School Improves and Mile Swim News

My grades improved. Basketball season helped keep me in shape, and I swam at the YWCA on Saturdays, but it wasn’t anything like the competitive swimming I needed to be doing. It was the best I could do, so I didn’t worry about it. Lesson learned from Mother and Dad. It was time to decide what to do for a spring sport. My choices were golf or tennis. Golf took more time, and tennis was obviously going to be more conditioning, so I chose tennis.

Burnie was really excited about playing his final season of baseball. He wanted to be the Dazzy Vance of Des Moines! The North High team only lost two seniors from last year, so they had a strong team with a good chance of winning the conference championship. His dad was having a scout from Purdue University come to watch him pitch sometime in the middle of the season. I was constantly pestering Burnie about going to the University of Iowa with me, but his dad and mom had gone to Purdue, so it was pretty much a done deal that he would be going there also.

My life was getting back to normal. Of course, it was never going to be the same without Dad, but Mother was a good sports fan and she was learning more and more all the time about basketball and baseball. I don’t think she was ever going to be a big football fan. She thought it was too violent.

She was really getting interested in my sports, though. One day she came into the dining room, where I was sitting at the table doing my homework, with the Tribune in her hand.

“Mable, look at this! This article says they are going to have a Mile Swim in the Des Moines River! You don’t remember it, because you weren’t born, but they had it as an Olympic event in 1908, and again in 1912. They call it open water swimming,” she informed me as she read from the paper. “You should enter!”

“May I see that, Mother? It sounds like fun!” I read the article. It was just a short quarter column on the third page of the sports section.

“Mother, the headline says MEN’S Mile Swim. Do you think they would let a girl enter?”

“I am quite sure they would let a girl like you enter. I’ll bet you could even get Ted Ashby to talk to them if you needed to,” Mother replied.

“You know, I think I would really like to do it. Maybe some of the other North swimmers would like to try it, too. There aren’t any event distances that long in high school meets. How much time do you think it takes to swim a mile, Mother?” I asked.

“Look at the end of the article,” she advised me. “I think it says right at the end.”

“Yes, it does. The Olympic times in 1908 and 1912 were twenty minutes and forty-eight seconds, and twenty minutes and four seconds. That was for men, of course. And it was at the Olympics. I’ll bet I could swim it in less than thirty; maybe close to twenty-five minutes,” I boasted.

“Well, I hope we will have a chance to find out,” Mother said. “I have a suggestion, Mable. Maybe you could telephone Mr. Ashby and find out how to enter.”

“That’s a good idea, Mother. I’ll do that tomorrow right after school. I need to get this essay done for English, right now, though. Thank you for showing me that article. Can you cut it out of the paper and put it upstairs on my dresser?”

“I sure will, darling daughter. And I will call you when dinner is ready.”

Mother was such a wonderful cook. I always thought it was a good thing that I was active in sports, or I would probably be really fat!

I was not going to get fat playing tennis, that was for sure. In swimming, I am always in the water, and even though I am swimming hard and giving my body a workout, I never really sweat. Tennis is not like swimming at all. I sweat like crazy! The courts soaked up the bright sun and then bounced it right back up in my face. Since it was a spring sport, I always remembered the weather being cool, not steamy. The temperature at our first match in April was seventy-eight degrees. It was ninety degrees at our last match in May. Those kinds of temperatures made for one extremely hot tennis season.

Burnie was having a very successful baseball season. Going into the conference playoffs, the Polar Bears were 17-6.