Rosa Bonds, antidrug activist

The other day I got an email from a friend in Philadelphia telling me Rosa Bonds had died. I thought I would put her obituary from the Philadelphia Inquirer on here because she was a rather interesting lady I had the chance to work with while we lived on Pastorius Street. Miss Rosa was one of those people who Obama described the other night in his speech as one of the many nameless people who work every day to make their neighborhood a better place.

I got to know Miss Rosa when a couple of us realized that along Germantown Avenue there was a neighborhood organization whose boundaries ended about five blocks north of the 6100 block of Germantown Ave. and another organization which ended about three blocks to the south of us. In that eight to nine block area there were four to five bars, numerous abandoned buildings, a couple of churches, a music school and a few businesses. We, two white guys, one from rural Indiana, and me from rural Iowa, got the bright idea that we should try to organize this area to see if we could get the city to pay some attention to the area and if we could help improve the area.

I talked with some of my neighbors and they thought it would be okay to try this so we knocked on doors, mailed invitations and had our first meeting. Miss Rosa was one of the foks who showed up and one of the few who didn't try to give us a hard time. After a couple of meetings it was to the point where some of the folks thought we needed to elect officers. Miss Rosa thought I should be the president but since I was one of about three white folks involved I figured it was best that she or someone else do it. At that point I didn't know about some of her other work but it seemed she was quite capable of leading any group that emerged from our meager efforts.

Over the next couple of years we organized a few street cleanings and did manage to get three of the nuisance bars closed. During the course of this Miss Rosa organized one of her anti drug activities. We set up our grills on the corner of Pastorius and Baynton Streets where lots of drug activity was taking place. We got a local store to donate some hot dogs and soda and had a little neighborhood party. We even had a local tv crew show up along with a few unhappy drug dealers and customers. It was one of the more memorable evenings during our time in the city.

So here's to Miss Rosa, a women who worked tirelessly to make her neighborhood and city a better place.

Rosa Bond, fearless anti-drug crusader

Posted on Tue, Oct. 28, 2008

By JOHN F. MORRISON
Philadelphia Daily News

morrisj@phillynews.com 215-854-5573

The senior citizens stood on street corners in East Germantown in all kinds of weather, sweating in the heat and shivering in the cold, for a just and dangerous cause: To chase away the drug dealers.

Their method was simply to find a corner where the dealers were operating and just stand there. These grandmothers and grandfathers took torrents of abuse and threats.

Sometimes they would bark back at the young punks, who needed selling room at a cherished corner. But mostly, the demonstrators just stood there while the dealers hid.

Possibly the most stalwart, and certainly the most defiant, was a feisty grandmother named Rosa Bonds.

"She had a mouth on her," said C.B. Kimmins, longtime drug crusader and a founder of Mantua Against Drugs. "I admired the daylights out of her."

Rosa died Oct. 14 at age 75. She lived in East Germantown.

In pursuit of her crusade, Rosa would hop into her battered old Chevy and drive herself and other demonstrators - and sometimes her grandkids - to the drug hangouts.

Former Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez wrote about Rosa and her cohorts: "Some young turk turning off Osceola Street onto Pastorius with that strut that says they aren't even there, that says they can't touch him. Nobody can touch him."

But Rosa was not intimidated. She raised her trusty megaphone and shouted: "Drug dealer! Drug dealer! Drug dealer!"

The 20-ish youth continued his cocky strut. She shouted again: "You can run but you can't hide! We charge you with genocide!"

In other confrontations, Rosa and the others simply ignored threats of violent death.

"I'm gonna go get my gun," a dealer would shout at her.

"Go ahead," she would reply. "Go get it." The gun never materialized.

The dealers took one look at this brazen grandmom and slithered away. Of course, they came back.

Steve Lopez wrote: "Rosa Bonds is on the megaphone at midnight, backed up by senior citizens fighting to save their homes. Just down the block, barely visible, the devil peeks around the corner."

Rosa was a founder and officer of East Germantown Against Drugs. Members wore white hats stenciled with the group's initials - EGAD.

Kimmins and his Mantua Against Drugs members would travel to East Germantown to stand with the seniors. "We stood out there in the cold. We told jokes, we talked to the neighbors," Kimmins said. "They told us, 'We never saw the block this quiet.' "

The grass-roots antidrug crusade in the city originated with the late Herman Wrice, who was fearless. He would go out with a sledgehammer and batter down the doors of drug dens.

Eventually, C.B. Kimmins and others sought him out and established Mantua Against Drugs. Rosa Bonds and her partners in East Germantown patterned their actions after the Mantua activists.

In 1990, Rosa, a staunch Republican (but later a Barack Obama supporter), ran unsuccessfully against Dave Richardson for the Pennsylvania House from the 201st District.

Rosa Bonds was born in Spartanburg, S.C. She attended school until the fifth grade in Asheville, N.C. After she arrived in Philadelphia as a girl, she graduated from William Penn High School and became a nurse's aide at Temple University Hospital and the American Oncological Hospital, now Fox Chase Cancer Center.

She also worked as a clerk for the city, in the old Philadelphia General Hospital and for the Department of Licenses & Inspections.

In 1952, she married George Bonds, who predeceased her.

She is survived by a daughter, Rosalind; four sons, Anor, George, Chester and William Sr., and nine grandchildren.

Barack Obama

Yesterday the people of the United States elected Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States. He becomes the first African- American to be elected President and he won in a landslide. As I watched the election results and the scenes of people gathering in Grant Park in Chicago, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Harlem, and outside the gates of the White House, I had to think of my old neighbor in the unit block of East Pastorius Street, Mrs. Rivers. Mrs Rivers and her husband lived in the house which shared a common wall, three bricks wide, with our house. In short we heard their arguments and they heard ours.

Once when I was in her house I noticed she had three pictures hanging on the wall above the mantel. In order, they were Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. When I asked why she had pictures of those three men, she looked at me and said something like, "They helped give me my freedom and dignity and I want to think of them everyday."

I don't know if Mrs. Rivers is still living or not but if she is I would bet that there is a fourth picture hanging on her wall today. I'm certain she would have a picture of Obama displayed and that she would be praying for him everday.

I hope Obama does well and that he has a successful presidency. As one of the pundits said last night, "he doesn't have a hard act to follow."

world series champions

Growing up I never paid much attention to baseball. Baseball was Jack Brickhouse doing the play by play of Cubs games on tv Sunday afternoonst while dad slept on the couch covered by parts of the Sunday newspaper. If we dared to change the station we were invariably told loudly, "I was watching that." I never found the late 1960's Cubs to be all that entertaining. Later when I had a paper route and had some money I chose to spend some of it on football cards rather than the baseball variety.

I didn't begin paying attention to baseball until we spent the summer of 1979 in Philadelphia and then moved there in the summer of 1980. The Phillies won their first World Series in franchise history that fall so it was easy to get swept up in the excitement. With Mike Schmidt at 3rd, Larry Bowa at short, Garry Maddox, plus Steve Carleton pitching it was fun team to watch even on our little black and white television. Sometimes it was even better to listen to the games on the radio and hear the banter between Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn.

Later when we bought our run down rowhouse I spent a lot of evenings hanging sheetrock and painting while listening to Phillies games. In spite of the work it wasn't a bad way to spend an evening. We also went to numerous games during our ten years in the city. Generally I would go with some guys from church after the services were over. We would bring cooked hot dogs in a large thermos, one guy insisted on bringing some big stogies, and we were all set to go. Usually we just bought tickets for the cheap seats and relaxed from high on the third base side so we could see into the Phillies dugout.

The best seats I ever had was when a friend, Bruce, had friends who had friends with access to tickets owned by a radio station. It was the second or third game of the season, it was cold, and nobody wanted them so Bruce and I went. We sat at ground level just beyond first base. I learned quickly it was important to pay attention especially to foul balls.

I figured I should at least mention the Phillies won the World Series last week for the first time since 1980. It was a rather pleasant diversion from all the presidential politics which had taken a decidely negative turn over the last couple of weeks. It brought back good memories of the ten years we lived in Philadelphia. Plus with all the Cardinal fans who live around here who seem to feel entitled to a championship every couple of years, and this year all the Cubs fans who for some reason seemed to believe "this was the year," it was fun to ask, "how about those Phillies?"

Thermopylae

Not long ago I finished reading Thermopylae by Paul Cartledge. The subtitle is The Battle that Changed the World. When our local library gets a new book of history I try to get it read in hopes that it will encourage them to expand their non-fiction selections. Cartledge describes the battle between the Spartans and Persia under Xerxes. I haven't seen the movie 300, but it is the battle on which the movie is based.

What I found interesting was in the description of the Spartans as being extremely religious, not something I would have thought about before. Cartledge describes how the Spartans sacrificed animals to examine the entrails to see what the gods were telling them and how they consulted oracles. During the events leading up to the battle, Cartledge describes the many times Sparta's leaders made their decisions based primarily on religous reasons rather than political or strategic factors. I am certainly no expert on Greek history but this did get me to thinking and some questions came to mind.
Do societies with a strong military need to bolster that with religious beliefs? Does the militarism grow out of the religious beliefs, or are the religous beliefs used as a tool to bolster the militarism?
From my perspective the U.S. is a militaristic society. The country spends more on its military than the next several countries combined. Depending on how it is figured, at least half of the national budget is devoted to the military. So the next question I have been thinking about is how religion has been manipulated so that today it seems most evangelical Christians in the US are strong supports of the military and the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Do they just assume like the Spartans did that the gods want us to go to war, or to continue fighting, and since god is on their side the U.S. will "win." The other part of this is to see how the evangelical church has been corrupted. How it has discarded the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount for a militaristic conquering hero. Or to go back to the Spartans, how all the gods and goddess were portrayed wearing military equipment, even Aphrodite.