Summer (High Dive '78) (Stories from the 70's Part II)

 

    On an early Winter morning at 2:30 AM in 2023 I am possibly the only person on Planet Earth listening to Meat Loaf's 1977 smash album "Bat Out Of Hell" on 8-Track.  Granted there is a growing crowd of those of us who actually collect and listen to vintage music on the long gone 8-Track format, but that is another story for another time...

    "All Revved Up With No Place to Go" on programme four just clicked over to programme one and the title track "Bat Out Of Hell" starts to play and this spurs me to write about another pivital moment in my youth that for some reason I am compelled to share with the world.

  I was seven and it was high Summer of 1978.  I had  learned to swim a year or two before and I had a great love to be in the water when ever I could.  That love still holds true with me in my early 50's.  If there is a body of water either I am in it, or I'm scheming on how I can get into it.  I was the child who watched all the underwater nature programmes.  My dream was to be part of the J.Y.C.'s Calypso team.  I feel cheated that I only discovered "Sea Hunt" just a few years ago.  

    But as a seven year old in a town near the coast of Lake Erie in Ohio the best I could hope for was a trip to a local beach on the lake.  This was a 20 minute drive, and it would be the better part of a decade better before I could drive there myself.  Looking back Lake Eire was really discusting at the time and still wondering how we did not come down with health problems.  I have already written about Lake Erie in the "A Summer Place" episode.  

    There was another option to was a lot closer and a lot cleaner.  Fennwood Campground and Pool...  This place is ground zero for my memories of being seven in the Summer of 1978.  Over chlorinated water and the whole lot...  This is back when people actually tried to get tans and being pale was not the cool thing.   This was the era of chopped off Levi's were common mens swimwear.  Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Boston, ELO, and a myriad of other bands blasted their way out of the speakers of portable radios.  The car park was full of beat up left over family cars from the 60's that teens could afford, some cool muscle cars and a smattering of custom vans that were all the rage at that time.

   And here I was a seven year skinny  blonde haired blue eyed boy who spend the last Summer wondering how he could scheme to see "Star Wars" once again.  Those of who were children then must have drove the people around outer limits by humming the theme song to "Star Wars" over and over...  That had to have been irritating par excellence...

   It was one fateful Summer day when my older Sister Sue and her boyfriend, who's name escapes me, took me along for an afternoon in the glory of a late 1970's day at the local pool.  Sue's boyfriend drove one of the custom vans that I mentioned earlier.  These things were the coolest thing on wheels at that time.  I don't recall if his was a Chevy, Dodge, or Ford...it does not matter.  It was blue and that is all I recall.

     I was getting more and more confident being in the water and being in the deep end was no longer a taboo place for me to be.  I had conquered the low diving board earlier that Summer.  I though that was the funnest thing in the world.  About 15 feet to the right was the big one...the infamous "high dive".  This was the one where the big boys did cannonballs, can openers, back flips, the whole lot that teen age daredevils did in the water.  I had to climb the ladder and walk the plank myself...

    I really don't know if I asked my older Sister for permission to take the leap, or if she encouraged me or what.  The detail escapes me over the decades.  I do recall getting into the queue to climb the ladder.  When it was my time to climb the ten foot or so high ladder, I did not hesitate.  I can still remember walking out to the edge and briefly looking down.  I honestly was not scared, which is strange for me.  I think I must have waited a second or less.  After that if was bombs away!!!  It was a rite of passage in many ways.  With that fateful plunge in the high Summer of 1978 I crossed another one of life's mythical barriers.

    I must have went off the high dive four of five times that day.  Not too long after that I was doing cannon balls and can openers.  I never did get the hang of doing flips.  I could dive off the high dive alright, but flips for me were on the low board.  And bloody hell did that hurt if you got it wrong and had a sun burn at the same time.  Pain builds character...or so they say.

   Driving home I was looking at the pile of 8-Track Tapes in Sue's Boyfriend's van.  I had seen the Meat Loaf  "Bat Out Of Hell" many times before but never actually heard it.  So he was nice enough to play that tape on the ride home.  Sue, her Boyfriend, Me and the Wolf with Red Roses drove home while the tape clicked it's way from track to track.   That is what I recall from the Summer of 1978.

     Update to the Summer of 2022.  I was at a local quarry where I normally Scuba Dive at.  On the other side of the quarry there is a state run public swimming beach.  This place has a diving board that is a lot less high than the high dive we had as kids and no scary ladder to climb.  I had to laugh and be sad at the same time when I saw kids and teens who were a lot older than I had been when I first jumped off the high dive be terrified to take the leap.  It was almost as if they had never been on a diving board in their lives.  When a 51 year man can take a running dive off the board and swim 30 yards underwater before I surface and look back to see a 12 year old who was scared of the diving board and could barely swim really made me sad...

  Please join me next time on Moon in the Sky!!!