SWIM, SWAM, SWUM

As a High School student, I had a great after-school job.  When New Bedford, Massachusetts High ended its school day at 2 pm, I would jump into my strategically parked car (named "Baby") let off the parking break, and coast down the hill to the YMCA, where I worked from 2:30 to 9:30.  I also spent all-day Saturday at the "Y." (Saturday evenings and Sundays were the times for dates with my future bride, Elaine.)

My job at the "Y" had many duties:

01.  Storing or retrieving baskets containing members' gym clothes and smelly sneakers.

02.  Caring for members' valuables as they worked out or swam.

03.  Washing and drying dirty towels (and sneakers, if their smell got too overpowering.)

04.  Killing as many cockroaches and water bugs as possible.

05.  Teaching weight-lifting and body-building to flabby old executives.

06.  Making sure that nudity was maintained in the showers and swimming pool.

07.  Serving as a life saver when the official one was off drinking beer at the tavern down the street.

08.  Saving drowning children if necessary,  (Happened just once.)

09.  Closing the pool at 7 pm each evening.

10.  Ensuring that members evacuate the premises by 9 pm.

11.  Ensuring that the swimming pool was then filled with chemicals.  (bleach?)

Our swimming pool was not very large, Maybe 10' by 25'.  One end was 4' deep, the other 6'.  The water was cold enough to "frost your gonads" ... kind of.

But the kids loved it, even when older guys joined them for a swim, or for what ever went on.  I had no control over that, except for a few times when the police were called in.

Now, I would like to once again relate a little story that I have told a few times.. because it "tickles my funny bone.

A very tall teenager had been sneaking in every evening to swim in the pool.  He was a persistent pain and every time we caught him, closed his entrance point, and threw him out, the next night he would have found another way to sneak in.

It was time to get creative! 

 On a snowy evening, New Bedford Protestant churches were holding their basketball championship games in one of our two gyms; the one that had a large running track overlooking the court.  Lots of people were straining the track, watching their favorite teams.

Because of all the activity, I had a helper that night, and we had closed the pool at 7 pm,  as usual.  A while later, as we suspected, we could hear the kid splashing about and enjoying himself. Now we did our creative activity.  We gathered up all of his clothes and hid them in a locker.

When he had had his fill of swimming, we could hear him puttering around looking for his clothes and getting madder and madder, until he couldn't take it any more and began to yell and curse like a seasoned sailor.  Me and my helper were holding our sides laughing, until we heard the kid bounding up the stairs next to the pool.

Oh oh! Those stairs led directly to the gym where the church basketball teams were playing.  The kid pried open the door to the gym and bounded out into the middle of the Baptist and Methodist, kind of boring, championship game.  Suddenly the game got much more exciting as the kid kept twirling and twirling in all of his naked majesty, as he yelled over and over:  "What #@%$&)*$@^# stole my clothes!"

 My helper and I tackled the kid and got him calmed down.  We gave him his clothes and got him out of there in a hurry.

Guess what?  Yes, there he was the next night enjoying another swim.  We finally decided to give in and chipped in to pay for a long-term membership that included lots of swimming time.

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