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 Camp founder Alma Illery wouldn't take no
for an answer
Monday, February 08, 1999 By Roger Stuart, Post-Gazette Staff Writer For someone so strapped for cash she sometimes borrowed car fare to traverse Pittsburgh, Alma Illery hobnobbed with the highest and mightiest as well as the meekest and mildest people in the city, state and nation.
A Pullman porter's wife, Illery lived in a row house at 28391/2 Wylie Ave. in the Hill District. There, every spring, she nursed 100 chicks in her basement. They provided eggs and meat every summer through four decades for Camp Achievement, a woodsy Fayette County outpost for hundreds of inner-city youngsters. "She was a big woman physically, but more than that, for me as a child, she carried with her an air of royalty," said Connie Portis, one of Illery's perennial summer campers, who publishes Pittsburgh Renaissance News and the Greater Pittsburgh Black Business Directory. Illery single-handedly and successfully lobbied Congress in 1944 to pass a bill establishing Jan. 5 as George Washington Carver Day, in memory of Tuskegee Institute's famed black scientist, and she was welcomed at the White House by at least five presidents. Illery held an honorary doctorate, bestowed upon her by Tuskegee in the field of humanities, and Homewood's Alma Illery Medical Center was named for her. She got started in volunteer social work during the Depression. While visiting a friend in Passavant Hospital, one of the women in charge pointed out that, while the hospital did a vast amount of charity work, particularly for Negroes who lived in the area, the hospital had a hard time making ends meet. "I didn't have any money," Illery said years later in recalling the incident. But she would see what she could do. What she did was enlist six friends to go door to door, seeking donations of cereal for the patients. Somehow they also managed to buy a bolt of unbleached muslin, from which they made hospital sheets.
From that inauspicious start, the group matured into the Achievement Club, a service organization that during Illery's lifetime spawned more than 50 chapters in several states. "She definitely was a pioneer, a trailblazer," said Portis, who regards Illery, who died in 1972, as one of her most inspiring role models. "She wouldn't take no for an answer, and everybody felt equal under Dr. Illery." Illery also helped to promote integration in area hospitals long before fair-employment practice laws and civil-rights protests. "God made all men equal," she was quoted in news accounts of the late '50s. "People are prejudiced because this is instilled in them as children. ... You get over prejudice by working with people, inviting them to your home and, in turn, they invite you to their homes." "I never knew the meaning of devotion and self-sacrifice and fighting windmills until I met Alma Illery," retired Levinson Steel executive Aaron P. Levinson said in chronicling some of her activities. The late Pittsburgh Press columnist Gilbert Love said - in "Doctor of Good Will," a Sunday magazine story 43 years ago - that Illery had "a personality that sparkles like Pearl Bailey's and the soul of a saint." As a civic leader, she was deeply reliant on faith and prayer and campaigned unstintingly with people in all walks of life to acquire money, clout, talent or personal commitment to support her humanitarian endeavors. "Dr. Illery was the only person I ever knew who could get something out of anybody," said Katherine J. Hamm of Penn Hills. Her parents, the Rev. William J. and Artegious Moncrief, were long-time stalwarts in supporting both George Washington Carver Day luncheons and Camp Achievement. "She had what I would say was an overpowering personality," Hamm said. "She was like iron on one hand and soft on the other. She talked rough. She would put her hands on her hips and holler at me so I would jump. But she didn't hold grudges." The camp got started in the early 1940s after a friend told Illery her employer had a farm near Connellsville she wanted to give to a Negro organization. Illery contacted Mrs. George W. Craven, who gave it to the Achievement Club to memorialize the Negro who saved her father's life many years earlier in an industrial accident. One of the most enduring memories of both Portis and Hamm was participating in Illery's annual Camp Achievement "tag days" on Downtown streets. Portis sought pennies, nickels and dimes from passers-by. Hamm marshaled kids and cans and turned in the proceeds to Illery. One year Illery talked Mayor David Lawrence and two other prominent Pittsburghers into donating $209 each to buy three prefabricated cottages. They were used to augment the sagging farmhouse that in the early years was the centerpiece of Camp Achievement. In later years, when camp facilities and finances looked particularly grim, Illery recruited an army of businessmen, led by Levinson, to raise money and renovate the camp. "The first time I went out to see Camp Achievement I didn't see a camp at all, but something that looked like a broken-down farm," Levinson wrote in 1956. "There was no nurse, no dietitian and no lifeguard. There was no adequate protection in case of fire, no electricity, no running water. There was not even a refrigerator. ... [But] the one commodity that it always had in abundance was love." As physical and financial reinforcements arrived, roads were built into the camp. More buildings were added. The old farm pond was transformed in stages into a real swimming hole. All this Illery explained at the time by saying, "God has his people stashed around to do his work." Her frugality was as memorable as her fund-raising and recruiting were momentous. "My father would take a group of kids up to the camp in the camp's station wagon," Katherine Hamm recalled. "He'd ask her for gas money. She would say, 'Now, Reverend, you know Camp Achievement doesn't have much money. He would say he needed $7, but she would give him $5. "I guess I was 22 when I started working for Dr. Illery for a couple of months each summer. I would help cook and wash clothes. She'd give us $25 and say she overpaid us because she gave us room and board. What she gave us was volunteer work." Dorothy I. Height, director for the Center for Racial Justice of the YWCA of the U.S.A., paid tribute to Illery at the 1974 George Washington Carver Day luncheon here. Height, who was raised in Rankin, said, "Here was a woman who brought a feeling of dignity and worth to everything she did. Always she had a pride in her own land. I wish our young people who say 'those were easy times ... who even call the work of those early black leaders 'Uncle Tomism' ... would know the strength of working in union." While Illery's story may have gone unnoticed by some, it did not escape attention of the Voice of America, which broadcast it worldwide in 41 languages. Yet little remains visible today to memorialize that legacy. There's her name on the Homewood clinic, where a couple of photographs hang. There was no George Washington Carver Day luncheon in Pittsburgh this year for the first time since the series began and Camp Achievement has become a ghost encampment plagued in recent years by fires and marauders.
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