OFF TO WYOMISSING HILLS
My meandering mind settled recently on a single incident in Wyomissing Hills, a “suburb” of Reading, PA. A brief dreamlike episode trying to rescue a madman. I can't find the end of that particular story, which I'll get back to later. But trying to piece it together elicited spotty recollections of odd personalities and encounters encountered living there from 1966 to 1970. And of the strange history of Reading itself.
Our family arrived in the Reading area with no pre-planning, almost on a whim. I and four other senior employees of a NYC consulting company, were planning to acquire, Stewart, Dougall and Associates, the firm we worked for in leadership capacities, from its current owner, Arthur Dougall. During one of a series of martini-greased meetings at the Harvard club to shape our offer, I suddenly concluded, for a complex web of valid reasons, that I must quit this group before it was too late. I left the table. And at a lobby payphone called a headhunter to accept a position he had recently offered me as executive vice-president of a headwear and felt manufacturing company located in Adamstown, PA, half way between Reading and Lancaster.
George W. Bollman and Co., was owned and operated by five elderly Bollmans. Their pecking order: George, Board Chairman and spokesmen to the outside world. Treasurer Fred. Fred questioned my every move, but always gave way to persuasive figures. Dan, President and avid about sports. Paul, in charge of manufacturing. An imperious maestro who kept and used a spittoon in his office and knew every workman on the line by first name. And swore. The only brother to do so. Eugene, responsible for research. He inevitably wore a hat at our weekly board meetings, puffed a pipe, rarely spoke.
My newly minted position reported to the President. The idea was for me to expand into new ventures based on the company's current strengths. That I knew nothing about manufacturing of any kind, or, for that matter, about business operations in general, had not seemed germane from my perspective, and had apparently escaped the Bollmans as well.
I remained with the Bollmans for four years. Accomplished a little for them. it was my second graduate school. I had to learn enough (and did) to make, or fake, my way into management at a larger firm. In fact, my wife, Connie, accomplished a lot more, starting a successful not-for-profit, HOME, Inc (Housing Opportunities in a Metropolitan Environment.
When we arrived in the greater-Reading area we learned that the locals were fond of the folklore of its past. Today it’s known for pretzels, mushrooms and outlet malls. But many people we met jumped at the chance to romanticize its two dark histories, though more as folklore. First, it had a Socialist government past. And when that went away, became so crime-ridden and corrupt (the folklore included a tunnel between police headquarters and the local whorehouse) that the federal government took it over during Bobby Kennedy’s term as Attorney General.
Reading's Socialism: In reality, the area’s genuinely socialist presence was more on the national stage. One local inhabitant, Darlington Hoopes, Sr. had been twice the national socialist party’s presidential candidate and twice Norman Thomas’s vice presidential running mate.The city did indeed, between 1920 and 1940, have a few socialist governments. But they came no closer to the classical definition: “the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community” than Bernie Sanders’s current concept. This can be seen by some of Reading’s socialist history:In 1929, by capturing the city council and two additional seats on the school board. Reading was the only city in the country whose council was completely controlled by the Socialist party.The Socialists abolished the contract system for street cleaning and garbage collection, extended the sewage system into parts of the city that had never been connected, and rebuilt the sewage disposal plant to eliminate the dumping of raw sewage into the Schuylkill River. In addition, they established the city’s first central purchasing department, provided for the separation of adult and juvenile offenders, and constructed several playgrounds and recreation centers for children and adults.During 1936-1940, the"Socialist" government sponsored projects, financed largely federally, such as the airport and administration building and low-cost housing for four hundred of Reading’s low-income families. This administration also authorized a land utilization survey which served as a preliminary to the adoption of a zoning ordinance.Nationally, In 1956 the Socialist party ran a presidential candidate, Darlington Hoopes, Sr., for the last time, and the Socialists appeared on the Reading ballots for the last time in 1958. Norman Thomas, the party’s presidential candidate from 1928 to 1948, has attributed the decline to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In Reading, too, it appears that the Democratic party has had a stronger appeal for the younger generation than has the Socialist party, as is seen, for example, by Darlington Hoopes, Jr.’s affiliation with the local Democratic organization.1
1 Information on Socialism abstracted bstracted from an article which originally appeared in the Summer 1965 issue of the Historical Review of Berks County
(Presidential candidate Hoopes’ son, Darlington Hoopes, Jr., and wife Carol were among or our first connections with Reading. They lived nearby, one of the two other democratic families in Wyomissing hills. Hoopes Jr. was an attorney. My memory of him is more of a klutz when it came to work around the home than anything political. He cut off a finger while fiddling with his lawn mower. They were pleasant dinner companions.)
Reading’s crime background is more recent, ending (perhaps?) in the 1960s. It involved prostitution and gambling. We learned the titillating folklore. Here are some actual facts.As Mayor Kubacki completed his first year in office, the Reading Times ………..revealed …….. that five bawdyhouses were operating with only rare interference from law enforcement. Reporters detailed the longtime activities of Mabel Jones…………[who had] complained to her TV repairman that protection money was cutting into her profits. She claimed the mayor was making personal visits demanding $300 a week. Mabel usually had four to six girls at her Lemon Street house.Although local law enforcement ignored the big-bucks operation, it did not go unnoticed in Washington, D.C. United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy picked Reading as the place to test new laws giving the federal government more control over gambling. J. Edgar Hoover, in spite of still denying the existence of organized crime, sent a brigade of more than 50 FBI agents, the largest federal raiding force since Prohibition. ……………A gambling palace ……….on 10th Street was attracting heavy hitters from all over the East. Luggers from Philadelphia and New Jersey were running a nightly shuttle service.The 1 a.m. raid went off without a hitch on January 20, 1962. After breaking into the building at 235 Cherry, agents found three craps tables handling heavy action. More than $55,000 was seized and 112 men were herded away in buses to the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Training Center and processed. Not a single Reading policeman showed at the Cherry Street site for more than an hour after the raid. Most of the gamblers were from out of town.As the 1963 general election approached. The Democratic party was split wide open…….. A reform group, Berks Independent Democrats, was formed. BID won two council nominations But the voters finally wanted a change and elected……a popular Albright College professor and coach [as Republican mayor]. [A] Republican district attorney [was also elected]. Instead of defying the federal law enforcement agencies he began working with them.2
2 Heavily redacted from Inside the Minker Era Years. An explosion of corruption between 1956 & 1965 exposed Reading ties to organized crime as never before by EDWARD A. TAGGERT which originally appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of The Historical Review of Berks County.
When I arrived in Wyomissing I searched for a new home while Connie tended the home fires in New York, The search was expedited by an apparatchik of a bank chaired by one of the five Bollmans. I, an apartment dweller born and raised in NYC, failed to anticipate the socio-political implications of bringing my tiny liberal clan onto the wealthiest and most conservative Boulevard in the Reading metropolitan area. My choice didn’t go over well with my wife. The daughter of a bank president but a turncoat from her clan, she caught on to the collision in values immediately. But it was too late. I had signed the papers.
The house exterior had charmed me immediately. Its interior however was literally falling down, sections of ceiling swooped away and draped toward the floor in several rooms. Not the unforced neglect of poverty. The owner, Ethel Lauer, widow of a beer baron, had grown up in it, and by then lived next door in an imposing fortress she had built with two-foot thick walls inspired by fears of nuclear Armageddon. Her property encompassed both homes and several acres of land down to the street below, as well as a small pine forest across from the entrances to both homes on Grandview. Her mother had continued to live in the home we bought until her recent death in her 90s and had not permitted any work to be done for 20 years. Hence the dilapidated interior.
Mrs. Lauer was separating the two properties, allocating ample land to the older residence we were buying. She did not agree to selling until she interviewed us at tea. We passed muster and, for our part, we left knowing we would need to steer clear of this force of nature and entitlement. She was not demur; had the barrel like figure of a truck driver. (She, we had learned, had a reputation for swearing on the golf course to which she frequently accompanied her grandson. And was known for her easily unleashed temper at the country club and elsewhere.)
We asked her about neighborhood security, a silly question considering the local inhabitants, but she answered seriously that the chief of police, “Buck” she called him, frequently patrolled, and often stopped by to check on her. And also, she had “Johnny.” “Who is?” one of us asked. “Johnny is my gun.” She showed it to us.
Mrs. Lauer’s only explicit reservation, or warning, to us was about her sizable and treasured rose garden bordered by a tall hedge between the two homes. No one, she told us, must ever enter or disturb it. In the years that followed our two boys engaged us in several diplomatic incidents by squeezing through the hedge to explore. Never, fortunately encountering Johnny.
Here are current photos of the home:
When the home was built, the main entry was in the rear. A carriage road looped up from the street below on a 5- or 6-acre plot. And a long curved balustrade, gone in the photo but still there in 1966 for us to maintain, girded the pathway from one end of the home to the other.
Sitting on the crest of Grandview Blvd, it was rather grand inside.
My Dreamlike Episode: One evening, in the sprawling living room at 78 Grandview I paced the floor with visiting friends from Reading. They were its Mayor, Vincent Yarnell, and Reading's City Managing Director, John Reusing. We were circling the room, trying to cajole a friend of the Mayor and neighbor of ours, John Saylor, who lived a few doors away, and was a pillar of the community, to calm down. Saylor, a very tall version of Don Quijote, was brandishing, I think I remember, a gun. He was angry. Not with us. But with unknown people out to kill him. He was, plain to all of us, paranoid.
I believe we succeeded in soothing him, perhaps headed him toward an institution. But I am blank as to how we had all come to this state. And other members of my family remember none of this.
They remember John Reusing though. An ebullient redhead who could talk a skin off a snake, he and his wife Olivia were dear friends.
But John Reusing was an alcoholic. He kept this addiction in check until one evening in mid-1969 he decided to relieve himself in a street adjoining Reading’s town park square. Regrettably, a news photographer happened on the scene at that moment and snapped a picture which found itself onto the front page of the Reading Eagle the next day.
John was forced to resign.
Having been forced to leave town, ridden out on the rails so to speak, we hosted a small fairwell party in their honor. Six of us altogether. A barbecue, many drinks, watermelon. I remember that because of the pit-spitting contest. Who could propel his or her pits the furthest. Then more drinks and John bemoaning the fact that they were leaving and hadn’t been able to sell their home.
I piped up: “We’ll buy it, and get rid of it.” Meaning the entire assemblage except the Reusings. All jumped aboard the bandwagon. Or, If any dissented, they were silent. In any event we made the joint purchase soon thereafter.
The home, in center-city Reading, didn’t prove easy to sell. It lay vacant month after month.
Not long after the cooperative purchase, the Gibson family also departed Wyomissing Hills permanently. I had accepted a position with Macmillan. The vacant house was still joint property of the carousers.
Fortunately, one of our group was able to sell at a slight loss soon thereafter.
Thus ended our four year sojourn in Wyoomissing Hills.
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