The Swimming Pool

I worked at the Mt. Pleasant Pool every summer from age 13 through my first year of college. I started as the basket boy for the morning Red Cross lessons and ended being assistant manager. I usually worked six days a week and many times seven. During the six weeks of Red Cross lessons, work started at 9 am and didn’t end until we closed the pool at 9 pm. I usually had an hour for lunch and supper but usually taught private lessons during those times. Needless to say I didn’t have much of a social life except when it rained. Those days we closed and we usually went to a movie or something like that.

People used to ask me if I ever saved anybody. I would usually say that I pulled someone out on an almost weekly basis. Did that mean I saved them? Well, I always thought that if I hadn’t done it someone else would have. That sort of thing is fairly common at most pools. Someone gets in over their head and needs a little help getting out.

It wasn’t quite as common to have someone slip under the water and not be noticed. Lifeguards are all about prevention and using rescue as little as possible. When it was necessary the guard would try to extend something to the swimmer or throw a life ring to them. We were to only enter the water as a last resort. On one occasion we had to use the resuscitator. As it turned out the person was having a seizure. We used it to provide oxygen. I don’t think he was ever in serious danger. Although I practiced it a thousand times, I never had to use CPR.

The pool was divided into areas with a guard responsible for each one. The areas were deliberately overlapping to make sure we had complete coverage of the entire pool. We practiced scanning our areas in patterns and then reversing the pattern and scanning again. That went on over and over all day long. It is so hard wired into my head today that I find myself doing it every time I am around people who are in the water. It is kind of a curse to always be looking for trouble.

In all of those years at the swimming pool we had some great times. I swam everyday and became a strong swimmer. At the annual swimming meet every summer I was undefeated, even swimming against swimmers two or three years older than me. It was the one area of my life that I had great success.

At every swimming meet the guards put on a show. We usually dressed up in crazy outfits and did crazy things off the diving boards. One trick was to line six guys up on the very end of the board and all dive in at exactly the same time. It was dangerous and tricky but I don’t think anyone ever got hurt. I still have the picture of us doing it that was on the front page of the newspaper.

Sometimes on hot summer nights some of us would stick around after the pool closed and go for a moonlight swim. It was cool to have the whole pool to ourselves. We often ordered pizza and had our own small party. Sometimes the police would stop in and check to make sure we were pool employees.
The police checked the pool after hours regularly throughout the season. It wasn’t unusual for us to find clothing left behind by skinny dippers who had climbed over the fence the night before. Sometime we had vandalism or damage to the pool. On a few occasions they broke into the bathhouse and would take whatever they wanted. Sometimes we were very frustrated.

We cooked up schemes to get back at the scoundrels. We put jelly on the counter we knew they would crawl over to get into the bathhouse once and the intruders left a messy trail but probably just washed it all off in the pool so we weren’t ahead much. Once we hid in the bathhouse until the swimmers snuck in and then turned on all the lights. When we realized how many of them there were and how big they looked we called the police. Fortunately, they left before anything happened.

We spent the night a few times at the pool waiting up most of the night to catch intruders. That didn’t work to well because we scared ourselves more than anyone else that came along. I’ll tell some more about that in the next installment.