By Daniel Massey
Impressed by an article in the Long Island Press about an eccentric Episcopalian minister who helped Queens youths fight drug addiction, Sylvia Simowitz decided she was going to meet the man and help him with his mission.
She took a volunteer job in the summer of 1966 as an administrative secretary for Samaritan Halfway Society founder, the Rev. Damian Pitcaithly, beginning a 32-year career for the therapeutic drug-treatment organization now known as Samaritan Village.
On May 22, Simowitz, who died of a heart attack in 1998, was honored in the community in which her career began as 89th Road at the corner of 130th Street in Richmond Hill was formally renamed “Sylvia Simowitz Way.”
In a ceremony that featured Simowitz’s son, Idan Sims, and 87-year-old husband, Arthur Simowitz, uncovering the street sign in front of Samaritan’s first permanent facility, family and colleagues recalled a woman who was instrumental in building the organization up from its beginnings. Samaritan started as an Astoria storefront counseling center that grew into a network of residential and outpatient centers that treat more than 1,500 people each day.
“She was the soul of Samaritan,” said Gloria Bimkowitz, director of community development, who has worked for the organization for 27 years. “Hers was a life of giving service.”
Samaritan President Richard Pruss, who joined the center as deputy director in 1967, told those gathered at the ceremony of the first time he met Simowitz, 35 years ago to the day. He recalled an elegant woman who appeared very much out of place in a hardscrabble center where the founding minister, his face unshaven, wore cowboy boots instead of a collar.
“He couldn’t figure out how she fit in with all these rough and tumble people,” Arthur Simowitz said.
But Sylvia Simowitz, who worked as a secretary for an Army commander on Governor’s Island during World War II, fit in despite her august appearance. She climbed from volunteer secretary to executive vice president before retiring from Samaritan in the 1980s. Her first salary was $75 a week, her husband said. She was a member of the organization’s board of directors until her death.
Pruss credited Simowitz with “setting much of the groundwork for the broad range of treatment services (Samaritan) provides today.” Her husband said that foundation-building often involved raising money in unorthodox ways.
“She was a scrounger. They had no money and they needed stuff,” Arthur Simowitz said. “We would go into a restaurant, go out to dinner. She would ask the owner if he had any crockery or pans he wanted to get rid of. She was always looking for donations from people. She went into a drugstore to buy toothpaste and ended up with the druggist giving us a check for $100 for the program.”
Simowitz traveled to Europe in 1971 to spread Samaritan’s residential treatment methods and once was mistaken for a nun by court officials when she showed up in place of Pitcaithly to request that drug offenders be released into her program. She lived in Laurelton for 30 years before moving to the East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s.
Simowitz kept working after recovering from a 1980 heart attack, but retired later in the decade. She spent her retirement as a volunteer at hospitals and nursing homes across New York City, giving of herself in much the same way as she had when her career began.
Reach reporter Daniel Massey by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
