Commentary: How Does the Thought of a Naked Swim Class Grab You?

Whoa, a lot has happened in and around Royal Oak since my daughter and I restarted our column collusion two weeks ago! On Dream Cruise Saturday, I headed back to Royal Oak from our annual summer sojourn in Empire to pick up my daughter Moira, her Yankee fan husband Mike Clark and their 7-week-old son Eli. I pulled into our driveway just as the sky turned green over our home, which is five blocks from the Dream Cruise.

That was a scary storm! As I pulled into our garage, the shagbark hickories in our yard started shedding limbs ranging from three to eight feet, hurtling them like spears down into our lawn and neighborhood. I was in our house about five minutes before the lights went out and it seemed like just a few minutes later the storm had passed. I think all of us in Royal Oak took a deep breath that with a million folks on Woodward Avenue, no one was seriously hurt.

I was back on the road heading up north Sunday morning to the Sleeping Bear Dunes area now described as the “Most Beautiful Place in America” or so said the Good Morning America show and countless other news and media mentions after that. The locals were decidedly proud, looking forward to more visitors and business in western Leelanau County. It can be argued that there are more beautiful spots in America, but if you take the Stocking Park Drive and stop at the right lookouts or take the one mile hike to the top of the Empire Bluff or Pyramid Point, I think the area has a solid claim. If you’re up this way, email me and I’ll show you what I mean!

Naked swimming classes not for this freshman

Now, onto easily the most controversial subject I have taken on in this column. Nope, not local politics, we’ll save that for later. Not a column weighing in on Gov. Snyder or President Obama. This topic is not for the faint of heart and is ever-so-slightly off color, so you may want to shield your eyes and cover one ear. Remember, you were warned!

I’d like discuss the subject of nude swimming in our public schools. Before you pick up the phone and call your local school, let me clarify that my knowledge of naked swim lessons in our school’s pools was a practice dating back to the late 1960s. That doesn’t mean it deserves any less hubbub or uproar. In fact, I think this audacious practice is so weird that it has been pushed deep into the subconscious recesses of nearly all the bare-bummed back-strokers now middle-aged minds.

Here’s what I know:  In the fall of 1967, I was a freshman attending U of D High School in Detroit. As the first semester was coming to an end, it was clear to me and the good Jesuits that unlike my older brother, I was an octagon peg unsuccessfully trying to fit into a square high school hole. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but soon I was a 5-foot-1 mid-semester freshman from an all-boys school headed to Dondero High School in Royal Oak.

Oh man, talk about a change in scenery!

There had to be more than 2,500 kids at Dondero and it was combination of Grease and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I walked into the hall for my first day of class and it was pandemonium. I saw a guy and gal making out in a stairwell, cigarette packs being exchanged, announcement of a girl fight after school and a Vietnam War protester handing out leaflets – and all that was in the first five minutes! I had no idea what I was getting into.

If I didn’t fit in at U of D High, I was lost in space at Dondero.  I wandered like a B-movie zombie from class to class finally arriving at phys ed, which happened to be swimming. I was in the locker room with kids twice my size and I happened to overhear the ugly truth: Swimming consisted of 30 freshman and sophomores hopping into the old Dondero pool – buck naked. Yep, sans swimsuits, not even a jockstrap. I could get more graphic, but this is a family column!

I couldn’t believe my ears.  Even at 13 years old, I thought I could muster the courage for the brief nudity that locker rooms required for aspiring athletes. But the thought of swimming “free bird” with 30 other guys while the instructors watched us do whatever the heck swimming phys ed required with it all hanging out, nope, I was not down with that!

So, I did what any self respecting nude swimming conscientious objector would do: I skipped class. In fact, I never attended one single naked lesson and no, I never did witness this bizarre public school lesson. But it made an indelible impression that until now lay dormant in the deepest nook of my post-pubescent mind.

I recently was talking with some friends who attended Dondero at that period and somehow the subject came up. They all agreed it was a nude class and no one could remember what the logic was for swim lessons without suits. Then the subject came up with my editor whose husband attended Hazel Park High School and had the same experience. That was enough confirmation for me to reclaim this incredibly appalling memory and ask what the heck was going on!

C’mon, seriously, I’d really like to be in the faculty or administration meeting where someone suggested: “Hey, I have a good one, let’s have all the boys who take phys ed swimming do it in the nude. What a hoot that will be!” 

Today, you’d be run out of town on rail!

Because I skipped the swimming class, I was given after-class detentions, which I also skipped and within two weeks I was within a whisper of being broomed from my second school in less than a semester of my freshman year. I was busy preparing my case on how the trauma of bare-butt swimming had made me do it when a fateful call from my parish school, St. Mary, notified my parents that most of my eighth grade transgressions had been forgiven and I could enroll for the second semester, which began the next week. Holy Mary, Mother of God, it was a parochial school miracle!

I avoided suspension or expulsion, never swam nude and went back to a school that didn’t own a pool.

Now that this sublimated memory has been resurrected, I am very interested in hearing from readers about this topic. Did it happen at other schools? What the heck was the rationale? Was somebody having a good yuk at the boys expense? No one I talked to remembers girls having to do the same. Was it just for boys? Inquiring minds want to know. Can you help out? I’d like to put this unsettling memory to rest.

It’s Monday, let’s go!

Gerry Boylan is the author of two books, Getting There, a novel and Gerry Tales, a collection of short stories. Both books are available at Amazon.com.  In addition, they are available for download for Kindle and Nook at Smashwords.com, Amazon.com and bn.com. You can also pick up both books at the Yellow Door Art Market in Berkley.