A place to ‘just be’
Homewood’s Wemco Club revels in its familiar feel
A few minutes after 9 p.m. on a recent Thursday, a group of people in matching jerseys walked into the Wemco Club in Homewood.
“Bowlers!” some of the patrons cheered.
They might as well have yelled “Noooooooorm,” as if Rhonda Fleming, a board member of the 100-year-old social club, put them up to it to prove her point.
Wemco is like the bar in the old television show “Cheers,” Ms. Fleming said: “Everyone knows your name and your business.”
With just 15 seats around the bar and many members having spent decades listening to each others’ stories, there’s a routine and comfort to the place.
There’s Ms. Peas in her usual corner bar stool by the door, nursing her Arbor Mist Exotic Fruit wine.
There’s Celeste Black and Danielle Harris, members of the club’s social committee, swiping through photos of a recent Roaring ‘20s party that Ms. Black organized in Wemco’s upstairs party room.
In comes Wayne Poindexter, whose fingerprints are all over the club — the lights, the wiring, the security cameras.
Mr. Poindexter is definitely someone to meet, Ms. Fleming says, and the tall electrician offers this introduction: “One day, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ Then he said, ‘Let there be someone to fix the light.’ And I was born.”
Here comes the club’s unofficial manager. Eric Snowden, a city garbage truck driver known to everyone as “Pookie,” saunters past the double-deck pinochle players. He spends seven days a week at the club fixing, cleaning, setting up.
Several years ago, Mr. Snowden was enlisted by Wemco’s president, Don Harris, to spiff up an institution that, according to Mr.
Harris, is “surviving but not thriving.”
Yes, it’s been around for 100 years, Mr. Harris says. “But where’s the progress?” he asks.
The birth of a local force
Wemco was born out of progress. The club was founded in 1919 by black employees of Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. who weren’t permitted to join the private social club established by the company’s white workers in Forest Hills.
George Westinghouse supplied some of the funding to to set up the Wemco Club, which was originally on Brushton Avenue and is now on Frankstown Avenue.
Ted Roberts, who held court at one corner of the bar on that recent Thursday, called the legendary industrialist a “civil rights leader.”
But it was Cyrus Green, Westinghouse’s first African American employee to rise to management, who founded Wemco and shepherded it through the first decade of its existence.
According to frequent coverage of the club in the Pittsburgh Courier during those days, Wemco quickly became a force in the African American community.
It had a strong baseball team, which competed with other company teams in the industrial league. It hosted boxing matches and field days where families — one Courier article estimated 1,000 participants — raced in potato sack competitions or while balancing an egg on a spoon.
The Wemco Club Auxiliary, “an organization of the wives, daughters, mothers and sweethearts of the colored employees of the Westinghouse Electric & Mfg Co,” hosted corn roasts and tea parties.
At the sixth annual New Year celebration of the Wemco Club, Alonzo Thayer, then the executive secretary of the Urban League, told patrons that the biggest challenges facing black workers was technology.
“The Negro must prepare himself to fit into changes which are taking place in modern industry, due to the introduction of laborsaving devices, replacement of manpower by electrical machinery, and efficiency demanded in large-scale production,” he said.
According to Wemco’s unofficial historian, Tom Burley, assistance from the Westinghouse company faded after Wemco’s founder and “spiritual leader” died in 1939.
But it would take four more decades for membership to be opened to non-Westinghouse employees, Mr. Burley said.
Now a “Gold Club” member of the board at Wemco, Mr. Burley
first came to the club with his father in the late 1950s. He followed his dad into a career at Westinghouse Electric Co., where Mr. Burley started as a janitor and retired 20 years ago as director of international business development.
In his six decades as a Wemco Club patron, Mr. Burley struggled to say how it’s changed. Except for the obvious: The average age of the membership is now several decades older than when he first joined. And there are fewer members.
On paper, the club has about 170 members who pay the annual $20 fee, and there are 14 officers. But the list of club regulars is — generously — a third of that.
With its cigarette machine, Tuesday bingo and an elegant silver-haired crowd around the bar, Wemco embraces an oldfashioned comfort. Men are still required to remove their hats when they enter. Women are escorted to their cars at night. New member applicants are vetted for reputation, and those who “act a fool — they’re told they can’t come back,” Mr. Burley said.
Members boast that the club requires a key fob to enter, an added level of safety.
“It’s also an emotionally safe place,” Ms. Fleming, another board member, said. “You feel included. You feel wanted.”
It’s a place where African Americans can “just be,” she has said.
Members have come together around the bar to process communal joys, like the election of the nation’s first black president in 2008, which inspired a prayer. They talk through the devastations, like the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, in which an avowed white supremacist killed 11 Jews.
“Targeting groups — that triggers feelings for many of us on different levels,” Mr.
Fleming said.
To change or not to change
At one time, the Wemco club had a corner on the late-night market, staying open until 3 a.m. — an hour later than last call elsewhere in the city.
It’s always been profitable, bringing in about $1,000 a night. Not bad for a 15-seat bar, Wemco’s president, Mr. Harris, said.
When he took over leadership of the board, a volunteer position, Mr. Harris wanted to see changes. He wanted progress, he said, which would have meant moving the club to a bigger space, perhaps with a community banquet hall.
Over the past few years, Wemco has renovated its first-floor bar and added a deck, a parking garage, a new roof and a lighted sign in the front. Under the current president, the club is running much more like a business, Mr. Burley said, and it’s good to have someone like Mr. Harris agitating for change.
But it’s also good to hear old-timers saying, “Let’s not forget why we’re here and what we’re about,” Mr. Burley said.
Still, Mr. Burley predicted that the history of the place — and Mr. Harris’ term ending next year — will ensure that the Wemco Club retains its current, if modest, feel.
“At the end of the day, it’s probably going to stay close to what it is now,” Mr. Burley said. “It is a comfortable existence.”