Working at the Springhill Recreation Center in high school was an education in itself. We should have gotten diplomas in chemical engineering, economics, health and safety, modern dance and ping pong.
The major attraction at the complex was a huge swimming pool.
Coach Buddy Bonnette, who ran the place, taught us how to keep the water clear with the right levels of chlorine and other chemicals.
He stressed that the job required perfection, and he was right. If the pool didn’t have enough chlorine, algae turned the water green. If it had too much, it burned kids’ skin and eyes.
That was just one of our duties. We had to keep all the vending machines filled. If we gave a Snickers to a pretty girl, the change box was a nickel short and we had to make up the difference.
We also took up the dime admission charge for three hours of swimming. Coach Bonnette counted people in the pool, and our admission revenues had better match the number of swimmers.
All of us had to pass Coach Bonnette’s grueling water safety instruction course for our lifeguarding duties. We had to keep kids from drowning and protect them from Babe Sears’ home run balls.
There were fast pitch softball games every night in the fields by the pool. Babe was the only player who could hit the ball into the pool from home plate a mile away.
We got signals when he came to bat and had to clear the pool until he finished. Then we usually had to dip the ball out of the water and return it to the outfielder.
Part of our job was assisting with swimming lessons. We were hit, bitten and clawed by kids who panicked when they got water in their face and chastised by ladies who messed up their hairdos.
We sat on lifeguard stands and baked in the sun for hours with no sunscreen or hat. My dermatologist still benefits from that lunacy.
He reminds me while he’s cutting and scraping sun-damaged skin that most of the harm was done in my younger years.
When he comes back from vacations to the beach that I helped finance, he shows me photos of his strolls along the ocean. He is dressed like a beekeeper, but his skin is smooth.
There was a ping pong table in the big recreation room. It was probably the only one in town, and I spent a lot of hours between various duties perfecting my shots.
Big athletes who could mop the floor up with me in basketball, football and baseball games couldn’t return my spin serves. It felt good to beat them at something.
We had to work all those nights when grown-ups, college kids and other folks had their dances at the Recreation Center. That let us learn the latest Bop, Bunny Hop and Jitterbug moves and impress the girls at our high school Friday night sock hops.
In all these years of working at full time and part time jobs, the only time I was fired was from the Recreation Center.
One of my friend’s parents got a new ski boat with some gigantic motor like a 40 horsepower. They invited me to go skiing at Caney Lake. I arranged for a guy to work for me that day, but he didn’t show up.
Coach Bonnette fired me the next day, but it turned out to be just a suspension. He hired me back the next week and even paid me for the time I missed.
I remember thinking during the time I was laid off how dumb I was to lose such a great job just to go on a little water skiing trip.
My checks from the city Recreation Center were coming in every Friday like clockwork. I was getting $22 a week and was probably not working much over 100 hours for that salary.
We had to be there every day seven days a week from 7 in the morning until about 10 at night. But there were some breaks during the day when we could swim all we wanted, play ping pong and shuffleboard and just soak up some sun by the pool.
During my suspension, I realized that I was being way overpaid at $22 a week and would have paid the city to let me work there.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES