This past weekend, I took a stroll into my past, attending a gathering of old (and new) friends at Bryn Gweled, the intentional community in eastern PA where I grew up. Bryn Gweled was founded in 1940 by far-sighted Quakers who envisioned a rural utopia where members who shared similar values about the importance of diversity and sustainable living could live and work together. More than 80 years later, it remains a flourishing community, a throwback to a different time. Although the suburbs surrounding Bryn Gweled have metamorphized into strip malls and McMansions everywhere you look, the homestead is amazingly unchanged, with verdant woods, plenty of open space and Bauhaus-inspired homes that seem tiny compared to contemporary housing (yet are surprisingly spacious once you step inside, with ceiling-to-floor windows open to nature’s delights).
I had a wonderful time reconnecting with old childhood friends and making new acquaintances. One woman who now lives on the homestead and whom I met for the first time told me she loved my parents (who lived in Bryn Gweled for 64 years) and was transferring that love to me. Everyone was warm and caring, happy to be back in a place where they have so many fond memories. And the stories people told over the weekend elicited gales of laughter, about the colorful characters who peopled our world as children, like Hans Peters, the chain-smoking Dutch-German immigrant who brought to soccer to Pennsylvania in the 1950s and helped ignite what is now a national passion.
One of the stories I told over the weekend was this one:
The Bryn Gweled pool (in which friends and I swam and chatted this past weekend) was a magnet even when it was closed. It didn’t open for the season until Memorial Day and it closed on Labor Day, which aggravated the heck out of me and my buddies. I was only seven or eight when I began climbing over the locked fence to get into the pool enclosure. It was a rite of passage and we all did it.
One hot afternoon after the pool was closed, I went directly to the community center from the bus stop and was still wearing my little plaid school dress with the white lapels. Paul D. and another friend had already climbed over the locked fence and were getting ready to dive into the pool. I was about halfway up the fence when I heard Paul shout: “Someone’s coming!” He and the other boy hid behind a tree, but my dress snagged on the metal fence as I attempted to climb down. I looked behind me to see one of the BG fathers – I think it was Dick Myers – bearing down on me. I desperately pushed away from the fence and heard a loud rip. Ignoring it, I jumped down and ran for it. But Mr. Myers, who had a lot longer legs, easily caught up to me as I was cowering under a bush near the tennis courts. He stood towering over me. I was terrified; what was he going to do to me? Spank me like my father does when I misbehaved?
“You shouldn’t be swimming when the pool’s not open,” he said, trying and failing to sound stern.“I’m sorry,” I squeaked. “I won’t do it again.”
“Good,” he said. “Now go home and see to your dress.”
Grateful to be let off so easily, I ran home, taking the shortcut through the woods as usual. When I got home, Mom was busy with my younger brothers and didn’t even notice the tear in my dress. Even so, Dick Myers spooked me enough so that I didn’t climb over the fence for the rest of the season. But by the following year, I was back to my naughty ways. I just made sure I wore clothes more suited to fence climbing.”
While I have many good memories of growing up in Bryn Gweled, its members were not immune to tragedy. I pretty much lost my best friend when her brother, Geoff, a Quaker who was being hazed by his Boy Scout troop for not marching in the Memorial Day parade, committed suicide at the age of 14. I tell the story of Geoff’s suicide and its devastating effect on all of us in my memoir, Brassy Broad: How one journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo. After Geoff died, his parents yanked my friend, Beth, and her younger sister out of the public school and enrolled them into a private Quaker school. After that I rarely saw her.
While Beth wasn’t at the BG gathering this past year (we’ve reconnected at previous reunions and many other times), I had a chance to catch up with old friends I hadn’t seen in years. Talking to them was as comfortable and familiar as donning a pair of old slippers. It felt as though we were 10 or 12 again and climbing that pool fence to sneak one more swim on a late summer day. They are memories to hold onto forever.
