There was a man in white coveralls who used to check Lake Pontchartrain for bacteria and contamination. I wish we could find him to help with this health crisis we’re having now.
My sons were little when I was working at the newspaper in New Orleans. One of the things we enjoyed on sunny days was splashing around in Lake Pontchartrain.
Signs along the beach informed us if it was safe to swim or if we had to stay out of the water because of germs and viruses that could cause infections.
Those hazards were certainly not perceptible. The lake usually had a pretty, pale blue hue with white foamy waves on windy days that made it appealing for fishing, swimming and boating.
But its perils were apparently invisible to the naked eye, much like the coronavirus. So the man in coveralls driving the white truck came by every hour or so to check the water.
He would fill a canister from the massive lake, put chemicals in it with droppers and then hold it close to his eyes to see the results.
If everything was okay, he would remove the “No Swimming” sign with the red lettering and put it in his truck. There was another sign under it indicating that it was safe to swim.
It was not unusual to be in the lake, get forced out when the water was tested and allowed back in after the next test. This sounds hazardous, but it was in the 1960s and my sons and I are still around.
If we had folks now like the man in the overalls to check the air, we might could avoid the virus by just staying away from it for an hour or so until the next test.
But I’m not Dr. Fauci. I failed math in college and struggled with science. If there had not been an easy major like journalism, I would still be trying to graduate.
Testing of the lake looked familiar to me back then. I had worked summers at the swimming pool in Springhill and helped test the chlorine levels of the pool several times a day.
Like the man did on Lake Pontchartrain, we collected pool water in containers, added chemicals and determined by the colors the water turned if the chlorine content was right.
Despite my ignorance of chemistry, I don’t think the chlorine we dumped into the pool ever took the hide off any of the kids who swam there.
The possibility of Lake Pontchartrain endangering our health in those days bothered me because I loved that beautiful 40-mile long, 24-mile wide body of water.
Our editor at The Times-Picayune belonged to the ritzy yacht club on Lake Pontchartrain. He would send some of us from the sports department to cover sailing and yacht races on the lake.
We had to ask folks at the club about boat racing words like spinnakers, leeward, windward, astern, the luff of the sail and other mysterious terms we never heard at baseball games.
But we were so infatuated by the races and the lake that another guy at the paper and I pooled our money to buy a cheap sailboat.
It was Styrofoam with a clear plastic sail and stayed flipped over more than it did upright. But we enjoyed the wind in our face on Pontchartrain a few times before the Styrofoam broke.
We fished on the lake in a metal boat with a small motor. When we went through canals to the edge of the gulf, Texaco tankers sailed by and made our boat look like a bathtub toy.
But we found speckled trout running once in a while and filled up the ice chest and got caught a few times in sudden storms that left us clinging for our lives to buoys or railroad trestles.
Fishing and boating on Pontchartrain was a different world from our freshwater fishing trips to lakes around Paradis 30 miles away.
We got to the bait shop before dawn on those outings. Leathery men were having gumbo and beer for breakfast and playing bourre. There were pistols on the card table.
Nobody ever came by in a white truck checking the water like they did at Lake Pontchartrain. I don’t think the bourre players would have allowed it.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES