Andreatta: When boys swam nude in gym class

The lengths to which Greece schools have gone to spare teenage students the anxiety of changing clothes for gym class has men of a certain generation shaking their heads.

“You should have seen what they made us do in gym,” Bill Reeves, 67, said. “My son and his generation think we’re full of it. We can’t convince them it actually happened.”

But it did happen. What you are about to read is true.

“When you got into high school, and you used the pool for gym, they had these rules and everybody had to follow them,” Reeves recalled of his days at Charlotte High School.

No running on the deck. No horseplay. No diving in the shallow end. Take a shower before swimming. Swim naked. No chewing gum…

Wait, wait. What?

“They made us shower first, then we’d all stand in line and march into the pool nude,” Reeves said.

It may be inconceivable to anyone under 50, but nude swimming was standard for high school boys in Rochester and in many American cities and states until at least 1970.

Girls, who swam separately from boys, were spared the indignity, although they have their own horror stories of school-issued swimsuits that clung like cellophane.

“It was the weirdest thing in the world,” recalled Chuck Napieralski, 67, who graduated with Reeves from Charlotte in 1968. “You can just imagine standing there in a line with your hands across the front hiding yourself. Once you got to the pool you just jumped in.”

When the practice ended is almost as much of a mystery as why it began. Nude swimming in gym class, it seems, was like what happens in Vegas: It stayed in gym class. Did the school board know it was happening? Did parents?

You’d think forced nudity in public schools would generate a newspaper headline or two, something like, “Superintendent faces bare facts about skinny-dipping, sentenced to life in Attica.”

But Democrat and Chronicle archives contain no mention of it. Perhaps boys believed if no one talked about it, it wasn’t real.

“You think back and say, ‘Why the hell didn’t we ask why we were doing this?’” Reeves said. “I would love to know why they did it.”

The practice appears rooted in the opening of the first indoor pool in the United States in 1885 at the Brooklyn YMCA, which was then for men only. Citing wool swimsuits as breeding grounds for bacteria, and their fibers as a danger to the pool’s filtration system, the organization required patrons to swim in the raw.

In 1926, the American Public Health Association published the first guide for swimming pool management. It recommended men swim nude and women wear suits "of the simplest type." Those guidelines remained until 1962.

After that, it was a matter of custom. Andrew Saul, a nutritionist and author from Rochester, wrote of swimming nude at Charlotte High School as late as 1970.

“Back dives were especially revealing,” Saul wrote in his 2003 book, Doctor Yourself.

Perhaps school administrators thought nude swimming built cohesion between young men. Maybe it did. Few activities foster solidarity like man-to-man defense in a naked water polo game.

Or maybe they were as oblivious to the distress nudity can inflict on adolescents as syndicated columnist Ann Landers was in 1974 when she offered this advice to a 15-year-old boy who wrote complaining of having to shower after gym class:

“You need to talk to a school counselor and learn why you are so uptight about being seen naked…,” she wrote. “If you look around you’ll find the vast majority of the guys who are showering are not in the least bit self-conscious.”

Ann was full of more rubbish than a pool filter before the invention of nylon bathing suits.

“Of course it was awkward,” Napieralski said of his high school experience. “I certainly didn’t like to do it. You just had to do it.”

Nowadays, it seems, students don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do, including changing clothes for gym class.

They’d rather stink up the school by third period than deign to undress in front of their peers, and administrators are willing to let them in the name of sensitivity.

Physical education has undergone a lot of changes over the generations, but perspiration as a byproduct of participation isn’t one of them.

For teenagers still enduring the discomfort of practicing good hygiene, consider this advice: Stare straight ahead, think of what your grandfather's generation braved, and recite this line from Finding Nemo, a beloved film of your generation:

“Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.