the early 1950’s and our high school integrated in the mid-60’s. There was racism left over but our little town had managed to avoid protests and violence altogether, we didn’t understand the violence that was happening. They probably did exist at one point and time but I never seen a sign for Colored Only in my small mountain town. My grandmothers brother had a house on a nearby lake and we ended up staying there for the trip and fishing. This was the extent of my brush with the civil rights era.