Our Summers at Rose Park Tennis Camp

A Tribute to Roumania Peters Walker

Summer Fun and Sunday Drives

As children, we did not experience summer camp as young people typically seem to do these days. Our father liked to get away though, often taking us on Sunday drives that radiated a hundred miles or more in every direction of the compass depending on the attraction and time of year. We took day trips to Dinosaur Land and Story Book Land, climbed Sugarloaf Mountain and explored Mount Vernon, swam in Lake Caroline and Lake Fairfax, enjoyed Great Falls and Cunningham Falls, and motored along Skyline Drive and Ohio Drive. We spent a week or more most years camping near the beach, but otherwise our summers were unstructured and we were pretty much free to ride our bikes and play with friends. As we got older and the family grew to eight children, our whole-family outings grew more rare, but our father would still make an effort to spend time with one or more of us at a time, like getting up early to help us with paper routes and especially by playing tennis with those of us who showed an interest or aptitude. Dad loved to play and teach us tennis, and three of us siblings especially took to it. It was our way to connect with an otherwise distant father who increasingly dealt with bouts of anger and depression. We played on a great number of different public courts, and we could rely on our dad to know which ones in which jurisdiction had lights for night play.

Rose Park Tennis Camp

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising then, that the one structured summer activity I remember vividly was Tennis Camp at Rose Park. Rose Park is  a beautiful urban space in Northwest Washington DC on the eastern edge of Georgetown not too far from DuPont Circle. It is situated on a bluff overlooking Rock Creek Parkway. In early spring, the grassy hill that descends from Rose Park to the Rock Creek Valley was (and is) filled with daffodils.

The park itself consists of ballfields, walking paths, a playground, a recreation center, a basketball court, and tennis courts. The DC Department of Recreation offered this free program for city youth, and the tennis camp ran Monday-Friday from about 9AM-1PM throughout the summer. If your family qualified, you would be served lunch as well. Our mother did not drive, so each morning we would ride our bicycles from our home in Woodley Park down Shoreham Hill and through Rock Creek Park for about two miles, fording the creek at one point, and after crossing under the P Street bridge we’d ride (or walk) our bikes up the steep hill to Rose Park. In the afternoons we would reverse the process.

“Pete and Re-Pete”

Matilda Roumania Peters, a high school physical education teacher, was the director of the Rose Park Tennis Camp. I remember her as slender and of somewhat less than average height, an unprepossessing woman whom we did not realize had a remarkable resumé. We simply knew her as Mrs. Walker. Roumania and her older sister Margaret Peters grew up less than two blocks away from Rose Park and learned to play on the precursors to the  courts we were then playing on. Roumania described the courts in the book Black Georgetown Remembered: “Sand, dirt, rocks, everything. We would…pick up the rocks and sweep the line and put some dry lime on there. That’s what we played with….We learned there.” From those humble roots, the sisters were eventually recruited to attend Tuskegee Institute where they became stellar singles players and nearly unbeatable doubles players affectionately known as “Pete” (Margaret) and “Re-Pete” (Roumania). The sisters were doubles champions in the American Tennis Association (ATA) for 14 years. Black players were barred from playing in the United States Tennis Association (USTA) at the time. One fact we did hear was that Mrs. Walker  defeated the legendary Althea Gibson, then a high school girl ten years her junior, in an ATA singles championship match. It was a victory no other ATA player could claim, as Gibson won the ATA girls’ championships in 1944 and 1945, and ten consecutive women’s championships from 1947-1956. It was that lone match in 1946, ironically a loss to our future teacher, that eventually led to Gibson breaking the color line and being invited to compete in USTA events, winning 11 USTA Grand Slam events in singles and doubles in her stellar career. Had Roumania been the one ten years younger, who knows if that might have been her…

Mrs. Walker was about 60 years old at the time we knew her and she was still very athletic. She was rather laid back If you were there because you had to be, and you did tennis drills for a minimal time before being released to play ping-pong, Connect-4, and other games under the supervision of the staff at the rec center. If you were serious about tennis, however, she would drill you mercilessly and match you up with players of similar or greater talent. She was hard on her protégées, but you were also pleased that she was giving you so much of her attention. Many of her summer students went on to earn tennis scholarships to college, a source of pride for Roumania. We played in tournaments against teams from other rec centers in DC, and we were given complimentary tickets to the Washington Star Tennis Tournament held annually at the Rock Creek Tennis Center at 16th and Kennedy Streets, a USTA event that Roumania and Margaret would not have been allowed to compete in during their prime. It was at that tournament that I met and shook hands with Arthur Ashe, another tennis pioneer, who spoke to a large group of youth from the National Junior Tennis League.

Mrs. Walker died in 2003 at age 85. She was much loved by the children she mentored, and will long be fondly remembered by our family. In October of 2015, the Rose Park tennis courts were renamed in honor of Mrs. Walker and her sister Margaret, a tribute a long time coming, earned in the heat and humidity of many a DC summer – one child at a time.