Alroy Puckett provides massage therapy to Major League Baseball player Larry Doby in February, 1954.
Courtesy of McKinzie Lambert Collection, Garland County Historical Society
“It’s a Small Price to Pay for Integration”
Alroy Puckett’s family has deep roots in Hot Springs and the bathing industry. He was a third generation bathhouse employee, working in the Superior Bathhouse and then the Black-owned and operated Pythian and National Baptist Bathhouses. Mr. Puckett also climbed the professional ladder in the bathhouses, moving up from pack room helper, to attendant, and then to massage therapist, claiming to be the first Black massage therapist in Hot Springs in the mid-1940s (see image to the right). All the while, he spoke of the “proudness of, of, of being ‘I am somebody’” because of his work in the bathing industry.
Mr. Puckett became manager of the National Baptist Bathhouse and Hotel in 1967. Four years earlier, the Hot Springs National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) integrated the bathhouses on the world famous Bathhouse Row. Puckett weighed the success of open access to Hot Springs’ thermal waters for everyone with the loss of business as more African American patrons abandoned the Black bathing businesses. “It’s a small price to pay for integration,” Puckett concluded in the 1983. “If that is what is killing us, let it go on.” Visitation statistics supported Puckett’s assessment as after 1963, neither of the Black bathhouses in Hot Springs ever catered to as many visitors as before the push for integration.
Alroy Puckett’s career in the bathhouse industry reflects not only the hard work performed by African American men and women in a separate and unequal society during an era of segregation, but also the possibilities and consequences of providing thermal water access for all at Hot Springs National Park.
