In the summer of 2007, a family seeking a simple vacation at a family-themed RV park in rural Alabama was met not with hospitality but with exclusion rooted in fear and outdated stereotypes.
Dick and Silvia Glover, of Saraland, brought their then-two-year-old foster son Caleb — later adopted — to Wales West RV Resort and Train and Garden Lovers Family Park in Silverhill. The boy loved trains.
The park advertised itself as a wholesome destination with a swimming pool, showers, playgrounds, and its signature light railway.
What should have been a month-long stay while the father received cancer treatment in nearby Mobile ended abruptly after park management learned Caleb had HIV.
Upon learning of the child’s status — reportedly after Silvia Glover mentioned it in conversation with staff — manager and owner Ken Zadnichek informed the family that Caleb could not use the common areas, including the swimming pool and showers, without a doctor’s note certifying he posed no risk to others.
The family left early the next morning. Their money was refunded.
A toddler with a treatable chronic condition, already facing other challenges including mild cerebral palsy, was effectively barred from the facilities other guests freely enjoyed.
The setting made the exclusion harder to square. Wales West sits in the quiet farming country of south Baldwin County between Summerdale and Silverhill, and it built its reputation on exactly the things that draw young families to the Gulf Coast’s interior: a miniature train that loops the property, gardens, a pool and the unhurried rhythm of a park where children are the point of the visit. For a two-year-old whose foster placement had brought him hundreds of miles from his home community while his foster father underwent cancer treatment, the park’s train was not an amenity but the reason for the trip — and it was precisely that trip which the park’s decision severed.
Foster placements are by their nature fragile arrangements, built around medical schedules, caseworker approvals and the limits of what a family can absorb. The Glovers had taken in a child with cerebral palsy and a chronic illness while managing a parent’s cancer treatment in Mobile, and they chose a destination within reach of the city’s hospitals so the stay could serve both needs. A single conversation with a staff member converted those plans into a departure before sunrise, and the refund that followed did nothing to restore what the boy had been denied: a month of playing where other children played.
Not a Close Call
This was not a close call involving actual risk.
By 2007, more than two decades into the epidemic, public-health authorities had long established that HIV is not transmitted through casual contact, shared pools, showers, towels, or ordinary play. The Alabama Department of Public Health itself stated clearly that HIV is not spread by swimming in the same pool or using the same wash facilities.
Yet Wales West treated a small child as a biohazard.
The science could not have been clearer by 2007. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, transmits through specific body fluids — blood, sexual contact, and from mother to child during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding — and not through water, surfaces, food, sweat, tears or the ordinary contact of children at play. Chlorinated pools inactivate the virus almost immediately. Public health agencies at every level, from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to state health departments across the country, had spent two decades communicating exactly that message, and the Alabama Department of Public Health’s plain statement on shared pools and wash facilities left no professional ambiguity for a private business to lean on. The demand for a doctor’s note certifying that a two-year-old posed “no risk” in a swimming pool asked a physician to certify something that was already settled science — and treated the boy’s status as a hazard the science had never supported.
The episode also carried a particular cruelty in its asymmetry. No other guest at the park faced any screening, inquiry or restriction; the test was applied to one child, on the basis of one disclosure, by a management that then converted a private conversation into a public separation. Children with HIV attended school, swam in public pools and played on playgrounds across Alabama in 2007 under laws and policies that had long since barred such exclusion. A family-themed park in Baldwin County stood alone in reviving a fear the rest of the state had retired.
The ACLU Steps In
The ACLU of Alabama rightly called the episode what it was: ignorance and prejudice directed at a defenseless two-year-old.
“Mr. Zadnichek should be ashamed of himself for picking on a defenseless two-year-old,” said Christine Sun of the ACLU’s AIDS Project at the time. “Ignorance about the disease…”
The national organization’s AIDS Project had spent years litigating precisely this category of discrimination — exclusions from schools, pools, dental practices and campgrounds justified by myths about transmission — and the Alabama affiliate’s involvement brought that expertise to a case whose facts were unusually stark. There was no disputed encounter, no ambiguity about what was said, and no plausible reading of the episode in which a toddler’s presence in a wading pool posed a danger to anyone. What remained was a straightforward legal question: whether a business open to the public could impose conditions on one disabled child that it imposed on no one else.
A Federal Reckoning
The answer arrived through federal law. The Americans with Disabilities Act — the landmark civil rights statute of 1990 — prohibits places of public accommodation, campgrounds and resorts among them, from discriminating against people with disabilities, and federal regulations and courts had long counted HIV among the impairments the law protects. Businesses cannot impose eligibility conditions that screen out individuals with disabilities unless those conditions are necessary for the operation of the business, and no such necessity existed in a toddler’s use of a swimming pool.
When the ACLU of Alabama took the Glovers’ case into federal court, it framed the park’s conduct in exactly those terms — and the case became one of the clearest illustrations in the region of how the ADA reaches beyond employment and public agencies into the ordinary commercial life of small-town Alabama. RV resorts, campgrounds, swimming facilities and family attractions are public accommodations under the statute, and the obligation to serve people with disabilities — including children with chronic illness — attaches to them just as it does to hotels, restaurants and theaters.
The legal framework had been tested repeatedly in the years before 2007. Federal courts had ruled on HIV discrimination in schools, in medical and dental practices, in insurance and in public services, and the consistent thread was that fear of transmission through ordinary contact is not a defense — it is the very ignorance the statute was written to displace. A business that demanded a medical certification of a risk that did not exist was, in effect, imposing a stereotype as policy, and the federal courts had already labeled such conduct unlawful when it occurred in other industries.
What the Case Left Behind
For the Glovers, the reckoning came too late for the vacation that had been lost — a month at a train park that their son, then two, would never get back. For Baldwin County and the Gulf Coast’s hospitality industry, the case left a plainer lesson: the standards that govern a theme park on the coast are the same ones that govern a hotel in Mobile or a restaurant in Fairhope, and a business that invents its own health policy does so under federal law.
The episode also stands as a marker of how far understanding of HIV had traveled by 2007 — and how unevenly that understanding had reached the businesses of rural Alabama. Twenty-six years after the virus was identified, the science was settled, the law was settled, and the remaining work was cultural: making sure that what public health agencies and civil rights lawyers knew reached the owner of a swimming pool in Silverhill before a two-year-old ever set foot in it. The Wales West case became part of that education, cited in the years since as an example of both how discrimination against people with HIV persists at the smallest scales of daily life and how quickly the law can answer it when a family refuses to accept it quietly.
For Caleb, the consequences of 2007 were borne by a child too young to understand them — a boy who loved trains, who was already managing cerebral palsy, and who learned before he could talk in full sentences that some places would decide, wrongly, that he did not belong. The federal case that followed could not give that month back. What it could do — and what the ACLU’s pursuit of the case achieved — was make certain that the next child with HIV who arrived at a Gulf Coast campground would be met with the accommodations the law guarantees rather than the fear the state’s health department had long since disproven.