Petie Snyder

Petie and Mark Snyder bought their beach house here in September 1966. In the summer of 1967, Petie and Mark got active in the Neeld Estates Citizens’ Association. Petie was there with bells on to help set up, wash dishes, or do what every need to be done. If you asked her to sell tickets to something she would go out and get the job done. And if there was a raffle she could get people not just to buy one but several tickets. One year she took on the auction and she worked all summer getting items from the residents. Petie was out every weekend talking to people and always bringing something home for the auction. She made a lot of money for the Association that year. Mark and Petie had a garden for several years. Mark would plant and harvest the vegetables and Petie’s job was to go into the community and sell. All of the proceeds that she got from selling vegetables went to the Association. Petie would freeze or can what she did not sell. The Kentucky wonder green beans were one bean that she would can. When Bob and Libby Neeld had the peach orchard she would can the best peaches.

  In later years, after Mark retired they would buy houses and fix them up. Petie in her overalls, worked right alone with Mark on these projects. She could glaze windows, put in screens, paint, stain trim, take apart toilet and put in new guts, put washers in the faucets. She was not afraid to try and do or fix something. The last house that they owned was sold in 2004, which was Shore Drive.

She loved to fish or just to sit up on the screen porch and watch the Bay go by. When son Mark would go out crabbing he would bring trash cans full for crab home. Petie would cook the crabs, give some away, and she and Margo would sit and pick crabs for days and after all were picked then she would make the best crab cakes, freeze them so that the family had crab cakes for the winter. At the farm in West Virginia Mark and Petie would fall trees together, cut up the wood and bring it back to their home in Silver Spring and to the beach for heating. Petie was the one who got up in the mornings and got the fire stated so that the rest of the family was warm when they rose. She love to go deer hunting up at the farm and son Mark and big Mark built her a tree house so when deer season came she would sit up there with her cigarettes and smoke and wait for the deer.

She was devoted to her husband, her children and grandchild. Petie was there if you needed a shoulder to lean on or she could say something a bring a smile or laugh to you. When there was a party she would walk in a say let’s get this Party Going………

*Petie Snyder, long time resident of Neeld Estate, passed away August 13, 2005. 

How a Camp Broke the Color Line
By John Kelly, Washington Post
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page C11

This is the story of a man who helped fight two of humanity's greatest enemies: fascism and racism. 

George Greene is a bona fide member of the Greatest Generation who as a young man fought across the islands of the Pacific and then as a slightly less young man became an instrumental figure in the lives of thousands of poor kids.

"The experience I had in the war really contributed to my interest in doing things for people," George told me. "Seeing so many people get killed, I just wanted to come back and do work with people."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Really we need to start in 1904, when the very first Family and Child Services summer camp for poverty-stricken children opened in Washington. Like everything else in this city back then, it was segregated. None of the children served by what was then called Camp Goodwill was black.

But the charity soon realized it needed to address what one contemporary report called the "sickness, unsanitary housing conditions, low wages, extreme poverty, high death rates and a dreadful infant mortality" that gripped the poorest members of Washington's black community.

In 1907, black citizens raised $480.48 to support a camp for "suffering children" and "worthy, overworked, sickly mothers." Camp Pleasant opened that summer on the grounds of a farmhouse in Tuxedo, in Prince George's County.

That's how things stood for the next 47 years: White kids went to Camp Goodwill, black kids to Camp Pleasant. Then came Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court decision desegregated public schools, and it also provided an opportunity for Family and Child Services to desegregate its summer camp.

In 1954, John Theban, the group's then-director, went looking for a person to run the summer camp, knowing that, with the Brown decision, few people would legally challenge its integration. He picked someone who was no stranger to high-pressure situations or to camping: George Greene.

George was 29, an Army veteran of World War II who had served in the Pacific in combat intelligence. After the war, he'd used the GI Bill to attend Springfield College, a school that had been a hotbed of the summer camping movement and was closely associated with the YMCA.

George was the head of recreation for Connecticut's Crippled Children's Society when he got the call from Family and Child Services. He leapt at the chance to make history.

"I just believed in desegregation," recalled George, now 79 and living with his wife, Patricia Beattie, in Silver Spring.

He and the charity's leaders sat down and planned how to go about smoothly bringing together black children and white children.

"The first thing we needed to do was to have an integrated staff," George said.

Most of the counselors were college students, energetic and ready for a challenge, reminiscent of the idealists fighting Jim Crow in the South.

"These kids were an intellectual kind of a group," George recalled. "I hired people with a positive attitude on integration. We had prejudice on both sides, but I eliminated anyone who was prejudiced."

In 1954, the camps were located in Prince William Forest Park. Then as now, the camps served children from all over the Washington area. "We set up a plan where, as the school systems integrated, then we would follow the integration process," George said. The District went first.

George knew that any parents who had problems with integration simply wouldn't send their kids to camp. But for those kids who did go, it was a chance to introduce them to peers they possibly might not have ever met.

"The attitude you set in the first half-hour in working with the brand-new kids, that will prevail the whole time they're under your supervision," George said. That meant that the individual cabins were racially mixed, and George made sure the campers saw that black and white counselors interacted easily with each other.

George said he received a few threatening phone calls from racists opposed to the integration. And counselors would sometimes find that the positive attitudes they tried so hard to generate inside the camp didn't always reach outside the camp's walls. On their nights off, "they would try to go to a restaurant that was still segregated, and they would be asked to leave," George said.

Where there weren't problems was with the campers themselves. "I don't think I ever saw or heard of any fights between white and black kids," George said. There were fights, sure, but typically they were over something a bit more mundane: "Two kids see a turtle at the same time," George said. "Both want it, and there ensues a struggle over ownership. That's not a black-and-white thing, that's a kid thing."

Send a Kid to Camp

Before he left Family and Child Services in 1968 to work in Virginia's juvenile justice system, George Greene had a chance to do what every camp director dreams of: design his own summer camp. Camp Moss Hollow in Markham, Va., is his handiwork. And that's where your dollars do their work. Our Send a Kid to Camp campaign needs to raise $750,000 by July 23. As of yesterday, Washington Post readers had donated $132,901.31.

To contribute: Make a check or money order payable to "Send a Kid to Camp" and mail it to: Attention, Lockbox, Department 0500, Washington, D.C. 20073-0500.

To contribute online, go to www.washingtonpost.com/camp. Click on the icon that says, "Make Your Tax-Deductible Donation."

To contribute by phone by Visa or MasterCard, call Post-Haste at 301-313-2200 on a touch-tone phone. Then punch in KIDS, or 5437, and follow the instructions.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company