Facebook postings are a dime a dozen but this one caught my eye.
It is about a mother’s open letter to those who were at a swimming pool with her son who has Down Syndrome.
Part of the letter reads as follows: “Today while at the swimming pool, my heart was breaking. You see, no one wanted to play with my son. He would go up to the other kids and say, ‘hi boy,’ or ‘hi girl.’
Every single time, the kids would either look at him weird, or say nothing and just swim away.”
Brandon would just look back at me with a look of disappointment, not understanding why the kids were being mean to him.”
That posting sent me back in time to around 1960 or so when I was a lifeguard, swimming instructor and babysitter at Odessa’s Floyd Gwinn pool.
I say babysitter because I think it probably cost a quarter or maybe 35 cents for a kid to go swimming from 1-6 p.m. That was pretty cheap babysitting even back then as many mothers would drop their kids off before the pool opened and be back at 6 to pick them up. And if their ride wasn’t there when the pool closed, our instructions from our pool manager was to stay with them until their ride showed up.
And believe me, we did what our pool manager said.
Choc Sanders was the pool manager’s name and he was a retired school teacher and a full-blooded Choctaw Indian. He was a big, big man with a big, big voice of authority for myself and fellow lifeguards Jarvis and James Wright.
Choc — and he had to give us permission to call him that; up until that time, it was Mr. Sanders — was the first all-American football player in the Southwest Conference playing for SMU in 1928.
Before the swimming pool opened each summer, Choc would have a picnic of sorts at his home and would go over all the pool rules and such, what trouble makers to expect and how to treat everyone the same.
“You won’t get into trouble if you treat everyone the same,” he emphasized every summer and always used the example of where girls our age could and could not sun bathe.
“There’s a sign on the lifeguard stand that says no sunbathing in this area, and that goes for all girls,” he would bellow out.
And one year, he told us that Marvin’s family had moved close to the pool and he would probably be at the pool every day.
Marvin? Who’s Marvin, we all thought.
Well, it didn’t take us long to get to know Marvin as he and his mom were there before the pool opened every day and she did not come back to pick him up until the pool was about to close.
The connection here, if you haven’t guessed yet, is that Marvin had Down Syndrome .
Every day, as we took our lifeguard positions, Marvin would walk into the pool area and come by and shake our hands and say “hi”.
Actually, he had to wait until the lifeguard in the stand came down to the shallow end because Choc had painted a red line on both sides on the sidewalk especially for Marvin and he knew not to go any further.
But, my gosh, he would test us on that every day, all day long.
He would walk toward the red line and just before we whistled at him to not cross the line, he would stop abruptly, turn around and salute.
During our break time, we all worked with Marvin to teach him to swim and by the time the summer was over, he was pretty good at it. He knew the rules of the pool pretty well and would remind us often that the rules stated if you could swim across the pool and back without stopping, you could get into the deep water anytime and jump off the diving boards. That was his goal. But he just couldn’t quite make it.
He would start out and about half-way across, we would have to get in and help him the rest of the way.
“Next time,” he would say, and we would get another handshake.
The pool closed after Labor Day and before that weekend, his mother told us they were going to be gone and wouldn’t see us until next year. We told her this was our last summer to be lifeguards and she asked us if there was any way we could let Marvin jump off the low board during regular pool hours so his buddies could see it.
Well, there was no way we were going to deny Marvin that thrill. On Labor Day, with a full pool, Choc got on the loudspeaker and announced that Marvin was going to jump off the low board.
People cheered and climbed out of the pool to watch as Marvin made his way from the shallow end to the diving boards, happily jumping over the red line. Jarvis, James and I all got in the water to help him and -— what do you know — Marvin walked right by the low board and climbed up the ladder of the high board and, before anyone could stop him, ran and jumped off the high dive.
Ol’ Marvin popped right up with the biggest smile that had been seen that summer in Odessa.
Marvin learned to swim, and I think three teenagers learned something that summer also.
Wade Warren is the assistant publisher of the Snyder Daily News. Comments about his column can be emailed to editor1@snyderdailynews.com.