Valley Club president says safety the issue

The president of a Montgomery County swim club said yesterday that safety concerns, not racism, led the club to bar camps of children from the pool.

John G. Duesler Jr. said the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley had arranged for three day-camps to use the pool this summer. But when 65 black and Hispanic children from a city camp called Creative Steps Inc. showed up at the club on June 29, lifeguards and other club members were overwhelmed, he said. "It was just too many kids on top of each other," Duesler told reporters, some of whom had camped out in vans in front of the club throughout the day. "Many of them couldn't swim."

The state Human Relations Commission is investigating the matter. Yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) asked the U.S. Attorney General's Office to review the matter to determine if the swim club violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The club reopened yesterday after being shut Thursday while protesters marched out front with signs saying such things as "Jim Crow Swims Here." Children swam and played in the pool, and their shouts could be heard from the street, where news vans idled and helicopters flew overhead.

Duesler, who met with reporters in front of the club yesterday afternoon, found himself at the center of the controversy after children from the camp told their director, and later national news media, that they heard club members make racially disparaging remarks about them. A few days after their first swim, Duesler revoked the contract with the camp and refunded the $1,950 the group had paid to use the pool.

In his first comments to reporters on the matter, Duesler said "there is a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion . . . and the atmosphere of the club."

Yesterday, with his wife, Bernice, at his side, he called that statement "a terrible choice of words," saying he meant that having so many children greatly altered the atmosphere of the pool and created an unsafe situation. He said he was uncomfortable with the ratio of children to lifeguards - which was 10-1 when all the children were swimming at once.

"This is just a terrible misrepresentation of what I said," he said, with local news media and CNN recording. "This is just so wrong."

Duesler would not name the other camps whose contracts were revoked, but said all three were done for safety reasons, not race.