Nestled into West Los Angeles, bordered by the State streets of Missouri, Mississippi, Iowa, and Nebraska, was the wonderful world of Stoner Park…a state of its own as we were growing up. I am sure that it is a more polished recreation center now, offering par courses and yoga classes, and fenced-in toddler areas, but in the mid 1950s, it consisted of two important youth magnets: four decent ball fields and a public swimming pool. I believe, in the 60’s, the park gained a reputation among the local hippies that best suited its name from their POV. But, for us, it was a place to endlessly play Run Down, Three Flies Up, or Over the Line. It was where teams like The Angels, the Stars, the Oaks, the Seals, or the Beavers (Pre-Dodgers, all we had in the West were Pacific Coast League teams to emulate) gave us the opportunity for becoming (very) local heroes and to hone our baseball skills. Our team was the Portland Orioles. Time freezes for me as I recall towering fly balls hit by some coach/father to a swarming herd of boys with mitts in the outfield….balls hit so high they seemed to never come down.
As there were no fences, a kid had to be pretty fast, or the competition pretty inept, to ever squeeze out a home run. I never hit one. But I did hit a game winning triple once that gives me pride even writing of it over 60 years later. I was really never much of a hitter. I was what was known as a “banjo hitter”…lots of singles just out of the infield…but my notoriety came from being a decent pitcher. Again, I wasn’t that fast, but I had control. Inside, outside, high and tight, low and away. I could put the ball where I wanted, a skill that kept me in the starting rotation for all four years of Little League. Unlike modern Little League, we didn’t really have uniforms beyond hats and team t-shirts. But we wore them proudly from April to August each year. Somehow, Terry Driskill, Bobby Delevuk and I remained on the same team. Having Delevuk usually guaranteed a winning season. He was a 10 year old with the body of a man: strong, fast, with hands that were nearly the size of my glove. (By high school, he could palm a basketball). One year we showed up for the first day of practice to learn that Tommy Morrison’s mom was going to be our coach. I admit to being extremely dubious, but that ended quickly as she put on a mask, squatted behind home plate and fired the ball back faster than it came at her. She made me develop a better leg kick and follow-through and probably added 15mph to my fastball. I can only say that this was an eye opener for a boy who never saw his mother break into a run, let alone throw anything more than a slipper. Even then, Mom lacked both direction and speed.
The other main attraction at Stoner was the public pool. Just picture this for a moment, as it would never exist in this country today. When you paid your dime at the door, you were given a mesh bag on a hanger. From there you would proceed down a concrete hallway to a large open patio with benches lined along three walls and shower heads every three feet along the fourth. There was no roof. The space was filled with naked and semi-naked male bodies, from 5 to 80, some just changing, some showering, and some men sprawled naked in the sunny center. There were no cubicles or curtains, just a mass of male humanity. I had never even seen my father fully naked. The array of bodies, balls, and muscle made me quickly slide into my trunks and get out. Once changed, a boy would carry his clothes bag to a fellow in the window, who would exchange it for a small copper tag with a pin and a number which would be attached to your swim suit. From there one would exit by stepping through a wading pool (which, as the day wore on became highly suspect in its disinfecting ability) and emerge to the pool area itself.
The Stoner Park pool on a hot summer day was a wonder to behold. It was a sea of bodies, in and out of the water. Hundreds of screaming kids at the two shallow ends, a sea of sunbathers sprawled on towels over nearly every inch of the surrounding deck, and an overpowering scent of chlorine and Coppertone that remains with me these many years later.
The center of the pool, the deep section, featured lifeguard towers on each side, a diving board and a high dive platform, where those with sufficient skills would show off to the amazement of appreciative crowds. The crowds were less enthusiastic about our comic leaps from the high platforms, which were lacking in grace and often resembled an octopus falling from a tree. In fact, the most common attempt, besides the ever-popular cannonball, was the imitation of being shot. I could never achieve my full potential in this regard as few actual wounded men held their noses, as I invariably did, as they went down.
As a boy emerged from the dressing room, he was propelled from the hairy ball sacks and stunning variations of the male body into a deeper and even more shocking pool of semi-clad female flesh. There were girls and women everywhere…mostly oiled and lounging, seemingly oblivious, though now I highly doubt it, to the electricity they generated across a sea of pubescent and prepubescent boys. There were few bikinis in my particular neighborhood in 1954, but the one-piece variations were enough to spark a subtle stirring that I would not come to recognize for a few more years. Of course, those years also predated sunscreen, as Coppertone was basically oil and SPF was years away. While lifeguards did wear zinc oxide on their noses, the rest of us just burned and burned, then peeled, then burned again, until our shoulders by summer’s end resembled some strange Rorschach pattern…a feature that became a badge of honor over the coming years, along with calloused feet that could withstand sand or concrete of any temperature. Yet, in 1954, peeling shoulders were accepted right along with perpetually scabbed knees and elbows as part of life.
There is no public pool in the small town where I now live. Unless families have the money to join the local Tennis and Swim club, I have no idea where kids learn to swim. I guess they learn about human bodies on the internet. And I am sure that no self-respecting mother would dare leave her child outside, either unsupervised or un-sunscreened for more than 15 minutes any more than they would give them a dime and send them into an enclosure with 30-40 naked men. I guess that is for the best. After a few years our family moved from WLA to Santa Monica. I left Little League behind me and traded public pools for the sandscapes of beaches and Stoner Park merged with a thousand other memories that now struggle to organize themselves in my mind. Yet, for a moment in my life, Stoner was sacred ground, its rites and rituals and moments of bliss hanging now in my memory like a high fly ball that I circle under these years later.