The Swimming Pool

Today is a tough day to be outside in Moss Point, Mississippi. It’s past four o’clock in the afternoon and the temperature is still ninety degrees and the humidity is high. What should I expect? It’s still July!

But how were these unbearable conditions dealt with before the days of air conditioning?

Generally, life went on without any recognition of the weather’s severity for the very good reason that we had no alternatives. But in the years immediately following World War II, a group of citizens got together and found a way to finance construction of a city owned swimming pool.

Big deal! Hundreds, maybe thousands of cities and towns have done that. But Moss Point had two things that, over time, set their swimming pool apart from the others.

The first was the water. There were actually two pools; the big pool and the wading pool for non-swimmers that quickly became known as the ‘baby’ pool. But while these two pools were separated by only a few feet of concrete, the water was as different as night and day. The big pool was fed by a deep well that not only produced a strain of naturally blue salt water, but salt water that had a temperature that must have been in the fifty degree range. There was no problem asking swimmers to shower before entering the pool because if you didn’t get a cold shower and went directly from ambient summer temperature to swimming in the pool, the shock to your body was traumatic! You searched for warmth. Fast. And where was the closest source of heat? The baby pool. For some reason, it was fed by a well that produced water (with a discomforting brown tint) that must have be about eighty-five degrees. It was great! It warmed and relaxed you and got the blood flowing again that only moments before had become frozen. Except that all those kids that had proven they could swim were disqualified from entering the baby pool. The lifeguards led a difficult life enforcing that rule.

And the other thing that set Moss Point’s pool apart from any other was the head lifeguard, ticket taker, swimming instructor, stunt diver, swim suit model, and all-around ham; my brother Jimmy.
Jimmy was always the best athlete in the family, but where he excelled was in the water. In it, on top of it, under it…..made no difference. He loved the water and the water reciprocated. His idea of enforcing discipline was to challenge anyone who wanted to break the rules of the pool to come into the water and discuss it. The offender quickly concluded that it was better to give a little and follow the rules than to become a victim of what a coroner would call an accidental drowning. Accidental. Right!

I still periodically run into people about my age that grew up spending their summers at the pool. And invariably, the subject comes to Jimmy. Particularly if the person doing the remembering is a girl, because the lifeguard she remembered had the ideal body for swimming. Tall and lean, big shoulders and thighs, bronzed from being outside and hair streaked blond by the sun or orange by improper use of peroxide.

And he knew it! And loved it. His favorite trick was to slowly climb the high diving board and then walk even slower to the end and look down into the water. He made sure that he had properly inhaled to make his chest appear even bigger and his waist smaller. Cars would stop and watch. Literally! Really! Then he would take a couple of test bounces off the end of the board without jumping out into the pool just to show how high he would be when he actually took flight. He had set the audience up right where he wanted them.

Now it was time. He would retreat to the anchored end of the board, take the customary three-step approach and explode off the end of the board into the sky. One bounce. Two bounces. And on the third bounce a miracle would happen. When his feet hit the board, the jump would terminate. And the inflated chest would drop a full foot into Jimmy’s secret talent…the ability to inflate his stomach into something that looked like he had inhaled a whole watermelon. He would look down at the bulging stomach with a puzzled look as if he had no idea what had happened and then, using his index finger, he would press in on the inflated area and simultaneously spew out water from his mouth that he had been holding the entire time of the performance.

To conclude the con job, he would make one of the most UN-graceful dives imaginable into the water, knowing full well that no one that had not seen the act before could have imagined how it would end. And those who knew would never tell. It was always fun to see.

And that’s the way I remember it.