When I was a kid, I never went away to camp. No, let me make that stronger: When I was a kid, I never even thought of going away to camp. Not for an hour, not for a minute, not for a second, not for a nano-second. Leave my wonderful home and all my comic books and go away for even a few days to a camp where I'd bunk with strangers and we'd hike and do exercises and have to eat whatever the camp served? Are you outta your ever-lovin' mind suggesting that? It's hard to think of something I would less want to do.
And my parents sure didn't ever seem to want a vacation from my presence. The first time I ever stayed overnight at a friend's house, my father was a nervous wreck.
I had seen camp in TV shows and movies. Not one thing in any of those programs or films looked like anything resembling "fun" to me, especially the pranks. I didn't even like the part in The Parent Trap where one Hayley Mills cut off the back of the other Hayley Mills' dress. Even as a child, I thought most pranks were…well, childish.
So I did not attend Mel Pierson's "Sleep Over Camp" advertised in the ad above. I did however take swimming lessons at Mel Pierson's Swim Club, a small office complex with a pool in which kids could learn to dive, swim and generally not drown. It was located at the address in the above ad…and all this, of course, raises the question, "Who the hell was Mel Pierson?" I don't think I ever met him and I certainly never heard anything about the man.
I had to wait until they invented The Internet and I could use our dear friend Google to find out that Mr. Pierson was a leading figure in the Los Angeles Parks and Recreations community and that then-Mayor Sam Yorty appointed him to the commission governing such matters for the city. I also found online lots of news clippings about Pierson losing that position and being indicted on various allegations of bribery and financial improprieties.
Makes sense. That was exactly the kind of person Sam Yorty tended to elevate to positions of trust. Personally, I would have indicted Mr. Pierson for having a not-very-clean, not-very-private dressing room situated so as to not give children like myself a secure place to change in and out of our swimwear.
For a year or two, my parents took me weekly to Mr. Pierson's Swim Club where an array of teenage "instructors" taught us to swim in Mr. Pierson's aggressively-chlorinated pool. Later, for reasons I don't recall, we switched to the Tocaloma Swim Club that was over on Santa Monica Boulevard near Westwood. It had an Indian motif that would probably now seem racially-insensitive. When my mother passed away and we cleaned out her house, I found my Tocaloma Swim Club membership card and my diploma and some sort of Red Cross certification.
But Mel Pierson's was where I learned how to swim and I was okay at it, I guess. Most of my lessons were handled by an instructor there named Beverly who seemed like a grown-up to me but was probably in her late teens…maybe early twenties. I remember her being very nice and very pretty and I remember one moment in particular. It was one of those things you don't forget when it happens at that age.
We — the dozen other students, Beverly and I — got out of the pool at the end of the lesson and toweled-off. Beverly had some sort of pamphlet or brochure she wanted to give me and she told me to go get dressed and then to come to the office. I had about fifteen minutes before one or both of my parents would be by to pick me up.
I went into the crummy little boys' locker area which I recall as something made out of cinder blocks with a shower, a bench and a row of unlockable lockers. It was not inside a building and it had no roof on it. Anyone upstairs in the office building could have looked out a window and seen us changing. I quickly showered off the chlorine, dried myself, put on my clothes and then I went into the office where Beverly was waiting for me. She was all alone in there and had taken off her swimsuit. She had not though put on anything else.
I had seen girls without anything on before but they were all around my age. Beverly was most definitely a woman. She acted embarrassed and I acted embarrassed and I later concluded that I was but she really was not. The way she had not immediately tried to cover up made me decide she'd planned it, as did the fact that…well, what the heck was she doing naked in the office anyway? And no, I can't tell you why she arranged this. You can make up a reason that's just as likely as anything I could offer. But she sure took her own sweet time about putting on some clothing and she couldn't find the pamphlet she's said she wanted to give me.
I can tell you why I was embarrassed. I had no idea how to react or what to do or what not to do. I felt like I'd done something wrong but I couldn't figure out what. I can also tell you it never happened again and that it was not why we soon took our business to the Tocaloma Swim Club. I didn't tell my parents about what had happened. In fact, I didn't tell anyone about it and Beverly never mentioned it or any pamphlets in subsequent swimming lessons.
This was the closest thing to a sexual impropriety I was involved in during my childhood. These days, you hear a lot about kids being molested or touched inappropriately or prematurely sexualized and that's, of course, awful as well as illegal. It just never happened to me and if it ever happened to any of my friends, I never heard about it. I wonder if it was occurring and it was just kept more of a secret.
Well, let me walk back one thing: I did tell one person about my encounter with naked Beverly. I told my mother…but I told her in 2011, a year before she died. I was 59 years old at the time.
In her last years, my mother and I talked on a lot of topics we'd never raised before. She asked me about various girl friends I'd had, especially the ones she'd met. She asked me if I'd ever tried recreational drugs or alcohol and was unsurprised to hear I hadn't. She asked me what went on at our house when she and my father went off for a few days in Vegas and I had the place to myself.
She also told me some things — like details of her first marriage — that they'd kept from me. They were things they thought I was too young to hear and then they forget to tell me when I was older. All that frank, "no secrets" conversation led to a remarkable bonding of mother and "child."
I told her the story about Beverly and she thanked me for not telling her about it at the time. This was because — and I think these were her exact words — "I would have had to do something about it and I'm not sure I would have done the right thing." My parents had a pretty easy time raising me since I never got into trouble and she, at least, liked it that way. (My father, I suspect, might have appreciated more opportunities to feel like a father by disciplining his son or getting him out of jams. I just never required either.)
She did say one thing that I thought was funny. She asked me if I was still as good a swimmer as I was at those two swim clubs. I said yes. I have a swimming pool at my house and while it isn't large enough to do serious laps and long-distance, I can still swim. She said, "Good. And I would hope that every so often, you also get to see what a naked woman looks like."