Mr. Dye Suits Back Up

Johnny Dye, known in the Hill as ​“Mr. Dye,” was reluctant at first to serve another two-year term as his neighborhood’s Democratic Ward Committee co-chair, a thankless party position he has filled for over two decades.

The 79-year-old Arthur Street stalwart ultimately agreed to sign up for another go — not out of a yearning to attend more late-night meetings, but because the community needed someone to step up.

Bolstering civic participation in the Hill has been Dye’s life’s work, in often unseen, and sometimes colorful, ways.

Dye and Wilson Street resident Pamela Delerme have successfully petitioned their way to becoming candidates for the Ward 5 Democratic Ward Committee co-chair positions.

Since no other candidates filed papers to challenge Dye and Delerme for the hyperlocal party roles, the two will bypass a primary and assume their positions for the two-year term that runs from March 2020 through March 2022. Similar teams have filed papers in all of the city’s 30 wards; in some cases competing candidates will square off in a March 3 primary, seeking one of the city’s least understood positions.

They have a lot to learn from Mr. Dye’s story —about why the position is worth holding and how it can make a difference in the lives of grassroots New Haveners.

11th Term. Or 13th?

Call Johnny Dye the dean of Democratic ward chairs. By his count, he has been in the role for at least 20 years. Maybe 25.

The position formally requires its holders to put together committees of several dozen neighborhood Democrats, hold meetings in the run-up to mayoral nomination contests, and then cast their own mayoral endorsement ballots (sometimes independent of whomever a majority of their fellow committee members have voted to support) at the once-every-two-years Democratic Town Convention.

Informally, ward co-chairs serve as neighborhood-level ambassadors for the city’s Democratic Party, spending their terms registering voters, getting neighbors to the polls, and encouraging political participation at the grassroots level.

Dye said during a recent interview in the second-floor living room of his and his wife Martha’s two-family perwinkle blue house on Arthur Street that he had initially planned on stepping down from this position to make way for another interested Hill politico.

But work and family obligations derailed the latter’s bid for the role, leaving one of the two ward committee leadership spots open and potentially unfilled if Dye followed through on ending his decades-long run.

“I didn’t want this area to go without a ward chair,” he said, putting down his cane as he sunk comfortably into a leather-upholstered lounge chair.

“Leadership is one of the most paramount factors when you live in the Hill.”

The neighborhood and the town committee needed someone responsible, someone hard-working and generous with their free time, someone who knows his neighbors well and is a good communicator, someone with deep roots — and stakes — in this community.

Threat Of Cane-Whacking

Dye has embodied all of those qualities and principles in the Hill for decades.

A retired former mechanic and engineer with Pratt & Whitney, Dye spent 14 years as the chair of the Hill South Community Management Team. He still attends every meeting, sitting up front with cane in hand and NYPD baseball cap on his head, chiming in on nearly every issue with his inimitable raspy voice.

He spent nine months as an alder, filling out the rest of former Board of Alders President Jorge Perez’s last term after the latter was tapped in 2015 by then-Gov. Dannel Malloy to become the state’s banking commissioner.

But he didn’t get into politics to hold high-profile positions or climb the elected latter. He has stuck with serving as ward committee co-chair, and attending countless public safety meetings and community cook outs — always pressing others to do their best to make the Hill a safe, neighborly, and politically engaged place to live.

“Mr. Dye is a mentor to everyone he meets, his heart is pure and his moral compass has been shaped by what his eyes have seen and where his feet have taken him,” New Haven DTC Chair Vinnie Mauro (pictured) told the Independent. He described Dye’s life as ​“like turning the pages of a history book of New Haven.”

“His presence at the NHDTC adds historical gravitas and he adds his own brand of humor and keeps the meetings starting and ending on time.

“I’ll also add, when he thinks I need it, he threatens to whack me with his cane … and that’s why I love him.”

Former Hill Alder Dave Reyes, who is also Perez’s nephew, agreed.

“Mr. Dye is a living legend in the Hill community,” he said.

He has a ​“wealth of knowledge. I call him ​‘Grandpa’ because I’ve practically known him my entire life. He is respected citywide, and it’s an honor to be associated with him.”

Occasionally, winning that respect entailed unorthodox measures.

The Legend Of The Trash

Tomas Reyes (pictured) will never forget the one day he saw firsthand how Dye earned his reputation as an outspoken, even tenacious, advocate for improved quality of life in the Hill.

It was the early 1990s. Reyes was in his second term as president of the Board of Alders and representing the Hill’s Ward 4.

“For some reason Johnny thought that, as president, I technically represented all the wards,” Reyes said. ​“He had been trying to get some garbage picked up around his house that DPW [the city Department of Public Works] hadn’t done.”

Dye called Reyes multiple times about the bulk trash dumped outside of his Arthur Street house. Reyes didn’t get back to him in a timely enough fashion for Dye. So the latter decided to take matters into his own hands.

“He came over with a pick up truck to dump a bunch of garbage outside my house on Redfield Street,” Reyes said.

When he found out about Dye’s audacious trash dump, Reyes said he was shocked. ​“Whatever I was doing, I stopped and ran home. I called him and we had some words.”

Reyes said he tried to explain that he represented Ward 4, not Ward 5, and that even as president of the board, he could not control DPW’s actions. He threatened to have the trash brought back over to Dye’s front yard and re-dumped on Arthur Street.

Then he cooled down, decided that would be a bad move, and made some calls to City Hall connections instead. Ultimately, DPW came to pick up the bulk trash — from Reyes’ front yard.

“That’s the kind of activist he was,” Reyes said about Dye. ​“He would try to do it nicely, but if it didn’t work, you can be sure he could find a way to get it done.”

Despite the trash tiff, Reyes and Dye became friends. ​“It didn’t ruin my respect and admiration of him,” he said. When Reyes became chief of staff for former Mayor Toni Harp, he would occasionally call him with requests for service.

“I viewed him as a friend. We were political allies.”

“I would describe him as firm, but not stern,” Reyes continued. ​“He’s a very interesting mixture of those qualities. You know when he’s talking, you’ve got to listen.”

The Road North

Though Dye’s name may now be synonymous with the Hill, he hasn’t always lived up north.

Born in Batesville, Mississippi, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Dye moved to New Haven as a teenager in 1959.

“Those were wild times,” he recalled about his primary and secondary education years in the birth place of Stax Records. He said he attended Porter Junior High School with Booker T. Jones, future frontman of Booker T. & the M.G.‘s. And at Manassas High School, he was just a few years ahead of future soul legend Isaac Hayes.

Dye and his family moved to Connecticut because of an injury sustained by his older brother Mack during the latter’s time fighting in the Korean War.

His brother had served in the European theater during World War II, and escaped unscathed. After the war, the U.S. military stationed him in occupied Japan. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, many of the Americans stationed in Japan — including Mack — were given a gun and sent to the Korean peninsula. Dye said his brother was seriously injured by a Chinese mortar during the conflict.

The military first sent his wounded older brother to a Veteran Affairs (VA) hospital in the Bronx. But, because of overcrowding, he was soon transferred to the VA hospital in West Haven.

Dye and his mother and siblings frequently visited his brother in West Haven, and eventually moved permanently to the Hill.

Dye recalled that the Hill he got to know in the 1960s and 1970s was a radically different place than the neighborhood he still calls home today.

“The racial makeup has changed drastically,” he said.

Back then, the Hill was mostly Italian-American. Dye remembered visiting Italian bakeries up and down Washington Avenue every weekend. He would get off work at the Pratt and Whitney factory in North Haven at noon, go to Washington Avenue to pick up a freshly baked loaf of bread, and then return home to Martha for lunch — just hot bread and butter.

Hull’s Brewery allowed customers to bring an empty pitcher to fill up with beer. The Boulevard was lined with shops of every kind. And the Hill was the anchor of the city’s Catholic community, home to Saint Anthony’s, Saint Peter’s, Saint John’s, and Sacred Heart.

Dye cited the late former alder, state representative, affordable housing advocate, and civil rights activist Walter Brooks as one of his primary inspirations for getting involved in local politics and New Haven civic life.

“We used to come here and talk politics in the house,” he said, gesturing with his cane towards his couch.

“Most frequently we would talk about improving and stabilizing the community.”

He said he also felt compelled to enter politics after serving on his neighborhood block watch, seeing crime getting worse and worse in the neighborhood, and feeling unsatisfied with local political leaders’ responses.

“Someone had to be very vocal,” he said. ​“I raised all my kids in this house. They love this house.” He had no intention of moving, from this house or from this block.

“Learn Your Constituents”

Dye said he has tried to continue that work of stabilizing the neighborhood through his volunteer leadership on the community management team and the Democratic Ward Committee.

He said he’s always viewed his primary responsibility as a ward co-chair as knocking doors, talking to neighbors, and gauging the most important issues facing the Hill community at any given time. Ward co-chairs then must communicate those neighborhood needs to alders and City Hall to try to achieve basic, quality-of-life improvements for city residents.

“Learn your constituents,” he said when asked what advice he would give to someone interested in assuming the role of ward co-chair in his or her neighborhood. ​“Learn what the need of the community is.”

Dye said one of the issues that he sees and hears about the most in the Hill is that of absentee landlords buying up residential properties and failing to take care of them properly.

“We have a lot of absentee landlords who you can’t hold accountable,” he lamented. ​“A lot of these houses, everybody wants to make rooming houses out of them. I’m strictly opposed to that.”

Dye said he gets multiple calls a week from out-of-town landlords interested in buying his home. His response is the same every time. A terse, raspy, ​“No.”

He praised the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) in general, and Hill Neighborhood Specialist Art Natalino, Jr. in particular, for working tirelessly to keep the neighborhood clean and safe, often by pressuring landlords to take care of their properties and maintain safe living standards for renters.

“Art is one of the top guys,” he said. ​“He’s very, very, very dedicated. You call him, he’s available.”

The Dyes’ three children are all grown and out of the house now, leaving just Johnny and Martha on the second floor. He said they come back frequently to visit, and still see Arthur Street as their ​“home.”

The carpeted-living room is decorated with framed photos of his kids, as both children and adults. A plaque on the wall commemorates Dye’s son Michael, a New York City police detective who developed brain cancer after serving as one of the emergency first responders during 9/11. Dye frequently wears a NYPD baseball cap in his son’s honor, and advocated alongside U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal last year for Congress to pass a 9/11 victims compensation fund.

Dye said he and his wife could have bought a house in the suburbs and moved out of New Haven after their children had graduated from college and after he had retired from Pratt and Whitney. But they chose to stay, in the house and in the community. Martha organizes the annual summer Hill pop up festival. And Mr. Dye. Well, he still does a lot.

“I’d lose that continuity,” he said about why he decided to stay in New Haven and not leave for the suburbs. The continuity of his history in the place, his neighborhood advocacy, and the community of neighbors he’s become an anchor of.

List of Ward Committee Co-Chair Candidates

Below is a complete list of candidates who have successfully petitioned to serve in the city’s 60 Democratic Ward Committee co-chair positions.

The names in bold are facing contested primaries, which will be voted on by resident Democrats from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on March 3.

This list also includes a few Republicans who have filed for committee co-chair spots. All of those candidates are running unopposed.

Ward 1: Donasia Gray, Michael Martinez

Ward 2: Jane Kinity, Lynette Murphy

Ward 3: Carlos Hernandez, Clarence Cummings

Ward 4: Howard Boyd, Simirramis Rodrguez

Ward 4 Republican: Cynthia Cavo

Ward 5: Johnny Dye, Pamela Delerme

Ward 6: Helen Martin-Dawson, Andrew Giering

Ward 7: Otis Johnson, John Martin

Ward 8: Brenda Harris, Ana Winn

Ward 9: Sarah Locke, Claudia Herrera-Martinez

Ward 10: Kenya Adams-Martin, Kenneth Suzuki

Ward 11: Joseph Fuce, Philomena Meyer
Kurtis Kearny

Ward 11 Republican: Gail Roundtree

Ward 12: Mary Thigpen, Lina Deleon

Ward 13: Arthur Natalino, Mildred Melendez

Ward 14: Sarah Miller, Martin Torresquintero

Ward 15: Kevin Diaz, Robert Roberts

Ward 16: Sarah Debala, Celestino Cordova
Mishele Rodriguez, Jayuan Carter

Ward 17: Christina Laudano, Alphonse Paolillo
Marianne Apuzzo

Ward 18: Lisa Bassani, Nicholas Colavolpe

Ward 19: Claudine Wilkins-Chambers, Ethel Berger

Ward 20: Oscar Havyarinama, Barbara Vereen
Jeannette Sykes, Rhonda Nelson Sheffield

Ward 21: Raymond Jackson, Katherine Sacks
Maverick Jacobs, Maceo Streater

Ward 22: Victoria Dancy, Sarah Grube

Ward 23: Jerry Poole, Dorthula Green

Ward 24: Randall Furlow, Arthur Perlo

Ward 25: Janis Underwood, Barbara Segaloff

Ward 26: Amy Marx, Sharon Jones
Pamela Allen

Ward 27: Beryl Benson, Andrea Downer
Ward 27 Republican: Lee Parker

Ward 28: Jess Corbett, Donald Walker

Ward 29: Audrey Murriell-Tyson, Major Ruth
Tamika Hollis

Ward 30: Iva Johnson, Marcey Jones