Now that public works projects are virtually antique, Delta kids need something to focus on, he says, something to move toward with discipline, something that will open up a new world of ideas. Despite his family’s low income, Womack’s CETA job allowed him to buy his own school clothes, go where he pleased and “just be able to enjoy some of the normalities of life,” he says. “Man, you just don’t know how that impacted my household,” he says, shaking his head resolutely. Because of CETA, Womack took a job at that very pool during high school and began a nearly 30-year career as manager and lifeguard instructor. Congress enacted CETA as an extension of the nationwide, Depression-era Works Progress Administration, which built the Helena swimming pool in the 1930s. Except for one major difference – the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a Nixonian public works law that employed Womack and 300 of his high school peers during summers in Helena. The situation is the same with kids in Helena today, he explains. “You don’t actually know it while you’re going through it, because everybody in the community is pretty much going through the same thing you are.”Įarnest Womack was born in Helena, worked as a lifeguard at the Helena pool since age 16, and now works as pool manager, partnering with Together for Hope to offer Swim Camp to Helena’s children and youth. “It’s a weird thing to grow up poor,” Womack says. He was born in Helena, and, like most members of Phillips County’s black community, learned as a child to live almost seamlessly below his family’s federal poverty threshold. Nonetheless, Womack grew up at this pool. His peppery beard reveals just enough gray to confirm the shirt’s authenticity. The glasses, coupled with his soaring stature, make first impressions downright stately – the kind of stately that can still rock a candy-red Central High School class of ’85 t-shirt. He peers through a two-tone pair of retro frames. Worse, he only has two weeks until 150 kids flood the front door for the start of swim camp, the long-awaited highlight of Together for Hope Arkansas’s year with Helena’s children.įor now, only Womack inhabits the pool house and takes a seat in the shade. To repair it, he will have to pry through yards of concrete and Depression-era piping. At first glance, the white-washed pool shed appears undisturbed, but through the breezeway pool manager Earnest Womack is neck-deep in a jam: the pool has sprung a leak. A stone’s throw east, the Mississippi River levee looms 20 feet high, sloping through parched, brown grass to an expanse of delta post oaks, a blistering tennis court and the crown jewel - an 85-year-old swimming pool the size of a small parking lot.
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North Helena Park is deserted, save for a midday chorus of cicadas and one lone pickup truck parked outside the pool house.