Back in the day: a social history of swimming

I was born in 1930, and swimming and diving gave me some of my happiest times. In my Kansas City high school we had a 20 yard pool where the boys swam in the buff. Same with the boy's swimming team. Not sure what the girls did - I'll have to chase down elderly female alums to find out. I became crazy about diving - mostly at the Swope Park municipal pool, which was divided into a large swimming area and a diving pool. I was fairly miserable much of the time in my teens - except at that pool. I watched some divers and learned to do a 1 1/2 somersault from the 3 meter board. What a thrill, doing it pike (keeping legs straight and bending at waist). To a jacknife and swan dive I added the watermelon. This was a dive designed to drench young ladies sitting at poolside by diving toward them and doubling over at the last minute. I ultimately became a lifeguard at the pool - getting my water safety certificate first. Boy, I felt special having this status and responsibility. I also met some cute girls, one who wore a bikini very daring for the times. But I was hopelessly immature and way behind her in my sexual experience, so that connection sputtered out in a way that leaves a distinctly frustrated memory. There's another aspect of the times that offers twinges. Until the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, Kansas City was a completely segregated society: restaurants, schools, parks, and swimming pools. So the African American population of Kansas City, concentrated in the northeastern part of town and adjacent to the Missouri River, could not use the fine Swope Park facility. It had smaller, inferior and crowded pools in the north part of town. My parents came from Europe and were unprejudiced. But although I absorbed many of the biases of the white community at that time, the separate but unequal segregation couldn't be squared with my ideas of fairness. As a sophomore in high school I remember our swimming team participating in the Missouri swimming championships in St. Louis. What a thrill hearing the names of the various teams called as swimmers went to the starting blocks for trial heats. Although my strokes were all primitive (we had no real coaching) and I didn't get far in the qualifying heats, there was something exciting about the lineup of swimmers, the starter's gun, the yelling and cheering from the teams and onlookers. The next year I joined the Kansas City Athletic Club, on the 8th Floor of the Hotel Continental in downtown Kansas City. We members of the team got free membership and participated in swimming meets in Kansas and even Oklahoma. Our coach was a lanky, personable former merchant seaman who had been in the convoys of ships from Baltimore to Murmansk, USSR during World War II. He related to me how from departure of the convoys of ships from the U.S. coast until they got to Murmansk there was never a time when there wasn't a ship burning - the result of German submarines. Qualified coaching quickly transformed my strokes. Up to this time I'd be exhausted by the time I had swum four lengths. By emphasizing alternate side breathing and lap swimming I soon broke through those limits, developing a smooth, relaxed crawl troke that was efficient and let me swim miles without overexerting myself. Some brawny members of the Iowa State swimming team (former members of the KCAC team) visited and from them I learned a version of the backstroke that let me move my arms as though they were like a two-bladed canoe paddle - no deadtime by my side when I finished a stroke. However, the style at their school, at least, was to move the arms outward like oars, than directly upward as proper form now requires. lt worked pretty well for me and my time soon dropped to something like 1:17 or so for 100 yards - time that I'd love to be able to do now at age 80. At the same time I also spent time on the diving boards - though without a coach I didn't make much real progress. But there was a nice girl diver whose tank suit fit her curves very nicely - and sometimes we managed to rub against each other underwater. Those were puritan times -especially in the Midwest. But everything is relative and the excitement with her could be electric for me. The next big step forward was when I entered Harvard as a transfer student in 1949. I was split between swimming and diving as a member of the freshman team. Under first-rate coaching my time for the 50 yards dropped quickly from 28 seconds to 24.8 - and would have probably continued downward. But I couldn't resist the thrill of gyrations in the air from the diving board. The next year, under the East's first championship diver (Charles Batterman) as coach, I quickly made major progress, learning the new style of twisting dives - a rapid twist then completing the somersault for the full twisting 1 1/2 in pike position. I became the first diver in the Eastern league to do the reverse 1 1/2 with a 1 1/2 twist on the 3 meter board, and ultimately the backward 1 1/2 with 2 1/2 twists. This was the time of laminated wooden boards and a simple hurdle, not the bounce hurdle that, together with fiberglass boards lets today's divers do dives that would have been inconceivable in my time. However, frankly, I don't really enjoy the Olympics with the overwhelming emphasis on fantastic numbers of somersaults and multiple twists, i.e. gymanstic skill - even though most of the divers have greater grace than many divers in my time. I much prefer to see the grace that one can only observe in slower dives, and find the emphasis on extreme athleticism and ability to spin and twist more akin to a footrace that tests extremes of physical ability than style. Sure, could be sour grapes. There are also other changes in society that have occurred since the 1950s. There was a much greater emphasis on sportsmanship and human relations. There were no athletic scholarships nor intensive recruitment of high school athletes - at least at Harvard. That would come after the 1960s - which as we all know was a decade that transformed many things in the United States. A final note on my early swimming and diving career came when I was in the U.S. Army (a draftee) in 1954-55. I was stationed in Germany and the army held swimming and diving championships in Berlin. So I not only competed in those events, but took the opportunity to visit East Berlin, in the Soviet occupied zone, along with another buddy. There was no Berlin wall, and we went through a simple checkpoint. Our first goal was the Olympic stadium and swimming pool complex where Hitler had presided over the 1936 olympics. My buddy was in uniform and so people knew we were Americans. Although the streetcar fare was a trivial cost, the passengers insisted on paying for us. I got an equally warm welcome from young East German divers who were working out at the Olympic diving area. It was an extraordinary experience to have these human contacts across the boundary between nations separated by cold war. Frank M.

I was born in 1930, and swimming and diving gave me some of my happiest times. In my Kansas City high school we had a 20 yard pool where the boys swam in the buff. Same with the boy's swimming team. Not sure what the girls did - I'll have to chase down elderly female alums to find out. I became crazy about diving - mostly at the Swope Park municipal pool, which was divided into a large swimming area and a diving pool. I was fairly miserable much of the time in my teens - except at that pool. I watched some divers and learned to do a 1 1/2 somersault from the 3 meter board. What a thrill, doing it pike (keeping legs straight and bending at waist). To a jacknife and swan dive I added the watermelon. This was a dive designed to drench young ladies sitting at poolside by diving toward them and doubling over at the last minute. I ultimately became a lifeguard at the pool - getting my water safety certificate first. Boy, I felt special having this status and responsibility. I also met some cute girls, one who wore a bikini very daring for the times. But I was hopelessly immature and way behind her in my sexual experience, so that connection sputtered out in a way that leaves a distinctly frustrated memory. There's another aspect of the times that offers twinges. Until the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, Kansas City was a completely segregated society: restaurants, schools, parks, and swimming pools. So the African American population of Kansas City, concentrated in the northeastern part of town and adjacent to the Missouri River, could not use the fine Swope Park facility. It had smaller, inferior and crowded pools in the north part of town. My parents came from Europe and were unprejudiced. But although I absorbed many of the biases of the white community at that time, the separate but unequal segregation couldn't be squared with my ideas of fairness. As a sophomore in high school I remember our swimming team participating in the Missouri swimming championships in St. Louis. What a thrill hearing the names of the various teams called as swimmers went to the starting blocks for trial heats. Although my strokes were all primitive (we had no real coaching) and I didn't get far in the qualifying heats, there was something exciting about the lineup of swimmers, the starter's gun, the yelling and cheering from the teams and onlookers. The next year I joined the Kansas City Athletic Club, on the 8th Floor of the Hotel Continental in downtown Kansas City. We members of the team got free membership and participated in swimming meets in Kansas and even Oklahoma. Our coach was a lanky, personable former merchant seaman who had been in the convoys of ships from Baltimore to Murmansk, USSR during World War II. He related to me how from departure of the convoys of ships from the U.S. coast until they got to Murmansk there was never a time when there wasn't a ship burning - the result of German submarines. Qualified coaching quickly transformed my strokes. Up to this time I'd be exhausted by the time I had swum four lengths. By emphasizing alternate side breathing and lap swimming I soon broke through those limits, developing a smooth, relaxed crawl troke that was efficient and let me swim miles without overexerting myself. Some brawny members of the Iowa State swimming team (former members of the KCAC team) visited and from them I learned a version of the backstroke that let me move my arms as though they were like a two-bladed canoe paddle - no deadtime by my side when I finished a stroke. However, the style at their school, at least, was to move the arms outward like oars, than directly upward as proper form now requires. lt worked pretty well for me and my time soon dropped to something like 1:17 or so for 100 yards - time that I'd love to be able to do now at age 80. At the same time I also spent time on the diving boards - though without a coach I didn't make much real progress. But there was a nice girl diver whose tank suit fit her curves very nicely - and sometimes we managed to rub against each other underwater. Those were puritan times -especially in the Midwest. But everything is relative and the excitement with her could be electric for me. The next big step forward was when I entered Harvard as a transfer student in 1949. I was split between swimming and diving as a member of the freshman team. Under first-rate coaching my time for the 50 yards dropped quickly from 28 seconds to 24.8 - and would have probably continued downward. But I couldn't resist the thrill of gyrations in the air from the diving board. The next year, under the East's first championship diver (Charles Batterman) as coach, I quickly made major progress, learning the new style of twisting dives - a rapid twist then completing the somersault for the full twisting 1 1/2 in pike position. I became the first diver in the Eastern league to do the reverse 1 1/2 with a 1 1/2 twist on the 3 meter board, and ultimately the backward 1 1/2 with 2 1/2 twists. This was the time of laminated wooden boards and a simple hurdle, not the bounce hurdle that, together with fiberglass boards lets today's divers do dives that would have been inconceivable in my time. However, frankly, I don't really enjoy the Olympics with the overwhelming emphasis on fantastic numbers of somersaults and multiple twists, i.e. gymanstic skill - even though most of the divers have greater grace than many divers in my time. I much prefer to see the grace that one can only observe in slower dives, and find the emphasis on extreme athleticism and ability to spin and twist more akin to a footrace that tests extremes of physical ability than style. Sure, could be sour grapes. There are also other changes in society that have occurred since the 1950s. There was a much greater emphasis on sportsmanship and human relations. There were no athletic scholarships nor intensive recruitment of high school athletes - at least at Harvard. That would come after the 1960s - which as we all know was a decade that transformed many things in the United States. A final note on my early swimming and diving career came when I was in the U.S. Army (a draftee) in 1954-55. I was stationed in Germany and the army held swimming and diving championships in Berlin. So I not only competed in those events, but took the opportunity to visit East Berlin, in the Soviet occupied zone, along with another buddy. There was no Berlin wall, and we went through a simple checkpoint. Our first goal was the Olympic stadium and swimming pool complex where Hitler had presided over the 1936 olympics. My buddy was in uniform and so people knew we were Americans. Although the streetcar fare was a trivial cost, the passengers insisted on paying for us. I got an equally warm welcome from young East German divers who were working out at the Olympic diving area. It was an extraordinary experience to have these human contacts across the boundary between nations separated by cold war. Frank M.