Lakeview Swim Club

It seems odd that with 6 boys in the family, not one of us played Little League baseball. It wasn’t that we weren’t athletic or that we didn’t like baseball. In fact, I remember asking Mom if I could join the local Little League. Mom’s response was always, “Sure, if you can arrange a ride” or “Sure, if you can pay for it”, knowing full well that as a 10 year old kid, neither was possible.

That’s why summertime never meant “baseball” to the Ceo kids. Nope, summertime meant swimming to us. And swimming we did – day and night, every day of the summer, officially beginning on Memorial Day and ending just as officially on Labor Day.

It wasn’t even the act of swimming that was the best part. Not even close. It was where we went swimming at – Lakeview Swim Club. We didn’t know what it meant to belong to a club like this. We simply took advantage of it in a big way. My parents knew though. They were always quick to point out that Lakeview was a private club – one that a family had to pay a membership fee and annual dues to join. So how did we get in? Church mice would donate cheese scraps to us we were so tight on money. Here’s how we swung it. Our family could afford to join Lakeview because my brother Bob was hit by a car. Yep, Bob was hit by a car, my parents sued the insurance company of the guilty party, and they used the resulting settlement to pay our “lifetime” membership fee.

How did Bob get hit? I don’t remember.
How badly was he hurt? I couldn’t tell you.
How long was he laid up? I never heard the details.
However, I can tell you that I swam every day of every summer during my childhood thanks to Bob’s accident.

My Dad was on “The Board” at the swim club (whatever that meant). I remember thinking he was special because he was on “The Board.” That meant that we received special privileges. Yep…we got to help prepare the pool and locker rooms for the summer and winter seasons.

If you think that we were scammed into working for free, well…maybe you’re right. But we had great fun doing it. Painting the empty, dry pool from the inside out, then filling the enormous, Olympic-sized pool with water for the first time each season was worth it to be the first ones to swim in the pool before it officially opened. It was fun work that came with great reward because there was something special about being the first at anything while growing up.
Anyway – like I said, the pool opened on Memorial Day every season with a Potluck Party for all of the members and their families. From that day through September 1, our day would start by:

Eating breakfast (usually Cheerios with two teaspoons of sugar and NonFat Dry Milk)
Making our beds and getting dressed.
Finding our swimsuits on the clothesline in the backyard and grabbing a beach towel.
Performing “the ritual.”

What was “the ritual?” “The Ritual” was something you only did as a rite of passage in preparation for the long bicycle ride to Lakeview. You see, Lakeview SwimClub was located by the Hickory Hill area of Ypsilanti – on the other side (that is, the “good side”) of Interstate I-94. For young boys to go swimming, we had to ride our bikes a half mile to what seemed to us to be a supersteel structure we called “The Overpass”. We would then go over The Overpass, and then ride another mile straight down Georgina Avenue, turning left on Jay Street, and another left on Grove Road.

Back to “The Ritual.” It wasn’t that we couldn’t ride our bikes with one hand, and hold our suit and towel with the free hand. Oh no…we were cool. Anyone could ride their bikes with one hand. Even girls could do it. The troubles began when the rider lost control of his towel. Have you ever had a beach towel unravel and get caught in spokes of your bicycle wheel? Let me say that when it happens, it happens quickly. The results can leave you picking gravel out of your knees and palms in a heartbeat. Okay, so even if you are an expert towel holder and bike rider, you still have to deal with the simple fact that you only have two hands and you need them both to pull your bike up the two flights of stairs necessary to go over “The Overpass.”

So what do you do? You perform “The Ritual.” The Folding of the Swimsuit and Towel for Bike Travel.

Fold the towel lengthwise,
Fold your swimsuit so it would lay as flat on the towel as possible,
Place your suit on one end of the towel, and
Roll tightly. I mean tightly!
Tuck (or force) the towel roll between the support bars of your Schwinn. Guys, you know what bars I’m talking about too – the “rupture bars.” These are bars that spanned that sacred area between the handle bars and the bicycle seat. The bars that girls’ bikes didn’t have. The same bars that taught you the absolute meaning of the words “rupture” and “pain.”

I’m sorry, bad memories just took me off course.

Once you have your towel and suit roll tucked into your bike bars, you take your belt off and wrap it around the bars and towel and fasten it by the buckle. Now you are ready to roll. And roll we did. Down Kennedy Street to Tyler, past the Pelletier’s house (Steve Pelletier was always shooting hoops), past George School’s playground and to the long sidewalk that led up to The Overpass.

The sidewalk went down a steep hill, and stopped abruptly at The Overpass’s staircase. Being careful not to ride too fast down the sidewalk to the staircase (remember the word “rupture”?) we would jump off our bikes at the end of the sidewalk, lift the front of our bikes by their handlebars, and carry our bikes up two flights of stairs to the top. The top of The Overpass was like being inside a long, rectangular cage that was wrapped in cyclone fencing. The Overpass stretched high above Interstate I-94, allowing pedestrians to cross safely over the fast moving traffic. I still remember how it would take my breath away to stand above these vehicles traveling at speeds mostly greater than 70 miles per hour. Often we would stop on our way home to shake our butts and shake our fists at the semi-truck drivers to encourage them to blow their big deep horns as they passed by. But we didn’t play in the morning. We were all business. We pushed our bikes across The Overpass and, again, with both hands on our handlebars, we ran down the stairs with our bikes in a controlled fall all the way down, tires bouncing and bike frame bending. Back on our bikes, it was quickly down Georgina, to Jay, to Grove Road, to our favorite summer destination.