We Thought The Music Would Never Stop

The loud speakers were huge. They were located underneath the high diving board. That’s the high tower on the left side pool if you were looking out at it from the check-in counter. They didn’t call it Twin Pools for nothing! Huey “Piano” Smith would blast the wits out of every mother within six blocks of the place when he cut down on, “I’ve got the ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu’”!

Mr. Roe Alexander kept it turned up pretty loud in hopes of bringing in more swimmers. It worked pretty well. Some of my first ever memories as a child was laying in bed, listening to those giant speakers. I can still remember “Be down to get you in a taxi honey, be there about a half past eight, now honey, please, don’t be late, I want to be there when the band starts playing the ‘Darktown Struters’ Ball’” I had no clue what he was singing about, and I haven’t heard that song since the swimming pool days, but it made me beg Mom for a quarter and I made haste toward where the music was coming from! We only lived a hop, skip and a jump on down Stonewall Street. Jerry Lee Lewis would hit the first line of “High School Confidential” and our windows would rattle. It was like a pied piper.

I jumped off the low diving board and thrashed my way toward the near ladder just a few weeks after I learned to walk. Jerry Atkins would sit up on that life guard stand and pray for me to make it. He didn’t want to get wet pulling me out. We all learned to swim through osmosis. Every kid in town just stayed down there and stayed down there till it happened.

There was no electronic filtering system cleaning or regulating the flow of water. It was two identical size pools that started about a foot and a half deep and tapered out to a depth of twelve, maybe fourteen feet. There was a wading pool in front of each of the big pools. The place was huge. Roe had a deep well and he drained and refilled each “side” about once a week. The life guards doubled as clean up men. A six inch pipe flowed “wide open” most of a day filling up a pool. And, let me tell you, that water coming out of the ground was ice cold! It would take a couple of days for the July sun to warm it to a “tolerable” temperature. Twins Pools featured a warm side and a cold side. I’d say pretty innovative for 1955!

I don’t remember graduating to the high diving board. It was somewhere between The Coasters’ “Searchin’” and Fats Domino’s “Yes indeed, I’m in Love Again”. I can still recall the first back flip I did off that high dive. Few accomplishments in my life have given me more satisfaction.

I started working in the concession in 1959. I was too young to lifeguard but it didn’t take much skill to hand a Zag Nut out the window and collect a nickel. Roe’s wife, Miss Belle, was in charge of the candy sales. They kept up with my hours on a little note pad and called me in every Saturday and paid me. It was the first steady job I ever had.

The pool opened a few weeks before school got out and shut down for the winter just after we all went back for the fall semester. It seems strange but writing about it fifty years later I can smell the chlorine and feel the sun bearing into my skin. I can see the wet footprints trailing along in front of the little section of seats for spectators and parents to gather and watch the swimmers. I remember Judy Seratte, John Kirby King, Mary Lois Basford, Stanley Patterson…..older folks that I studied as a youth. I still feel the sting of a wet rolled up t-shirt up side my head. That would be courtesy of Bob Edwards or Bo Booth. We’d throw anything they would allow in the pool at each other! We’d have underwater breath-holding contests. We’d get up in the shallow end, put someone on our shoulders and fight and laugh until our sides hurt. We’d take a flying leap off the high dive and try to catch a tennis ball that Leon or Jackie Burns would hurl out over the water from the life guard chair on the far deck of the opposite pool. And we did it all with “Sixteen Candles”, “Alley Oop” and the “Reverend Mr. Black” blaring in the background.

My hands would stay in the permanent wrinkle cycle the entire summer. My eyes squinted naturally to guard against the sun. A swimming suit was my wardrobe. Slowly, as one summer faded into the next, I moved from the concession counter to the basket room to the life guard stand. I grew up down there…..as did so many of us. 

I don’t know all the components to making a young boy ease correctly into a young man. But I believe with all my heart that old pool helped. I appreciated that Roe and Miss Belle gave me a chance. And paid me! I am thankful for every friend that shook water on me, dunked me, shared their peanuts and coke with me, confided in me and hugged my neck when life didn’t go like we planned. I saw love born, lost and regained. I might have even felt it once or twice myself…..  

The Fiesta’s probably said it best, “My baby is so dog gone fine, she sends those chills up and down my spine…..” I think of that old pool, that setting, that time, that place, the wonderful lifelong friends….. I still get those chills.

Respectfully,

Kes