Theodore M.
Well, I guess some people might have panicked, but I didn't. I just turned
around and dog paddled and came back to the beach, and from then on I could
swim.
We swam a lot during the summer when I was in high school, mostly in a
neighbor's pool. These neighbors had a lovely pool, and this reminds me of
one of the harsh facts of growing up around Baltimore in the 1930s. There was
an awful lot of anti-Semitism. The neighbor children had gone to the public
swimming pool in Glyndon and-1 don't know how people could tell someone
was Jewish, but at the public swimming pool whoever was on duty said, "You
can't come in, and they asked, "Why not?" And he said, "We've got too
many. And then finally the manager came out and said, "We don't allow your
kind in here."
There was a small creek running through our neighbor's farm, so they dammed
it and built a swimming pool and invited the whole town to swim. They built
just an ordinary little pool, and then the electric company put a new high
tension power line from Safe Harbor on the Susquehanna River down to
Baltimore, which came right over this pool. It wasn't safe to swim there, so the
company-it's now Baltimore Gas and Electric Company-built this beautiful
pool about
yards by 30 yards. So the whole town was invited to come out
there to swim. I don't know whether it helped or hurt the business of Glyndon
pool that much or not, but it must have because we all swam there, and we
were welcome all summer. Some summers I would count the times I went
swimming, and it would be something like 100 or 110 or something like that,
and each year I'd try to beat the previous record. The pool was about
quarters of a mile or a mile out Berryman's Lane from my house, and I walked
it all the time.
What was the neighbor's name, do you remember?
A: The name was
D-o-r-m-a-n. The farm has been taken over by some
kind of an institution now and I don't think the pool is still there.
But that's one of the unpleasant facts of life, growing up in the 30s. We didn't
think much about it, but Baltimore was very segregated, not only the black
race, but also the Jewish people. Of course, the Jewish people had some of the
really fine sections of the city; you couldn't call them ghettos. But in the
sections around Johns Hopkins University, Guilford and Roland Park, I think
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