Old Pool to Make Memories Again

 It’s a shame that Timmy and Bill weren’t here to see it.

  That would be the late Tim Hally and Bill Molitor. Childhood friends who grew up in my old North Boise neighborhood and died too young. 

  We had two summer pastimes. If we weren’t playing baseball, we were swimming in Lowell Pool.

  Lowell and the South Junior High Pool, as you know if you’ve followed the news stories, needed expensive updates. They were  closed for several years while the city tried to decide whether to spend the money to upgrade them. And, as you also know if you’ve followed the stories, the city has made its decision. South Pool will be replaced. Lowell Pool will be renovated and brought up to code.

  Timmy and Bill would be delighted to know that, as I am. We loved Lowell Pool. It was our summer home away from home.

  It was four blocks from the old neighborhood. We were there the day it opened for the first time, waiting impatiently along with scores of other kids. No one who was there that day will forget seeing it for the first time.

  It was a Blintz Pool, one of over 100 above-ground pools designed by an engineer named Wesley Blintz and now one of very few still in existence. You accessed the pool via changing rooms – men’s on one side, women’s on the other – and climbed stairways to the pool itself – a glittering circle of water so brilliantly blue that it almost hurt to look at it.

  It’s an understatement to say that its annual opening in late May, usually on or near Memorial Day weekend, was eagerly anticipated. No one was admitted until opening day – at least not officially. There was a way, however, to discover prior to opening day whether the pool had been filled with water yet. 

  The lowest limb of a tree, easily climbed, afforded an unobstructed view of the entire pool. Bill and I made the climb daily. One unforgettable night, having learned from our perch on the limb that the pool had in fact been filled, we managed to scale a wall and sneak in for a swim. Being there by ourselves, just the two of us under the stars on a moonlit night in a silent pool normally teeming with boisterous swimmers, was magical.

  Until we actually got in the water – which was the approximate temperature of snowmelt! Our illicit dip lasted less than a minute.

  Never having learned to swim, my mother and older (ten years) sister decided to take lessons there in the evenings, when the pool was only open to grownups. They quit after coming home the first night with goosebumps and blue fingernails.

  Once the water had warmed up to a bearable temperature, Timmy and Bill and I spent virtually every summer afternoon there. With that much practice, we became good swimmers. Our mothers weren’t convinced of that, however, and decreed that we take formal lessons at the YMCA. They relented, somewhat sheepishly, when the instructor promoted us from tadpoles to flying fish on the first day.

  The deep end of the pool had two diving boards, a low- and a high-dive. It was a badge of honor to have worked up the courage to use the high dive. It took me several tries, but it was worth it. I walked home six inches off the ground that day. 

  An accident on the way home one afternoon triggered a fainting spell. We were happily pedaling along when, for a reason now forgotten, I stopped suddenly and jumped off of my bicycle. The handlebars swung around and hit me in the forehead. By the time my pals had walked me home, blood was streaming all the way down to my feet. Mom answered the doorbell and collapsed.

  Most of the pool’s lifeguards were young women in their teens or early twenties. Silly young boys (meaning us) doggedly flirted with them, as if they’d be remotely interested in six- or seven-year-olds. To us, they were goddesses. To them, we were obnoxious pests.

  One of them lived in our neighborhood. All of the neighborhood boys were enamored of her. I don’t remember ever speaking to her in those days, for fear of becoming tongue-tied. If in the unlikely event that she had spoken to me, I probably wouldn’t have been able to utter a single syllable, the power of speech having temporarily left me.

  Fast forward several decades. My folks, who were still alive and living in the old neighborhood at the time, told me that although she’d moved elsewhere the house where she lived during her lifeguard phase was still in her family and she was spending the summer there. This presented an opportunity to say hello and prove that I’d grown up, had children of my own and was no longer the diminutive nuisance she remembered.

  She was very nice, inviting me in after I introduced myself as a former pool denizen. We talked for several minutes, during which she was pleasant but seemed a tad suspicious, as if she half expected me to pull a peashooter out of my pocket or attempt a cannonball onto her couch.

  Indelible memories were made at that old pool. And now, thanks to the city investing in its renovation, more will be made. North Boise children again will have a first-rate public pool to beat the heat on summer days and star in their own stories.

  That’s wonderful news. Cyber-age kids need more than digital memories. 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday and posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.