When Boys Swam Nude in Gym Class
By David Andreatta
The lengths to which Greece schools have gone to spare teenage students the anxiety of changing clothes for gym class has men of a certain generation shaking their heads.
“You should have seen what they made us do in gym,” Bill Reeves, 67, said. “My son and his generation think we’re full of it. We can’t convince them it actually happened.”
But it did happen. What you are about to read is true.
“When you got into high school, and you used the pool for gym, they had these rules and everybody had to follow them,” Reeves recalled of his days at Charlotte High School.
No running on the deck. No horseplay. No diving in the shallow end. Take a shower before swimming. Swim naked. No chewing gum…
Wait, wait. What?
“They made us shower first, then we’d all stand in line and march into the pool nude,” Reeves said.
It may be inconceivable to anyone under 50, but nude swimming was standard for high school boys in Rochester and in many American cities and states until at least 1970.
Girls, who swam separately from boys, were spared the indignity, although they have their own horror stories of school-issued swimsuits that clung like cellophane.
“It was the weirdest thing in the world,” recalled Chuck Napieralski, 67, who graduated with Reeves from Charlotte in 1968. “You can just imagine standing there in a line with your hands across the front hiding yourself. Once you got to the pool you just jumped in.”
When the practice ended is almost as much of a mystery as why it began. Nude swimming in gym class, it seems, was like what happens in Vegas: It stayed in gym class. Did the school board know it was happening? Did parents?
You’d think forced nudity in public schools would generate a newspaper headline or two, something like, “Superintendent faces bare facts about skinny-dipping, sentenced to life in Attica.”
But Democrat and Chronicle archives contain no mention of it. Perhaps boys believed if no one talked about it, it wasn’t real.
“You think back and say, ‘Why the hell didn’t we ask why we were doing this?’” Reeves said. “I would love to know why they did it.”
The practice appears rooted in the opening of the first indoor pool in the United States in 1885 at the Brooklyn YMCA, which was then for men only. Citing wool swimsuits as breeding grounds for bacteria, and their fibers as a danger to the pool’s filtration system, the organization required patrons to swim in the raw.
In 1926, the American Public Health Association published the first guide for swimming pool management. It recommended men swim nude and women wear suits “of the simplest type.” Those guidelines remained until 1962.
After that, it was a matter of custom. Andrew Saul, a nutritionist and author from Rochester, wrote of swimming nude at Charlotte High School as late as 1970.
“Back dives were especially revealing,” Saul wrote in his 2003 book, Doctor Yourself.
Perhaps school administrators thought nude swimming built cohesion between young men. Maybe it did. Few activities foster solidarity like man-to-man defense in a naked water polo game.
Or maybe they were as oblivious to the distress nudity can inflict on adolescents as syndicated columnist Ann Landers was in 1974 when she offered this advice to a 15-year-old boy who wrote complaining of having to shower after gym class:
“You need to talk to a school counselor and learn why you are so uptight about being seen naked…,” she wrote. “If you look around you’ll find the vast majority of the guys who are showering are not in the least bit self-conscious.”
Ann was full of more rubbish than a pool filter before the invention of nylon bathing suits.
“Of course it was awkward,” Napieralski said of his high school experience. “I certainly didn’t like to do it. You just had to do it.”
Nowadays, it seems, students don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do, including changing clothes for gym class.
They’d rather stink up the school by third period than deign to undress in front of their peers, and administrators are willing to let them in the name of sensitivity.
Physical education has undergone a lot of changes over the generations, but perspiration as a byproduct of participation isn’t one of them.
For teenagers still enduring the discomfort of practicing good hygiene, consider this advice: Stare straight ahead, think of what your grandfather’s generation braved, and recite this line from Finding Nemo, a beloved film of your generation:
“Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”
Article appeared in www.democratandchronicle.com on 22nd September 2017
A memory I won’t forget is from the early “60’s, our folks decided I ought to take swim lessons at the local MUNICIPAL POOL. I never learned to be a good swimmer, but(t) the City bathhouse forced a “rite-of-passage” on me I didn’t look forward to – disrobing in front of strangers!🙄 Bath night with my brother was one thing, but(t) disrobing in front of rowdy 😆 😆 boys from the working-class was intimidating. For a 9 year old attending Catholic 🙏 school, that had Catechism lessons but no locker room nor showers, it was culture shock! 😮 Moreover, my physical growth hadn’t hit full stride a nine years of age.
The bathhouse was built by the WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION in 1938, the boy’s changing area & group showers were open, not only indoors, it was open to the sky. Years later the local college built a student union near the bathhouse. I surmise anyone on the top floor or roof had a good view of the bathhouse! Back then it wasn’t a sensitive matter for boys to disrobe in front of one another or shower as(s) a group, nor was it seen as(s) risqué to publish it in LIFE magazine in 1941! (that photo is in one of Rev. Frank Senn’s articles)
Fortunately, our pool was outdoors & co-gender, unlike the gender segre-gated lessons at the “YMCA”. Though it stood for “Young Men’s Christian Association”, it didn’t allow boys the virtue of physical modesty. YWCAs had females don plain swimsuits, but(t) boys – not so much as(s) a jockstrap!
In fact, at our city bathhouse, we had to shower before donning our trunks. I can understand this. After removing all our clothes we’d put them in numbered wire bins & given a metal voucher tag with that number. On two occasions, after turning in, the bathhouse attendant yelled at a couple boys who didn’t change their underwear nor wipe their butts (enough)! If ya’ don’t wipe, ya’ leave a bold brown racin’ stripe! Especially if ya’ get a “snuggy”! HO-HO-HO! Catch a whiff of what I let go! 🙊
A public pool in Chicago had boys straddle-walk over a pressurized sprinkler pipe to flush their poopy butts! Y-E-E-E-H-A-A-A!
Before chlorination the U.S. PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE strongly urged boys learn swimming buck naked. Not only did the YMCA prohibit any attire for boys, high schools, parochial as(s) well as(s) public, mandated boys learn “in the buff”to main-
tain pool sanitation – swim trunks could carry feces 💩 & fungus.
Just adding a follow-up to my April 14th comment on takin’ lessons at the local
City pool; it’s from my essay “My (& Others’) Rite(s)-of-Passage in “61”. I’ve taken up writing essays as a past-time. Believe me the emojis on my comment are just half of the illustrations on that & my other essays.
I liked Ann Landers advice to the 15 year old. Reading between her lines, she told ’em to GROW A THICK SKIN! But(t), to use a pun, her column would’ve raised
(hi)eyebrows even when it was published in 1974.
I thought I might add, with your Administrator’s approval, more of the essay (My & (Others’ Rite(s)-of-Passage in “61). Mother asked if I’d take lessons at the”Y”, adding I ’d have to learn without trunks. That was a non-starter for a 9 year old sensitive about his stature.
But(t), to use a pun, a few of the boys in my neighborhood, John Wiggert, the Moen brothers & John Stanek took lessons at the “christian association.” I remember one winter day Wiggert waiting for the city bus. The only thing he was holding was a towel. I doubt he’d be wearin’ trunks at the “Young Men’s Christian Assn.” & wouldn’t have gone out in the cold wearing wet trunks. Stanek told me a boy in his group had “an 💩accident” leavin’ a stool in the pool. As we know poops float awhile before sinking. His stool might’ve floated long enough for the others to notice. They must’ve laughed as John did telling this, but the instructor didn’t. He ordered “stool-in-the-pool boy” to swim to the bottom to pick up his ☛💩. Most swimmers need to keep both hands open to tread H2O, so-o-o stool-in-the-pool boy surfaced as poop-in-the-“piehole” boy! ‘Must’ve been humiliating for the kid but funny for the other boys; they probably didn’t let ’em live it down! Back then they didn’t coddle boys; they expected ’em to grow a thick skin. They had a saying: “sink or swim”, physically & psychologically. If ya’ didn’t, they’d call ya’ woose, sissy or the worst – pussy!
But my hat’s off to the instructor; he didn’t put up with any crap. He ordered ’em to swim to the bottom to retrieve his “accident”!
Speaking of wooses, 1972 movie “Slaughterhouse 5” opened with the lead character, Billy Pilgrim, dumped, buck-naked, to sink or swim at the YMCA. He sank, making no attempt to tread water. His Dad started yelling his name as(s) he sank to the bottom; the woose 😯 would’ve drown if the other Dads had not rescued the runt. But that was a time before child psychology & the “self-esteem” movement began to emasculate traditional American culture, under-mining a sense of virile straight gender nurtured by the Young Men’s Christian Association – before it became just the “Y”.
School swim classes wasn’t the only reason to “be in the buff”. I attended Senior high school from 1967 to “70. Though this new building had no pool, unlike the old LaCrosse Central High, it required our football/wrestling jocks to be weighed without so much as(s) a jockstrap!
In Sophomore gym we took wrestling lessons in an unused classroom. Our phys. ed. instructor, Mr. Venne, was doin’ double duty weighing one of the school football/wrestling jocks – buck naked! Yup, in the “60’s it wasn’t seen as(s) taboo to weigh somebody naked in front of our gym class, to get accurate weight. No one else in my gym class seemed to think anything of it, until a girl came to the door to hand (♠︎ footnote below) deliver a message to Venne. We laughed as he quickly went to the door to prevent her from seeing Lester’s “birthday suit.” Fortunately, for our instructor, the contour of the room prevented her from catching a glimpse of ’em. At least Lester practiced good butt hygiene, unlike a guy 😆🙊 in my sophomore gym class.
♠︎ In the “60’s there were no cell phones, nor wireless handsets for landlines nor touchtone dialing. But there was a military draft and landmines in Vietnam. My Brother served a year “in country” He had a photo taken of ’em on an armored personnel carrier, with the words: “PIECE MAKER” on it – PRIMITIVE TIMES!