Our Olympic-Sized Pool

My Mother was a stay-at-home Mom. She shopped at a store on San Juan that had bent cans and sale racks.  In my mind, she scrimped and saved all of the time. I was never was aware of her splurging unless you call getting a Krystal Burger on occasional Wednesday night after church a splurge (and we could only have one with water to drink.) Those were the happiest of days too!

Daddy worked for the government.  After coming out of the Army in the mid 1940’s from Camp Landing, he moved the Jacksonville to be close to his sweetheart(my Mom) then got a job at NAS Jax. 

My parents married at Riverside Baptist Church in Jacksonville.  They bought a house, site-unseen with a small down payment.  With little money and only one salary coming in they scrimped and saved  even more. They then,  put money on a down-payment for a 10-acre plot on the Westside of Jacksonville.  I was about 7 at the time but I even remember the conversations about being careful with money as Mama would take Daddy to work so they both could use the car.  She would pick him up after work, then we would all go to the property and work on the house until dark.

The home was a Jim Walter home and Daddy and mama figured out the rest using what  little resources and money they had. In a recent water leak at the property, some 60 years later, we found that Daddy used a spark plug to close up a water line. The funny thing was the spark plug was still working. It was a break in a corner coupling that had given way.  We all had to laugh at his ingeniuity.

By the time I was 10 we were swimming and having pool parties at our  20 x 40 sized swimming pool we had dug with our own hands.  Because my parents had no “real” money, there was no renting a bucket truck so everyone had a shovel and we would shovel until dark and drop into bed.  It took, days, and months to dig. To help the situation, Daddy used cinder blocks to raise the sides high. At end-result we had a pool with a 3 foot depth on one end and 6 1/2 footer at the other.  A liner was used on the sides and into the base of the pool and we used a deep well to fill it.

To make it really nice, our parents had purchased from the train station literally thousands of bricks so bricks were used for the top walk ways and coming down on the sides.  It actually was so pretty when finished. Here we were, people without money with a beautiful pool that made us feel like rich folk.

See you tomorrow

Sources: Vaughan Publishing, Nannette V. Ramey