The Massachusetts Medievalist has left the Middle Ages to recount an oral history session about Philadelphia public pools in the 1930s and 1940s.
(I couldn’t find a good image of the Kingsessing pool from the 1940s but the fashion in this image is in the right time period.)
My Dad grew up in the Kingsessing neighborhood of southwest Philadelphia, a largely working-class Irish Catholic enclave where he knew everybody and spent his days as the second-youngest of six children, with an absentee father and his mother who worked in a textile mill in Germantown. Now 94, he's at his conversational best these days when he's telling us about the old days in Kingsessing.
The Kingsessing recreation complex still exists, but with rather spiffier facilities than it had when Dad was a wayward teenager during WWII. The pool had boys' days (MWF) and girls' days (TThSa), with Sunday split between the two. In response to my question about families attending with both boys and girls, he told me he didn't remember parents going to the pool with children except for those little enough to use only the baby splash pool – a different time!
The pool operated with a one-hour admission policy which was actually more like 45 minutes. Dad and his friends would wait in line and enter the pool area at the top of the hour, then the pool was emptied and everyone kicked out at :45 so the next batch could get in. Dad and his friends would run out and get back in line, hoping to get right back into the pool BUT the gate keepers would check their bathing suits –still wet? No re-admission.
SO they would take off their bathing suits, run out in their underwear onto Kingsessing Avenue when traffic was stopped by a red light, and try to lay out their bathing suits in just the right configuration on the asphalt in front of the wheels of a stopped truck. When the light changed, the truck ran over the thick cotton-wool fabric, squeezing out the excess water, and providing a rumpled and dirty but quasi-dry swimsuit that might pass the gate keepers' test for admission (I thought he was making this up but then realized that truth is indeed stranger than fiction).
Pool access vastly improved once one of Dad's friends got a job as a gate keeper and turned a blind eye to their damp swim trunks.
They still risked life and limb to swim, however. The pool was surrounded by a pretty high wall and the access gate was locked when the pool was closed but there was no guard on the property. Somewhat sheepishly, Dad told me that after he and his buddies had had a few beers, they would climb up onto the wall late at night. Rather than jump down to the ground, they would launch themselves off the top of the wall right into the pool and get a midnight swim – no waiting and no wet-swim-suit check required.
I’m hoping for more great 1940s Philadelphia history for future posts — meanwhile, if you’re in the Philadelphia area after 22 March, check out this exhibit at the Fairmount Water Works about the history of Philadelphia’s public pools and their segregation.
Update: another voice from "the old neighborhood" remembered that she and her friends hid during the :45 clear-outs in the locker rooms by standing on the toilet seats, thus evading the need to put their damp swim suits under the wheels of passing trucks (via Sister Jeannette, 12 March 2023).