The Pool Is Open And The Times Really Are Better!

Yes, the pool at my condo building is finally open for the season.  If it seems like it is opening a little late, there is a very good reason for that, as regular Blog readers know.  The pool never opens until after the end of the University of Denver's school year.  This is because in the past a small minority of DU students have tried to impress the coeds by jumping into the pool from the building's balconies.  Just last year a DU student tried this from the second floor balcony, hit the bottom of the pool pretty hard, and afterwards wandered around the yard in a dazed condition with a broken collarbone, until someone finally called 911.  Thus the attempt by condo management to remove temptation.  In any case, the photograph I am holding was taken of my grandmother Louise Spillard (on the right), my mother Mary Hoyt (in the center), and I back in August of 1963 at the Sun Castle Hotel in Pompano Beach, Florida.  I was planning to wax nostalgic about what a time of innocence it was for America back then, before the Kennedy and King assassinations and Vietnam and all that, but after thinking about that long ago trip, I  remembered the details of driving through the American South at that time.  I remember seeing hand-lettered signs on the gas station bathrooms saying "White Men Only," a young black couple from the north being turned away from a "whites only" motel in Macon, Georgia, and black families sitting on the porches of shacks that looked exactly like the one from the Beverly Hillbillies television show only a few miles to the west of our hotel in Pompano Beach.  In other words, taken as a whole, the times really are better now.