#583 Greasy Apple

When I was growing up it was different world. Safer in some ways—we seemed to have fewer sexual predators—but unsafer in others.
I used to work on the municipal pool crew. I was about eleven. We had to add alkali and chlorine to the pool. Not the pool’s pump system.
The actual pool.
We would take out a little sampler kit, add drops, and determine whether the ph was too acidic or basic. Then we would go get an old coffee can, fill it with either chlorine or alkali, and add it directly to the pool as we walked around its perimeter.
We would do it during operation hours too.
We’d just tell the little kids to swim back a ways.
It’s amazing how much the ph of a body of water can change based on how many bodies are in it. Of course, in those days the community pool was also pretty much the community bathtub.
In any event, when we added the chemicals, the stuff would splash back occasionally. I still have little white spots in my tan every summer where my skin was fried.
Back then, it was no problem having a job at the tender age of eleven as long as you observed the simple expedient of not getting paid. Cash that is.
We were allowed all the popsicles and candy we could eat. We kids thought we were in heaven. The pool manager, whose job we were doing, had slave labor eight hours a day for the price of a few Pushups and Frozen Snickers.
A different time.
It was a time when no one even questioned the inherently unsanitary aspects of, say, bobbing for apples.
And shampooing was more rare than bathing in the fifties. Greasy-headed kids were the norm.
Yet it somehow never occurred to us that plunging headfirst, and slavering and spitty mouth open, into a giant bucket to try to grab apples with our crusty teeth, might not be the best way to prevent the spread of childhood diseases.
I’m guessing if we’d called it “bobbing for head lice” the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with a rusty nail game would have had more takers.
America ya gotta love it