War of Nerves

In the rubber-stamp ranch-house community of Levittown, Pa. (pop. 60,000), the vacant house at 30 Darkleaf Lane last week came alive with a distinction all its own. From one roof peak flew an American flag, and from another--spotlighted by night--the stars and bars of the Confederacy. Each evening the house of the Confederacy was crowded with the members of the newly formed Dogwood Hollow Social Club who worked hard at a hard-boiled bad-neighbor policy. With windows wide open they chattered loudly over coffee, volumed up a phonograph, harmonized on Old Black Joe, aiming all this cacophony at the adjoining home of William E. Myers Jr. and his three small children. Reason: the Myerses are Negroes, the first to buy in five-year-old, middle-income Levittown.

Bugles by Night. Myers, a 34-year-old, $4,800-a-year refrigeration-equipment tester, moved into his pastel-pink, three-bedroom, $12,150 ranch house in August because his family had outgrown a two-bedroom cottage in a predominantly Negro community a mile away. But his coming to Levittown flowered fears, jeers and widespread rumors that he was the spearhead of a Negro invasion. For days surly crowds grumbled outside his house, finally threw stones through its picture window. Bristol Township police were reinforced by tough state troopers at the direction of Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor George M. Leader ("I am ashamed," said Leader, "that this occurred in Pennsylvania").

After a cop was hit by a rock, troopers drove off the crowd with swinging nightsticks, banned further assembly in the area by more than three people at a time. But since the ban, agitators have perfected subtler methods of tormenting Myers. They take turns each evening slamming a heavy mailbox door near his house, stop their automobiles to catcall or toot bugles.

Friendliness by Day. Not everyone in Levittown belongs to the anti-Myers Social Club. More than 1,000 residents signed a "Declaration of Conscience" deploring "acts of violence and intimidation." Some came by to mow Myers' lawn, leave gifts or say hello. But even a few of these have paid the price of friendliness. Next-door neighbor Lewis Wechsler has been openly friendly since Myers moved in; since then a cross has been burned during the night on Wechsler's lawn and a painted KKK blobbed across one wall of his home. A woman who lives half a block away paused one evening to chat with Myers, found on her lawn when she got home a stark sign: "Nigger lover."

Last week Bristol Township cops cracked down on the Dogwood Hollow Social Club. Houseowner William A. Hughes, who lives about 1 1/2 miles away, was summoned before a justice of the peace, ordered to bounce the new occupants and their noise or be fined for a zoning violation. Hughes complied; the members finished their coffee, turned off their phonograph and disappeared. At week's end Householder Myers waited uneasily to see in what guise they would next turn up. Said he: "I want to be the same as any other American; I want to be treated like anyone else. This is a war of nerves. But I'm not going to move."

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