The Magic Dime

An memory and thought provoking piece by Co-Founder Manus Patrick MacLean

There’s a question I get asked more than any other: Why did you start Brain Drain Unlimited Foundation?

If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s in a working-class neighborhood in America, you already know what I’m about to tell you. You know because you lived it. You know because the smell of chlorine on a July afternoon can still stop you dead in your tracks and send you back forty, fifty years in an instant.

I want to tell you about the magic dime.

Every summer morning, my mother would press a single dime into my hand. One thin, silver Roosevelt dime,  1968, 1971, 1973, it didn’t matter what year was stamped on it. What mattered was what it could buy. That dime was a bus ticket and a swimming pool admission, all rolled into one. Ten cents. A full day of summer, purchased outright.

The Bus

The city bus would groan to a stop at the corner and we’d pile on, a herd of kids in cutoff shorts and old sneakers, towels rolled under our arms or draped over our necks like we were prizefighters heading to the ring. You’d drop your dime in the farebox and hear that satisfying clink, the little mechanical gulp that said: you’re in. You belonged somewhere today.

Nobody’s parent rode with us. Think about that for a moment. Eight, nine, ten years old, and we rode the city bus across town by ourselves. The driver didn’t bat an eye. The other passengers didn’t call the authorities. It was just summer. It was just how things were. The world trusted its children a little more back then, or maybe it just trusted the neighborhood. Either way, we were free.

Memorial Pool

Memorial Swimming Pool. If you had one in your town, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Every city had one, built in the postwar years when municipalities actually invested in public recreation, big, concrete, no-frills pools surrounded by chain-link fences and cracked concrete decks that burned the soles of your feet if you stood still too long. There were no waterslides. No wave machines. No cabanas or smoothie bars. There was a shallow end, a deep end, a high dive if you were lucky, and a lifeguard in a white zinc-oxide nose who blew a whistle every eleven seconds. 😂

It was paradise.

You’d hit the water and the whole world outside that chain-link fence just evaporated. School was a thousand years away. Your dad’s overtime shifts, your mom’s worries about the electric bill, whatever was on the evening news, none of it could reach you in that water. You were a kid in a pool on a Tuesday in July, and that was the entire universe.

The Democracy of Chlorine

Here’s what I remember most, and here’s why I’m writing this on a blog for Brain Drain Unlimited Foundation: that pool was the great equalizer. Everybody’s kid was in that water. The plumber’s daughter and the teacher’s son. The kids from the row homes and the kids from the twins. Black kids, white kids, the Italian families, the Irish families, the Puerto Rican families who’d moved in the year before. Everybody had a dime. Everybody got in.

Nobody asked where your parents came from. Nobody asked what language you spoke at dinner. You were just a kid who could, or couldn’t, do a cannonball off the high board. That was the only credential that mattered.

I think about this every single day in my work with displaced professionals who come to this country carrying credentials and dreams and find the door locked when they arrive. People who were respected in their home countries, who saved lives, who built things, who taught, who created, who discovered. And here they sit, on the wrong side of a chain-link fence, waiting for someone to let them in.

What a Dime Could Buy

That dime bought more than a bus ride and a swim. It bought belonging. It bought a day inside the community, not outside of it. It bought the chance to show what you could do, how far you could swim, how long you could hold your breath, how high you could climb before your nerve gave out on the diving board. It bought dignity for a dime.

That’s what we’re trying to build at Brain Drain Unlimited Foundation. Not a swimming pool, obviously. But the same principle. A low barrier to entry. A place where your talent matters more than your paperwork. A place where a talented professional from any field and any country can get back in the water, can practice their profession, contribute to their new community, and be seen for what they can do, not just where they came from.

We help people navigate the immigration pathways, the visas, the credential evaluations, the licensing exams, the bureaucratic maze that would make that old city bus route look like a straight line.

We do it because we believe what that dime taught us: that the cost of admission to the American community should be low enough that talent, not wealth, is what gets you in.

Summers End

The pools are mostly gone now, or they charge twelve dollars, or they require a membership, or they’ve been replaced by private aquatic centers with tiered pricing and reserved lanes. The buses cost two-fifty. No mother is pressing a dime into her kid’s hand and saying, “Go. Have a good day. Be home by dinner.”

But the principle doesn’t have to be gone. The idea that a community invests in making sure everyone gets a chance to jump in the pool, that idea is worth fighting for. It’s worth funding. It’s worth building an entire organization around.

Every displaced professional we help is a kid standing at the edge of the pool, dime in hand, waiting to jump.

Our job is to make sure the gate is open. That’s why we exist.

That Dime Still Matters

That dime bought more than a swim. It bought a chance to belong. Right now, displaced professionals stand at the edge with their own dimes out, waiting for the gate to open.

You can help keep the pool open. Donate to fund credential support and mentoring. Volunteer your time. Share this story.