Cooling memories

Portland’s debating swimming pools.
And that’s a debate worth having.
But for those of us of a certain age, the memories of small town life without a pool are inescapable.
Dunkirk has been fortunate — thanks to the generosity of the glass container company that was part of Armstrong Cork, later Kerr Glass Manufacturing Corporation, then Ball-Foster Glass, and now Verallia, a division of Saint-Gobain — to have a municipal swimming pool that’s in pretty good shape.
Portland’s pool is another story, and the community is at one of those junctures where the choices get hard. How much money do you spend on repair? Are you simply delaying the inevitable replacement of the current pool? And a dozen others.
But those of us of a certain age remember those dark summers when the Portland pool was closed by the State Board of Health and the city fathers dithered and fussed and fidgeted as they tried to figure out how to go forward.
The old Portland pool — far older than Dunkirk’s pool — was a bit of an oddity.
It was, as I recall it, an oval in shape. It was located directly behind what was then known as “The Rec,” as in recreational center and is now known as the home of the Portland street department.
At the west end of the oval was what was called the “baby pool.” It was shallow, about three feet deep at its deepest.
As a kid, nobody wanted to spend too much time in the “baby pool.” But what lay beyond was pretty scary.
There was a fence of sorts separating the “baby pool” from the rest of the swimming pool. But instead of a gradual change in depth, beyond that fence there was a drop-off.
Stay on one side of the fence, you were humiliated. Go to the other side of the fence and you were terrified.
I’m sure I’m not alone for having ventured beyond the fence at about age 6 or 7 to sit on the concrete deck and peer into the blue waters below, wondering if I could survive.
And while I was sitting there, I was of course pushed in by some older kid who thought it would be funny.
A part of me was kind of happy when the old pool was closed by the state. It was a creepy place in many ways.
But as any kid will tell you, summer becomes insufferable without the chance to swim.
Sure, we took the usual steps: Running through the sprinkler, playing with the hose. But those didn’t add up to much. The “Slip and Slide” hadn’t been invented yet, but I doubt that it would make a difference.
Our best hope was that every week or so, one of the neighborhood parents would relent and take a bunch of us — sweaty, unruly, and probably needing a bath — to Pine Lake, west of Berne.
It’s a nice enough spot, but to us it may as well have been the French Riviera. Sand, water, scary diving boards, rumors of snakes.
What more could a kid ask for?
How long the interim was between the state’s closing of the old pool and the opening of the new one is something I can’t recall. My guess is two or three years.
What I do remember is that the new pool was celebrated as if we’d landed on the moon.
I’m sure Dunkirk celebrated the same way when the glass company led the effort to establish that community’s pool.
After all, it beat running back and forth in the sprinkler.[[In-content Ad]]