Spring Board Diving

A Lost American Treasure

Let us reason together.  How boring is it these days to go to a pool and watch kids float around with their plastic, air-inflated devices?  Absent from our times now is the high dive!

It was my go-to event throughout the summer wherever we lived growing up in eight states from four-years-old through high school.  A navy man, my dad’s job caused us to move every year or two from one state to another around the country including Hawaii and Germany.  My first destination activity was the diving board at whatever pool we found near our new home.   I remember constant diving and the people sitting in their pool-lounge chairs watching us flying off the board into the air.  The high-dive was where it was at!

We arrived in Hawaii when I was four.  A pool was the first thing my parents sought out for their three kids.  So it was with every move; A pool had to be nearby.  What fun to fall from way up there, way down into that water and then up and at it again.  The line was shorter for the high board than it was for the two low boards.  And all day long the ladder was there to be climbed and the board to be bent down so as to fling me up into the sky to fly and land, penetrating that water like a knife into a pie.

Back flips, front flips, twists, swan dives, hand stands.  Constant acrobatics, exercise, entertainment, and sun bathing.  A particular benefit came with a job at Casa Bonita in Denver, years later, as the “lead diver” for several years in the heyday of that restaurant when Bob Christians was the entertainment manager, cir. 1974-1980. How fine it was to be paid to dive! And Bob had all kinds of energy and imagination as a former Ring Ling Brothers trapeze artist together with his wife, Karen.

There are things that my children and grandchildren have today that I didn’t have – computers, soccer, internet (and de-criminalized sodomy and abortion).  Some good things and some really bad! 

But I am sorry they missed that high-dive spring board. (Stupid lawsuits and subsequent high insurance rates!)

1 Feb., 2022