My summer of broken bones

Like I said, it’s not that we weren’t athletic or didn’t like to play baseball. In fact, we played baseball all the time in the field at the end of the block. Everyone that we could get would play ball with us. Young and old, liked or hated, skilled or not, it didn’t matter the field was big and if you didn’t want to run all the time, you needed bodies. But again, like I said, our first love was swimming.

I was 8 years old, going on 9 during the summer of 1967 when I first learned what physical pain was all about. It was a typical summer day at Lakeview Swim Club. We had rode our bikes in the morning and spent all day. Jack was the LifeGuard on duty that evening, when we called our Mom to tell her we were having too much fun to come home. She agreed that Dad and her would pack a quick picnic and bring dinner to the pool to join us. This was always a treat because it was extra special to stay out late and swim when the pool lights came on in the evening.

We played until Mom and Dad arrived. We ate dinner, which typically amounted to grilled hotdogs, sandwiches, or something quick and easy. We waited the obligatory 30 minutes after we ate to digest our food. (As the old wives’ tale said, if you go into the water to soon after you eat, you could get a cramp and drown! Have you ever known someone to die from a food-related cramp? I guess the wives’ tale works because no one ever drowns.)

We went right back into the water. The game at hand? Creating the largest splash the diving board. Every kid does it, or at least tries it from a diving board sometime in his life. However, most never advance past the regular, one meter diving board, fearing to hit the water with a dreaded “bellysmacker”.

The High Board, now there was a test of courage. And creating a big splash from a High Board dive? Well that was showing off our machismo, which we all did in spades. What is the High Board? Also known as the 3 meter board, every pool worth anything has one – but the best ones had a fiberglass (it had to be a Duraflex® Board) diving board attached to it. Fiberglass boards could catapult even the smallest, meekest child into sub orbit. Can openers, cannonballs, and sleepers were the best for creating the largest, noisiest splashes from the High Board.

It isn’t important to get a big jump off the High Board – after all, you are already 11 feet above the water. What was most important was how you entered the water. The position of your body upon entry determined the splash result.

For example, your basic cannonball requires a flat impact of your butt against the surface of the water, causing a SPLATT, and a wide exploding coverage of water. This resulted in a low, tsunami-type wave, good for splashing the girl on the pooldeck that you had a crush on. The people who made the biggest cannonball splashes were the fat kids that had plenty of surface area to greet the water with.

The next favorite splash dive was the ever popular can opener. You could always tell the rookie – he was the one who held his ankle in a straight “up-and-down” posture, as if he were pulling his heel up to his butt. This incorrect position freed up the geek’s other hand to plug his nose before he entered the water. The only good thing that came from this poor execution was that it signaled to us just what kids we could give wedgies too in the Locker Room when the pool closed. Nope, any expert splash diver will tell you that the proper position for an effective can opener is this: knee pulled to the chest with BOTH hands, with a slight bend at the waist backwards. The idea is not to contact the water with surface area like the cannonball, but to cause a vertical displacement in the water that will shoot a column high into the air. Of course, as impressive as the splash of the accomplished can opening diver can be, equally impressive is the concussive sound one hears both above and below the water. Holy cow! We never said it, but we all knew deep inside that the best can opener would surely win the hearts of the hottest sunbathers on the deck.

As I said earlier, Jack was the lifeguard on duty that evening when it happened. He was sitting on the Lifeguard stand talking to “Fat-Pat” Roe ( some girl he either went to school with, had a crush on, or couldn’t shake for some reason or another).

We were doing our dives as fast as we could to keep the water stirred up, laughing and joking as we watched each other on our kamikaze missions, smacking the water, coming out with red backs, and making fools of ourselves. We would race up the High Board’s ladder, run to the end of the board, and take a fearless jump to gain altitude over the water’s surface. Once our flight peaked we would position our body appropriately for the desired effect.

We would go, one by one, in the same order, over and over again. By the sixth or seventh time, we were pretty well delirious. It was my turn and I scampered the obligatory 11 feet to reach the height of the ladder. After my feet reached the last step, I carelessly grabbed for the bar to pull my body onto the board with my slippery, wet hand. When my hand slipped off the bar, my body fell backwards, away from the bar, away from the ladder, and down the eleven feet I just climbed.

The next thing I knew I was staggering, crying, and bleeding. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack running towards me. The rest was just a blur until the doctor set my broken arm the old fashioned way, by pulling on it from opposite directions. Not only was my arm broken, but so was my nose. However, that didn’t look nearly as bad as the contusions, scratches, cuts and raw skin I had on the entire left side of my body from the impact of hitting the solid, cement pool deck from an 11-foot free-fall.

I had a full cast on my arm, from my shoulder to my fingers, for 6 weeks. Afterwards, that cast was removed and was replaced with a half-cast that allowed me to bend my elbow. Freedom at last, but short-lived. The very next day, the kids on the block gathered to play baseball and I came along.

I shouldn’t have.

I think it was Kenny McGregor, an older kid that lived 3 houses down on the same side of the street, who hit a foul ball over the fence along the makeshift, rightfield line. The wisest kid in the group decided it was best to lift the smallest ballplayer over the fence to retrieve the ball – me. So, they lifted me up and over the fence to the point where they realized they couldn’t lower me all the way – so they dropped me. Now the fence wasn’t that tall, probably just 5 feet high. But neither were the kids I played ball with. When they dropped me, I landed in a funny manner (not funny – haha, as we so often said back then) and twisted my left leg in such a way that it caused a spiral fracture of the tibia bone. The pain was immediate, but I would have endured it happily if I didn’t have to tell my Mom I was playing baseball with a broken arm.

I again went to the hospital, and again had a full cast put on, again on the left side of my body, but this time from my crotch to my toes.

Mom used to tell stories of people thinking that everything happened at the same time, like a car accident or something that made sense. She also remarked more than once about being embarrassed taking me in public anywhere, fearing people would believe I was a victim of child abuse. She also said that people never believed the real stories behind the broken bones. In fact, she often thought it would have been easier to lie about what happened and tell them something more believable than the truth.

Needless to say, I was miserable. After I broke my leg, I initially had no choice but to use a wheelchair. I couldn’t use crutches with my arm in a cast and a heavy leg cast to boot (no pun – really). Because I was so miserable, Mom used to make my brothers take turns playing with me in the house. To get even, Tom would torment me during his turn. He would push me fast across the Living Room floor only to stop abruptle – just short of a collision. One day, either intentionally or not, he pushed me so fast that he lost control and crashed me into the Living Room wall. Now, in the 60’s full casts were made of plaster, with no flexibility, no hinges. While sitting in a wheelchair with a full, inflexible leg cast, what do you think would have hit the wall first in a run-away collision? If you guessed the big toe on my left foot, you guessed right. What do you think happened to my big toe? That’s right too.

It broke. I was never so glad for a summer to be over, as I was that summer. I’m sure my mother would have agreed.