Those swim class memories a cold blast from past
How could they get away with exposing them like that?
A couple of old classmates from Thornton High School bumped into each other over the weekend, and as is often the case with male alums of their era, the subject quickly turned to what both consider one of the stranger aspects of their high school experience: swimming naked in gym class.
"When I tell people we swam naked, nobody believes me," one of the men observed.
His friend had once made the very same observation to me. It's true that I didn't believe him at first either, not until he recounted his humiliation in excruciating yet hilarious detail -- standing poolside waiting for attendance to be taken on cold winter mornings, hands strategically placed to hide certain shriveled body parts, eyes averted, praying for no untimely display of arousal.
When he brought it up again Monday, it occurred to me there must be a column in this. I see it as an opportunity for a cathartic purge of what for many must have been a painful adolescent trauma. Either that or we could just share some funny stories.
For the uninitiated, we're not talking illicit skinny-dipping here. This was an organized school activity where gym teachers would order their students to take off their clothes and get in the pool for swimming instruction.
Given that boys of that age are at various stages of puberty, you can understand how some might have found it awkward.
Never heard of this practice?
Just ask most any male age 50 and older who grew up around here. Naked swimming once was the norm for boys in Chicago public high schools and some suburbs, gradually fading away between the mid-1970s and early 1980s.
"Everyone was traumatized by it. I never understood the guys who weren't," said a Bogan grad from the 1970s, smiling in such a way to let you know he's gotten over it.
As far as my notion of providing psychological support to naked swimming survivors, it turns out WGN radio host Garry Meier beat me to the punch. Meier, who has mined the naked swimming topic for years, recently went so far as to form his own (mostly facetious) support group: SUNK. He says that's short for Swam Under Naked Kids.
As with many naked swimmers of his time, Meier said it was only later that he looked back on the experience and said to himself: "Wait a minute! What was that all about?"
Meier was a Chicago elementary school student in the early 1960s when he "did the naked swimming thing" at Fenger High School. Meier recalls thinking at the time "it was weird."
"We didn't get it, but we didn't say anything about it," Meier said. "We didn't have Dr. Phil back then. We just toughed it out."
Meier said he and his classmates were given the explanation that school officials didn't want them clogging up the pool with sand from their bathing trunks. As someone who didn't frequent the beach, Meier found that to be one of many explanations he's heard through the years that don't hold water.
At Thornton High School in south suburban Harvey, former athletic director Ed Fredette said it was just a matter of not wanting to deal with the logistics and expense of providing clean swimsuits to every boy.
"It was a total embarrassment. It really was for years," Fredette said, meaning for all concerned, not just the swimmers. Fredette said he finally got the school to provide boys with swimsuits, which had been the practice all along for girls.
Still, he said he never heard a complaint at the time from students or parents.
"You think we could do that today? No way, Dick Tracy," said Fredette, now 73 and living in Alabama.
At Thornton, bringing a note to class to get out of swimming for the day brought its own humiliation. Boys who wouldn't swim were required to wait in the bleachers wearing only their underwear.
"If you sat in your clothes, you would be mischievous," Fredette explained. "If you put them in their underwear, you didn't have to worry about them."
I'm sure I'll hear from somebody about how we're all too hung up on our bodies and that nudity is a natural thing, blah-blah-blah. That's fine. I get it. Just try telling that to a high school kid. These days they won't even take a shower after gym class.
Retired Thornton swimming instructor John Engemann said he was relieved when the school switched from birthday suits to bathing suits. He said he'd always worried about kids hurting themselves going off the diving board.
Ouch.