The Swimming Pool II

The Swimming Pool II

Over the years I worked at the pool with a lot of different people. I met Terry Conrad while working at the pool. Terry was a lifeguard along with me and he attended high school at WACO. Terry was very bright and loved technology. He was always fiddling with old radios and gadgets like that.

Terry had a great sense of humor and was always coming up with cleaver tricks and practical jokes. In the filter room there was a huge over flow tank. It was round and about three feet in diameter and six feet tall. Near the bottom of the tank was a three-inch pipe with a small wheel valve. The pipe led directly to the main line just before the large filters. Over it was an eight-inch pipe with a large wheel valve. That line is what we used to add city water to the pool. It came from a well not far from the pool.

In the heat of the summer when the pool water temperature was too warm to be comfortable we sometimes added well water to cool it down some. It really didn’t help much but it was better than nothing. One very hot summer day we got the idea that we could really cool down by crawling in that big tank. We would open the bottom valve full blast and the top valve and the tank would look like a boiling caldron of water. It was far from being hot with the water temperature about 60 degrees.

Once, on a hot afternoon after we had backwashed the filters Terry decided to get into the tank before going out to guard the pool. As often happened there were four or five kids at the top of the steps watching us work. The kids were shocked to see Terry crawl in the big tank with the water swirling around. Terry seized the moment and begin acting like the water was pulling him under. The kids imagined that the tank went deep into the floor of the room and eventually into the pool. Terry struggled, screamed and disappeared. The kids were screaming frantically. I yelled at them to run out and see if he came out in the bottom of the pool. By the time they came back Terry and I were laughing hysterically.Those kids went and got their friends and we did it again. We replayed the trick over and over. We even fooled a few of the female lifeguards with that trick.

Although this may have sounded risky it really wasn’t. The suction out the side pipe was minimal and both Terry and I could hold our breath for quite awhile. Some of our other escapades were really risky.

We challenged each other to see who could hold their breath the longest. We would both swim the length of the pool under water and start back the other way sometimes getting as much as halfway back.

We tried diving from the back rail of the diving board stand. That meant the diver had to clear about 12 feet of the deck to get to the water. The diver would stand on the top of the rail with the other person bracing him. We easily cleared the deck so naturally we moved about four feet back to the deck rail. Miraculously we both cleared the deck that way, a full 16 feet. We only did that once each! If you think this is crazy wait until you hear the next story.