We went to Pritchard Pool, in the summer, when it was hot outside. It was an outdoor pool, except the change rooms were inside. The water was cold, until a minute or two after you dived in.

It was a long walk to Pritchard Pool. Six blocks, and you had to cross Burrows Avenue, and take care not to get run over by a trolley bus. Sometimes the cars didn’t stop and you had to dodge them, like Leo Lewis, the football player. On the way there we passed by a two story red brick building that was a police station. Parked in front, were black and white police cars with cherry red dome lights on top, that spun like twirling red igloos, when they chased bad guys. They looked like this:

There was a great danger that bad guys could escape out the front door of the police station just as we walked by on our way to Pritchard Pool, so we had to run across the front of the building. One time Wesley tripped, scraped his hands and knees and got a bleeding nose. My cousin laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. Wesley didn’t cry but he didn’t feel much like swimming in the cold water of Pritchard Pool after that. He cheered up a bit when we bought pink gum at the corner store on the way home.

The pool was called Pritchard Pool because it was on Pritchard Avenue. Before it was an outside pool it was a ‘bath house’. That seemed dumb to me; taking a bath with other people.

You had to pay ten cents to get into the pool, but you could stay all day. There was a string of buoys across the middle of the pool, separating the shallow end from the deep end. We were never allowed to go into the deep end because the lifeguard said we could only go until our feet could no longer touch the bottom of the pool. So we never go to go on the diving board. That was just dumb because I could dog paddle in deep water and never drowned once.

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