daredevil

This memory came up for some reason today.

We had several sections in high school PE including wrestling, gymnastics, bball and swimming among others. This is back in the late 60's. PE classes then weren't co-ed. We did the swimming section in the nude. It's like from the dark ages or something. We didn't think twice about it back then.

Did anybody else do that?

btw, if you pissed off the instructor, he'd have you grab your ankles and nail you with a styrofoam kick board. I think that's a minimum half millon dollar settlement these days if you're lucky enough to have a teacher do that now.

Spoke

HS PE classes are co-ed now??? Co-ed wrestling??? Oh man . . .

-Spoke

daredevil

- Bet the boys can't wait for that section, eh?

RockyMtnMerlin

Yes ,but it was with Cub Scouts in the 50's. And they had these long bamboo poles. If you touched the side of the pool (after you had learned to swim of course) without permission, they would whack your knuckles. Now what the heck was that all about?

rodrigaj

James Monroe HS in the Bronx, NY. 1964. I remember it well. Those were different times. I remember boys being sent home for too long hair (beatlemania) and for wearing jeans. Girls had to wear skirts and nylons. And this was in a public school!

airbrake

Been there-done that. I graduated in 66. The girls had swimsuits, but us guys were buck nekkid. In the lower high school grades there is a big difference in developement and some guys were pretty embareassed.

rainycamp

We did that in a public high school in the Chicago suburbs in the late 60's. The doors to the pool grandstand were supposed to stay locked, but once in a while some girls would find an unlocked door, and sneak in to watch us swim.

daredevil

Yep, this was public high school, late 60's, suburbs of the Twin Cities. I'm gonna guess it comes from what would have been typical military procedure up until then. I remember doing marching too come to think of it.

Skipper

East High School, Madison, Wisconsin, 1969-1970. Swimming naked wasn't so bad. You just had to be careful how you entered the water from the diving board.

JanMM

Obvious evidence of some perverse manifestation of the beginnings of the gay/lesbian agenda. Or, the nudist agenda.

ollo_ollo

I graduated in 58. We never did the BD suit swimming but teachers could send you down to the PE coach with a note telling him to give you a swat or two. We always got it from a ping pong paddle. Afterward, he would initial the note for you to return to your teacher. Different times!

Digital Gee

Mr. Fouts, my fourth grade teacher and first male teacher, delivered "swats," as he called them, with a wooden paddle, to the boys, in the front of the room. One to five depending on the offense. We saw it as a badge of honor to get swats. Sure hurt after winter recess when we'd been playing in the snow!

Of course, he'd be arrested today.

He did give me a heartache, however, when he up and married my kindergarden teacher, Miss Brown. I had hoped against hope that she'd wait for me!

Big Paulie

My first paddlin' teacher, Mr Conrad in the 6th grade, was actually a great guy...but a little strange. He looked and sounded exactly like Ernest Borgnine.

Years later, I heard he ended up in a mental institution. I never got over the sadness of hearing that, because as I said, he was really a great guy.

Retro Grouch 

I went to a Catholic boy's high school in Des Moines. We didn't have a swimming pool but we did have corporal punishment. The teachers would administer various kinds of torture in the front of the classroom. I remember recieving swats from a chair rung, I think, until his arm got tired.

Thinking back, the teachers who used corporal punishment were all the screw offs. It was party time whenever they got somebody kneeling in the front of the room. The best disciplinarians did it with the force of their personalities.

Road Fan

I was in the Chicago Public Schools (Senn HS) in the late '60s, we had to swim nude. I didn't get the point of that.

Road Fan

MKahrl

As it was told to me, pre-WWII indoor pools were equipped with circulation pumps that would jam easily when threads caught in them. That's if the pool had any circulation system at all, some just kept the same water until it became too gross to deal with. Why that tradition carried on into the 50's and 60's, when pumps got better and swimsuits shrank, I don't know.

Garfield Cat

But at George Swift School (Thorndale and Winthrop), they had a pool and it was with swimwear in the 60's. Didn't go to Senn.

Artkansas 

Seems like a Yankee thing. The only place that I ever encountered it was the few weeks when I attended the summer camp at Hackley Academy in New York. Kids in Florida always wore bathing suits.

I only got paddled in 3rd Grade. I had 3 teachers that year. The final one for the last half of the year. I was her whipping boy. I got paddled 20 times. I can't remember why. So fat lot the paddling taught me. She was a former PE coach.

The Smokester

Yes. Me, too. Also, remember the feet dip just as you entered the pool room? I thought that was the worst part since it was always shockingly cold.

Also got on the receiving end of lots of corporal punishment. I was a real bad ass (not really, just mischevious) and held the class record for canings my eighth grade year...Ninety something as I recall. Most didn't hurt much since the prof would try to hit your wallet and produce a large whapping sound which made for lots of theater.

Hmm...What's the statute of limitations on this?

Big Paulie

Class action suit! Yeah baby!!!!!

solveg

Thankyou! I've mentioned the naked swimming thing a couple times and noone believed me. Heck, I started to doubt my own memory, it seems so strange.

But yeah, the boys swam naked. I know, because you could see through the door vent from the girl's side!

DnvrFox

YMCA pools butt naked. I was always a bit suspicious of those YMCA supervisors!No corporal punishment, at least to me. I did have one kid spanked by the VP when I was teaching in the 60's. It was legal then. I regret that.

RockyTopBiker

Our high school football coach was a former Rose Bowl Fullback for the U. of Tennewssee and a huge bear of a man. He always carried a custom made paddle that many of his students had autographed. It had a leather handle and he was always to be found standing in the hall swinging his paddle. On the last day of school, a friend and I sneaked into his room and stole the paddle; took it to the shop and sawed in into 6-8 pieces then returned it to his desk put back together like a jigsaw puzzle. My consience always bothered me about doing this, so I confessed to him at a 35th class reuinion. He didn't even remember it!!

stapfam

Played Rugby at school and had 3 Teachers coaching the 1st XV (15to the unitiated) All were good Club players and 5 of us played for Kent Under 18's. We would occasionally get a new Lad to join in the training-Wink Wink. These were the lads that needed a bit of straightening out and they normally got carried off the pitch after about 20 minutes- We made the pain last that long.

Then one memorable day and we had a whole class to train against. They really must have upset one of the teachers.

JanMM

Corporal punishment and forced group nudism. I didn't think so at the time, but maybe my high school, where the boys wore swim trunks, was an outpost of enlightenment.