How two summers of Fresh Air fun changed a life and sparked a meaningful reunion

My sentimental journey there is better measured by time than distance.

It was a reunion after 52 years. Paul Squires, a childhood friend, had invited me, my daughter and her mother to attend a 100th birthday celebration this month for his mother who, perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for the two of us meeting as kids and reuniting as much older adults.

I now realize it was more than that. The summers we spent together were a pleasant diversion from city life for me. But for Paul, a white kid from rural Pennsylvania, getting to know me, a Black kid from Brooklyn, changed the arc of his life.

“I don’t think people realize how avant garde and ahead of its time the Fresh Air program was for basically breaking color barrier,” Paul told me recently.

The Fresh Air Fund, founded in 1877, takes underprivileged youths from the smog and sticky, hot pavement of New York City and exposes them to greener pastures for a few weeks in the summer as the guests of host families in rural communities in upstate New York, northeastern Pennsylvania and other nearby states.

I was a Fresh Air kid in the summer of 1971 when Paul and I were both 12. It was the last time we saw each other in person.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, at least, the cross-racial component of these summertime exchanges stood out. Most of the Fresh Air kids were from minority communities while the majority of the families that hosted us were white. At a time when segregation was more the norm than not, these intimate, mixed interactions had…