June 17, 2010

Where did you go to swim and what kind of suits did you wear.

First we wore swimming trunks that were fairly short and tight on the legs. We would have considered what we wear today as boxer shorts back then. I went swimming nearly every afternoon in an irrigation canal that ran above our home. It was about two feet deep in the deepest spots and the most popular thing to do was to float on inner tubes in the canal. We would sometimes just hang on to the tubes and paddle our feet but the canal wasn’t deep enough to do that without slapping your toes on the rocks every so often. We would usually carry the tubes about a half mile to the bridge and then jump from the bridge into the water with the tubes under us. (Don’t think that we were super brave jumping from the bridge because it was only three feet or so above the water and we couldn’t jump from the upstream side since our tubes with us on them wouldn’t fit under the bridge. If we really went to a swimming pool then we would have to travel for a half an hour to the Roosevelt city pool or 45 minutes to the Price city pool. It wasn’t until I was out of high school that we had Starvation lake to swim in just upstream from town.