Daniel Rubin: An ugly turn at Ocean City

By Daniel Rubin

Inquirer Columnist

I wrote a pretty sunny column last summer about Angels on the Atlantic, the program that brings thousands of underprivileged kids from Philadelphia and Camden to Ocean City for a day at the beach.

You might remember the pictures: joyous, squealing children playing tag with the pounding surf.

Well, the place is a little stormier this year. It requires a closer look.

Relations between the city, the neighbors, and the couple running the nonprofit have soured. Lawsuits and countersuits have been filed. Blogs level angry accusations.

As Walter Lukens, who lives across Beach Avenue from the nonprofit, puts it, "So America's greatest resort, a cherished place, is now being called racist. Great."

I got Vince Hubach on the phone the other day. He started the Angels program with his wife, Jeanie, three summers ago, converting an oceanfront hamburger shack into a place where kids could experience the simple summers he'd enjoyed as a boy from Glenside.

Hubach started off upbeat - how he was expecting his biggest year, 3,500 kids this summer - how he's busy cleaning and laying boardwalks for the disabled.

Then he conceded how he's having a devil of a time with the city and his neighbors.

Summer summons

Sixteen times last year, the municipality cited Angels on the Atlantic for violating ordinances - it contended that the Hubachs' port-o-johns, food carts, and buses were not allowed.

The Hubachs are fighting the charges, contending in a lawsuit filed in February that the city is selectively prosecuting them - discriminating because they serve mostly poor and minority children.

The suit quotes city zoning board lawyer Mark Stein as working to thwart the nonprofit's effort to build a pavilion on the site, and calling Angels "a controversial organization that brought black and Spanish children from Camden and Philadelphia" to the beach.

In an interview, Stein said the problem with the plan was strictly legal, and that the race issue is a red herring.

That pavilion plan is still in dispute. More than two dozen residents hired an attorney, contending the pavilion would violate laws enacted in the 1960s that restricted the building of private structures on beaches and dunes.

The latest round goes to the neighbors. An Atlantic County Superior Court judge this month said the pavilion wasn't permitted - reversing the city's zoning board.

A paper trail

When I met Hubach last summer, he was the balding, smiling 40-year-old flipping burgers and hosing off kids before loading them back in the buses. His T-shirt read: "The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears or the sea."

I'm not sure saltwater will do the trick now.

Hubach is still sore at City Councilman John Kemenosh, who last fall told a reporter for the Ocean City Gazette's Web site that "the Ocean City that my children, you and others your age grew up in is rapidly disappearing. It's being taken over by people who are not serving the best interest of the community."

Kemenosh was just warming up. He called Hubach "a criminal inviting children to our city."

What he was referring to is a second-degree misdemeanor conviction from a 2005 incident in Delaware County. Hubach pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in simple assault. "A fight broke out in my warehouse and I didn't do anything to stop it," he says.

Hubach says he'd been trying to make a citizen's arrest on a man who attempted to sell a Mercedes he didn't own and the man fought "like a bull."

A probable-cause affidavit from the Upper Darby police offers more detail: As Hubach confronted the man, two business associates from New Jersey showed up to buy some equipment, he told police. By coincidence, he said, the two men - a father and son - also had been scammed by the Mercedes man.

When police responded to 911 calls, they found the Mercedes man in a "hog-tie" position. He'd been beaten with bats, he said, and stabbed in the foot.

The two associates pleaded guilty to simple assault. The car man pleaded to two summary offenses, relating to possessing a vehicle he didn't own. Hubach got a year's probation. He has no other record. It was, he said, a onetime mistake.

His problems at the Shore, however, continue. Ocean City is fighting him over renewal of his mercantile license. If he has to, he says he'll stop selling food on the beach. The 16 citations will be heard in Middle Township instead of Ocean City.

I talked to two of his neighbors, who resented the charge of racism.

Angela Gerken, who is a school board member in Essex County, N.J., and a summer resident of Ocean City for 22 years, called the community "anything but racist. . . . I have never heard anybody say anything to or about a person of color that would lead me to think there is a racial overtone."

On the contrary, she said, the city went too far to accommodate Angels on the Atlantic. "You're talking about 16 violations over several years that have never been resolved. . . . To me, the people who have been using the disadvantaged population is the Hubachs."

"That card is a really, really sensitive card," said Walter Lukens, whose company raises funds for nonprofit projects, including the proposed Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington. "We've now gone from a spitting match into nuclear weapons."

So the forecast calls for summer squalls. It would be a shame if they ruin a day at the beach for kids who don't get out that much.

Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com

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