Water Resources People and issues
reasonable skill, and then as soon as somebody went out, I'd be at bat, and I'd
usually, maybe, get around the bases once before I was out. I could run, but
sometimes people would volunteer to run for me because I guess I ran with a
kind of a hop-leggedy run.
That was when I started in organized sports, I played softball then off and on
with class teams, not with varsity. Sometimes I played soccer, and sometimes
basketball. Then I started to play golf. I loved golf. I learned to hit the ball in
the meadow on the farm near where we lived. I taught myself to play golf with
my brother's clubs, and then became a caddy-this was about when I was 12,
13 years old-so I could play golf on caddy day. One Monday, which was
caddy day, I got around 54 holes on our nine-hole course in Reisterstown. We
didn't get much work, as caddies, because people couldn't afford to take
caddies back in the early '30s.
And so the only varsity sport that I ever got involved in was the golf team in
my senior year at high school. I also started swimming regularly, I guess by the
time I was in high school-I taught myself how to swim by reading in a book.
I went into the water in our farm one Sunday with neighbor boys who took me
out there-they asked my mother if I could go and she said sure. I had read a
little book called "Healthful Sports for Boys," and it had a section on
swimming. It told about the breast stroke and the crawl and the backstroke and
the sidestroke which they used to talk about then. I read about the various
strokes, and that the first thing is to not be afraid of the water. To conquer the
normal fear of water you filed the wash basin full of water and put your head
in it and opened your eyes and you'll find out that you can see under water,
and once you get over that, why you'll find that swimming comes easier.
So I went out to the farm with the Warner boys-1 know my mother would
have had a conniption fit if she knew what I did. There was a swimming hole
in the Patapsco Falls where it flowed through the farm. There was a gravelly
beach where we could get down the bank to the water, so I walked down and
stuck my head in the water and opened my eyes. I couldn't see a thing! The
water was muddy. But that didn't stop me, and so I guess I probably dog
paddled across to the other side and put my feet down and there wasn't
anything down there. It was one of those places where the water was deep.
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