Editor’s note: This is the 96th of a series about growing up in Marysville during the late 1930s and the 1940s written by Bill Boyd. Each article is a snapshot of the people, businesses and activities during that era as seen through the eyes of a young boy.
Boyd was born in Marysville in 1932, graduated from Marysville High School in 1950, and lived the greater part of his life here.
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Swimming pool memories
If I had to pick one place in town I enjoyed most as a kid, it would probably be Marysville’s public swimming pool. I don’t know how I could ever explain how much fun I had there.
I’ve seen quite a few other public pools over the years, but I never saw one I thought could hold a candle to the original Marysville pool. Part of it was just the design of the place. Most public pools are simply rectangles, but the Marysville pool’s design was really neat. Combine that with the architecture of the stone bathhouse, and it was really something special.
Of all the days I spent at that pool, and all the fun I had there, the two most memorable days had nothing to do with swimming. In fact, on both days there wasn’t even any water in the pool.
The first was in 1936, when construction of the pool was just finishing, and only a week or two before it would open for the first time. My family had followed its construction, and one day after dinner my dad decided to go see how it was progressing. He parked the car along Park Avenue, and we walked down to the fence. Frank Galloway, who was serving as manager of the pool, was there checking on the final construction work. We talked with him through the fence, and he invited us to come in and look around.
Although the pool itself was almost finished, the bathhouse would not be completed for another year or so. A temporary wooden structure had been built for that first year. They had not yet started to put water in the pool, so Mr. Galloway asked me if I would like to go down into the pool. Oh boy, would I. The metal ladders had not been received, so they had installed wooden ladders for the first year.
I climbed down the ladder in the shallow, northeast corner of the pool, and I immediately started to run. Such a little kid … in such a big space! Wow, was that fun! As I ran toward the deep end, I could see how the walls at the side of the pool got taller and taller. Then all of a sudden the bottom of the pool started to go down, down, down. It was so steep that it was hard to run back up the hill.
When I climbed back up the ladder in the shallow end, I heard my dad and Mr. Galloway talking about season tickets to the pool. Wouldn’t that be great to have a season ticket? If I could have this much fun when the pool was empty, just think how much fun I could have when it was full of water. This was going to be a great summer.
The other memorable day occurred several years later, when I was maybe 14 years old. It was in the spring, and pool employees were preparing the pool for its summer opening. They had cleaned out all the winter debris, and were looking for a lot of youngsters to paint the pool before filling it with water. That sounded like fun, and it was a good way to make some money, so I jumped at the opportunity.
Today, they would simply get some guy with a spray gun, and he would paint the whole thing by himself. But in the 1940s, it was done by an army of kids, most of them older than me. We were all given paintbrushes. These were the biggest paintbrushes I had ever seen. They must have been 10 or 12 inches wide. When we were hired, we were told to wear old clothes and shoes, because the job would be pretty messy. We had no idea how messy it would be.
There was some adult who gave us our paintbrushes and mixing paddles. Then he showed us where a whole bunch of big paint cans were sitting on the lawn. This was to be a two-day job. He told us we should paint as much of the pool’s walls as possible on the first day. On the second day, we would finish the walls and then paint the bottom. Then he went out to his pickup truck and drove away.
As might be expected, there was a lot of spilled paint and a lot of splashed paint on that first day, but things seemed to be proceeding on schedule. The man came back at the end of the day, when the walls were almost finished. He gave us some turpentine and rags to clean up with. Then he left for home.
The next morning, that same man came back to get us started again. Then he went back to his pickup and disappeared again. We wore the same clothes and shoes that we had worn the previous day, so we were a pretty sorry looking bunch of kids. There we were … all these kids in paint soaked clothes … with all that paint … and no adult supervision. I think you can probably see where this is going.
Things were going pretty smoothly until about 2 or 3 p.m., when someone got the idea that it would go faster if we did not dip our brushes in the paint cans, but instead simply poured the paint on the pool bottom and then spread it around with our brushes. That got pretty messy, especially when a couple of kids slipped and fell onto the painted surface.
Then it started. Some kid dipped his brush into the paint and slapped another kid across the seat of his pants with the wet brush. Other kids saw that, and before I knew it, everybody was slapping someone else across the backside with a paintbrush. It was like something out of a slapstick movie.
By the end of the day, when that guy came back in his pickup truck, we all looked alike. There was splattered paint all over us, and everyone’s rear end was solid white.
The guy with the pickup truck gave us some more turpentine and rags to clean our hands, arms and face, but there was nothing we could do about our clothes. I couldn’t ride my bicycle home, because I would get paint all over the seat. So I walked it home. My mother met me at the back door, and she made me strip down to my underwear. Then she noticed that the paint had soaked through my pants and even the seat of my purple boxer shorts was solid white. So before she sent me to the bathroom, she handed me a paper bag and told me to put the underwear into it.
It took a lot of scrubbing, but I got myself pretty clean. Whatever paint was left would wear off over time. I guess it’s not surprising that when I look back on all the fun I had at that swimming pool, this day stands out above all the rest. Today, if I had a chance to paint the pool the same way, I’d probably turn it down. If I could be 14 again, however, I would do it in a heartbeat.
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(Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can email him at bill@davidwboyd.com)