Summer lessons can last a very long time
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- July 5, 2025
- 320
To begin with, I’m fairly sure that what happened really did happen, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be entirely mistaken.
I stake no claim on being infallible in matters of memory.
To do so would undercut the beauty of unreliable narration.
With that disclaimer stressed, these are the facts as I know them:
For several years after my family relocated from the capital city to this little town, the Fourth of July fireworks were held in the park.
Folks would arrive early, some toting lawn chairs, others spreading blankets on the hillside, settling in for the show.
Along about 9 p.m., the aerial pyrotechnics would begin.
About a half-hour later, the grand finale would end the show.
Then people went home.
These facts are indisputable. They are canon. They are unshakable.
However, there was one Independence Day that broke the mold, a single exception to the small-town efficiency to which we had all become accustomed, and it is that event I wish to examine.
The volunteers in charge of sending up the fireworks set up just behind the municipal swimming pool, which kept them a safe distance away from those in attendance. They were experienced, knowledgeable and more than trustworthy. They were experts, pros.
But not even they were immune to the peculiar vagaries of a North Central Ohio summer night’s wind patterns, and one year many of the projectile remnants they sent up landed in the water.
This caused civic leaders to take the unprecedented step of closing the town’s pool for two weeks, right during the heart of the season.
I recall no spasm of righteous anger, no uproar citing municipal malfeasance, no call for heads to roll, just quiet acceptance of, “It’s just one of those things.” I’m not sure that would happen today.
These days things are wavering on a knife’s edge, and the tinderbox of resentment grows ever so volatile, and there’s a feeling one stray spark could ignite a social conflagration.
But that’s the macro view, not the one likely to happen here.
Which is why when I think about the summer of the pool closure, I cast my memory even further back to when I learned to swim.
John F. Kennedy had taken a program begun by his predecessor and transformed it into the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, which stressed an emphasis on school-age children to take part in regional competitions that included races and other challenges.
Somewhere in the vast depths of the pack-rat detritus I have hauled from pillar to post since summer 1961, I have a certificate, signed by the president, attesting to my 6-year-old fitness.
A few years later, living in a small town after a seismic move, I found myself enrolled in a Red Cross program that would teach me to swim properly. I mean I could thrash around a bit, but Mom and Dad considered it high time I get a credited nautical education.
The swimming pool, as I’ve already described, was a jewel in the raiment of the tapestry of the place, a showpiece, a source of pride.
But things seemed a little less glorious at 8 in the morning when, a full hour before opening to the public, we in the class gathered in the shallow end, looking up at lifeguards wrapped in blankets, robes, towels and anything else they had found to ward off the chill.
The first drill was to put your face under the water and hold your breath for as long as you could. This woke you up in a hurry.
Next, we were ordered to grab the edge of the wall and, with your face submerged, let your legs float to the surface. When you needed another breath, you lifted your head, gulped down air and repeated the process over and over. The final stage was to let go of the edge of the pool and let gravity pull you into a floating position.
This, we were told by those dressed like Eskimos, was the “Dead Man’s Float,” which seemed a bit macabre to me, but the fact was I was floating free and easy for the first time in my life.
From then on it was just a matter of learning different strokes and mastering the skill of raising your head up for air and lowering it again as you picked up speed and developed a smooth pattern.
We were tested at the end of the week for endurance and proficiency and were then awarded our Red Cross certification cards, which, when you’re 10, feels like a real accomplishment.
And I got used to the cold because, once you were in, it was warm.
I’ll close this essay with something from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the Paul Newman-Robert Redford film from 1969. Our two outlaw heroes have been on the run for days, unable to shake the posse on their heels, and have run out of room to hide.
Facing a jump into a raging river hundreds of feet down, Sundance tells Butch he can’t swim, which makes Newman crack up.
“Are you crazy?” he laughs. “The fall will probably kill ya!”
I’ve always found a lot of life wisdom in that one wonderful line.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where Fourth of July memories are always welcome.