In the mid-fifties, no one I knew had a swimming pool. Of course, I have to admit my circle of acquaintances was not large. I knew my family, our neighbors, our friends at church (that's about thirty people, the entire congregation), classmates (again about thirty or so kids at school), teachers, the school principal (thankfully I was not personally acquainted with him until one incident in the eighth grade, which is another story altogether), and of course all my relatives "back home" in Arkansas and Mississippi. As far as I knew, none of these people had a swimming pool on their property that belonged exclusively to them.
There were probably swimming pools even then in large cities, like Los Angeles, and of course in Hollywood. Why, I used to have a whole book of paper dolls of an actress who was famous for swimming (I forget her name), and all my paper dolls wore swimsuits (not bikini ones) underneath the tabbed paper dresses that I cut out and put on them. So I knew some rich people had swimming pools somewhere.
But in Delano, swimming was generally in public swimming pools. Delano High School had a swimming pool, too.
In the summer of 1956, when I was between fifth and sixth grades, we discovered that swimming pool, and it became our ultimate answer to the long, hot, dry summer in the San Joaquin Valley. The price of admission was a nickel for elementary school kids. It was an L-shaped pool with a high dive and a low dive on the deep end, and very shallow water for beginners on the other end.
You had to take your own towel and, of course, bathing suit. My bathing suit was cotton material, not the stretchy synthetic fiber fabric of current swimsuits. Thin elastic strings gathered the material so that it was scrunchy all over and clung to the body and stayed with you when you wiggled and bent and moved around in the water...
Except sometimes... After a lot of hanging on the clothes line to dry in the hot sun, the elastic stretched permanently, and unless I tied the front top up tight, right under my chin, it would fall to my waist when I came up out of the water, revealing my flat chest, which was sooooo embarrassing. Even if that didn't happen, once the elastic was destroyed by the sun, the bathing suit sagged pitifully. But most of the kids who came to swim every day in summer were poor like us, and the same thing happened to them.
My brothers learned to swim quite well, even little Richard, who by then was about six years old. They would even jump off the diving board, at least the low diving board. I stayed far from that deep end of the pool, and just played in the water, never really learned to swim well.
At the Delano High School swimming pool, I discovered how shockingly nasty boys can be, far worse than my brothers ever were. Once a boy bobbed up right in my face, and grinned, "Hey, look! There's a candy bar down there..." He pointed straight down. Curious, (not that I would have wanted to eat a candy bar that was in the swimming pool, though I have always loved chocolate) I looked down and saw it floating slowly to the bottom. I was a bit suspicious of the boy's wicked grin, though, had a bad feeling about him. I had borrowed goggles from someone, so I put them on. I looked under the water and immediately recognized the big brown turd floating downward. Nauseated, I got myself out of that pool as fast as I could.
We had moved from the little house on Fourth Avenue by then. We rented a three bedroom one bath house on Oxford Street, which was within walking distance of the high school pool. After swimming, we would walk home carrying our wet towel and swimsuit over our arm, and once home we would hang them on the clothesline to dry. We went swimming most every day that summer, except on weekends. By the end of July, the swim suits were not in good shape due to all the chlorine and hot sunshine, but we made do with them all summer. We felt lucky to have the nickel a day to go swimming.
Daddy had lots of lathing work that summer and Mama helped him. Since they were being paid by the piece instead of by the hour, that increased the income. We felt quite prosperous.
Mama then had an electric sewing machine, and I begged to be taught how to sew. We bought a pattern for doll clothes at the dime store for 25 cents. She showed me how to cut out a doll dress using that pattern. I completed the cutting out part with Mama watching over my shoulder. She had to go to work with Daddy the next morning, so she left me alone with just, "Follow the instructions on the other side of the cutting directions..."
Unfortunately, she didn't realize there were words and terms in there that made no sense to me. I learned you need a teacher to help at least with terminology if you're going to follow sewing instructions on a pattern. I also learned that sewing doll clothes with a pattern is harder than sewing people clothes. I was so disappointed not to be able to finish my doll dress that whole first day, till Mama came home and showed me how to do it.
Before the summer was over, though, I had made a dress for myself, which I wore to school. In the sixth grade, one of my classes was Home Economics. In those days all girls were taught Home Economics starting in sixth grade, and boys were taught Wood Shop. (Remember, back then Girls were Girls and Men were Men, and even if girls liked sports and were good at them, they had to learn how to cook and sew because those skills were bound to be necessary when they grew up.) I loved HomeEc, and found out there were more great things to cook than beans, taters, and corn bread. Miss Billerbeck taught us how to make, of all things, "pizza pie," which is what pizza was called in those days. I had never heard of pizza before I came to California.
In sewing class, we first made an apron with a bib. Since I had already made a dress for myself at home, I felt it was a little beneath me to have to make an apron. You had to pin every seam and then stand in line to let the teacher approve your pinning of the seam before you could sew it. It took forever to finish a project in there. I did learn more about sewing clothes in that class than under Mama's tutelage. Eventually Miss Billerbeck allowed me to just forge ahead and sew without standing in line with a pinned seam.
I suppose I was a girlie-girl. I was never good in sports, but I could run. I could outrun my brothers, barely trying. Of course, Ray had short legs, and Jim was, as Daddy would have put it, "chunky." I never raced kids at school, though. That seemed like a boy kind of thing to do. I would rather sew, embroider, or read a book.
Now, reading... that's really another story...
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