Our Doughboy Pool

OUR DOUGHBOY POOL

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This must have happened in the late 50's or early 60's because we moved back to First Avenue when I was eleven or twelve, that was 1956 or 57. We had been able to take some kind of vacation every year, soon after we moved back, the business was bad and the cost of the addition to the house and what ever made going away impossible. So, Mom and Dad decided to buy a pool instead. The plastic lined, round, metal framed kind of pool was the choice and Dad, always the innovator, chose a 21' frame with a 24' liner.
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One summer in the late 1950's my retail family could not afford to take a real vacation. Freestanding swimming pools, Doughboy Pools had just become the rage and Sears & Roebuck had them in their catalogue. So, Mom and Dad decided to buy one. It arrived just before the Memorial Day weekend two colossal boxes on the back of a freight truck.

In their wisdom, they bought a 21' ring with a 24' liner and dug out the space so that the center of the pool was nearly 5' deep. In the week or so before the pool parts arrived, Dad and my twin brothers, Paul and David who are 3 years younger than I, spent long nights huddled around the end of our long dinner table, doing the math to work out how wide, how deep and what the slant of the sides should to be to make that pool work! When the boxes came, in the middle of the week of course, we could not open the boxes until the long holiday weekend upcoming. The waiting was impossible!

During that long week of waiting a load of fine, sandbox sand was delivered. Dad made arrangements to rent the tiniest tractor I had ever seen and have it delivered over the Holiday weekend.

Finally, Saturday afternoon got here, the shop was closed and it was time to build the pool base. Dad, David and Paul worked with tape measures and stakes and flags to make the ring and the center of the pool. It looked like a bunch of sticks in the ground to me, but they said they knew what they meant so, OK.

Dad used the tractor to bring the giant, bulky boxes into the patio and began the “digging”. Someplace there are 8mm movies of my 125 pound Dad bouncing around in a circle digging out the base of that pool! Around and around and around he went, with each round the ring got deeper and more slanted.

Around dusk a 6' ridge had developed and I asked “How is the tractor going to get out of the hole?” Dad turned off the engine and walked into the house followed by my brothers. They didn’t come out. Oh, oh, They hadn’t thought of that. So I said to my Mom. “Should we go in and start dinner?” “Yes”, she said, “But very quietly.”

The next morning they went back to the pool hole, finished the slanting and then a small ramp of dirt was shoveled into being and the tractor drove out. The shovels came back out and that dirt was dumped into a wheelbarrow. I think it took a while for this elegant but sweaty solution to occur to them.

After the digging, came the spreading of the sand base so it would be as smooth as possible, the same wheelbarrow was filled with the sand from the pile outside the patio, wheeled up to the edge of the hole and dumped. It was up to the boys and me to move the sand around the hole to create a smooth, even bottom for the pool. That took most of the day on Sunday but around 4:00 the in afternoon, it was time to unfold the immense blue liner.

We were hot and tired but to wait for the morning was unthinkable. So, we wet each other down and slowly stood the metal ring in place, opened the plastic, and began smoothing the liner over the carefully prepared sand with our feet and hands. We got it centered, brought it down the sides to the edges and started the water running into the pool for it was a real pool! Mom turned the hose on. That water was so hot at first Paul, who was in the middle, thought he’d been burned. But as happens in the summer in Tucson, the water coming from the hose began to cool. Eventually that water was downright cold! The deeper it pulled from the wells, we did have wells then, the colder it got.

It was the first time I discovered the color shift afforded by staring at one end of the spectrum for a long time in bright light. When I finally looked up from the intense blue of the plastic liner, the sky looked ORANGE! I was very surprised and remarked on the strange effect. Had it been now, one of us would have just gone in and looked “spectrum shift” up on Google and found something like, “Understanding Color/Light and Color” know about the way the internal eye sees color. But at that time, we just had fun teasing each other that our vision would get stuck being orange forever!

So, we spent the time until the sun went down crawling around the bottom of the hole/pool smoothing over the big bumps of sand under the plastic to make them little bumps. The hot air surrounded us and the icy water played around our knees and arms and we saw orange every time we looked up from the blue plastic. At last it was too dark to see what we were doing and Mom called us in to dinner. Dad decided to leave the hose running and check it later.

After dinner I fell asleep and I think the boys did too. My Dad must have monitored the water level most of the night because about 4:45AM when I woke up, he was out there at the pool starting to snap the edging strips on to hold the plastic in place.

I tell you how much work it was to fill the pool because some time after the 4th of July the south edge of the pool plastic started to turn black. That was the edge getting the most sun, nearly all day every day and it was decomposing!

I remember Dad standing over the edge saying, “Nearly five hundred dollars, we haven’t even finished paying or the damned thing and its falling apart!” He stomped into the house, got the paperwork from Sears and Doughboy Pools, got the phone numbers and went to his shop office to call them.

I remember following him, I was very afraid that he was going to pull the pool out and ship it back forever!

He must have spoken to 6 people at Doughboy Pools and a few at Sears, none of them would take responsibility for the plastic parts of the pool. “Well, who manufactures the liners?” he asked of the 2nd Vice President in charge of blowing off customers. “3MMM”.

“Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing?” Dad asked with a grin. “Fine! I will be back in touch with your company, be assured!” Slam went the phone.

Dad dialed, yes dialed the ‘0' for the Operator, got the 3MMM number and there started the most amazing series of summers of my life. Dad ended up speaking to an engineer, a plastics engineer, who asked him if he was an engineer. My Dad, who had not finished High School, was being mistaken for an engineer! I don’t think he ever got over that.

The two of them talked over the next several weeks and Dad clipped and shipped and mailed blackened pieces of the curled plastic to 3MMM and 3MMM would call and ask questions.

Then came the BIG question, about 3 or 4 weeks after this communication started, They asked him to drain the pool and ship the liner to the lab. I was working in the showroom that day, and I remember hearing Dad’s voice say loudly, “You want me to drain it? Do you know how long it will take and how much shit I will have to put up with from my kids?” Long pause... “Well, OK, I guess I can convince them...”

So, what happened was that a new liner, made of a “new” composition plastic for southwestern US sun was on its way, along with a check for the inconvenience of the draining and refilling. Each time the plastic showed ANY signs of darkening, we did it again.

Over the next 3 or 4 years I think we emptied and refilled that pool half a dozen times. Our little Oleanders grew from scrawny 3 and 4 foot shrubs to 12 and 14 feet tall and they bloomed most of the year round.

In the process, my Dad became a member of the National Society of Plastics Engineers. It was one of his proudest moments! And 3MMM perfected a pool plastic that would stand up to Arizona sun for at least a few years.